When the Wind Blows

The story begins with When the Wind Blows .[return:][return:]Frannie O Neill is a veterinarian in a small Colorado town, working tirelessly at her job in a bid to numb the pain and confusion over her husband s unsolved murder not very long ago. While driving home late one night, she makes an incredible discovery in the form of a young girl, fleeing from her. The girl had wings.[return:][return:]Kit Harrison, an FBI agent who earned the nickname Mulder for being as eccentric as the character in the TV series, turns up as Frannie s new tenant. He is supposed to be on a holiday, following a personal tragedy, but is simply unable to let his current case go. His investigations brought him into town and to Frannie because there is a possibility she was involved.[return:][return:]Sparks fly between Frannie and Kit. She tells him what she saw in the forest, and they go searching for the girl. They find her and her horrifying world unfolds for them.[return:][return:]Max is the product of a secret experiment at what she refers to as the School. She and the other bird children alpha male Ozy, blind Icarus, Max s brother Matthew and twins Wendy and Peter - were specially designed . They have IQs that go off the charts. They are mature for their age, possibly aging like birds rather than like humans. [return:][return:]Max and Matthew escaped at the first opportunity and became separated. The School wants them back before anyone sees them. [return:][return:]As the hunters close in on her and her newfound friends, Max finds herself drawn back to the School in search of Matthew and the others.[return:][return:]Not too surprisingly, Max is a part of the case that brought Kit there in the first place, the reason why his superiors wanted so badly for him to let the whole thing go.[return:][return:] When the Wind Blows captures the imagination because there are many of us out there who wish we could fly. Like Jurassic Park, the events described here are in the realm of biological possibility and this is a book published in 1998.[return:][return:]The adventure continues with the 2003 sequel - The Lake House .[return:][return:]The children are now living with their biological parents, but there is no happily ever after. Their parents don t understand them, but sell interviews and endorsements. Their schoolmates pick on them for being different. The rest of the world is just trying to adjust to the fact that the freaks exist.[return:][return:]They want to return to Frannie and Kit, whom they consider their parents. Frannie and Kit sue for custody, but the odds are firmly stacked against them. The devastation is too much for the vet and the FBI agent. They part ways, returning to their individual lives and drowning their sorrow in work.[return:][return:]But Max, who was put to work in the School, knew that there is another horrible medical experiment taking place in a lab somewhere in America. When hunters come for her one night, she and Matt flees the house. They collect the other four and together, they return to Frannie. She calls Kit.[return:][return:]With the very unusual family reunited, the only thing left to do now is to coax Max into telling them what she knows. Her years at the School conditioned her into not revealing any secrets. But with her astronomical IQ, a photographic memory and biological make-up, she is both an asset and a danger to the evil unfolding at the Hospital.[return:][return:]Patterson is fond of short, abrupt sentences, which works to the narrative s advantage most of the time, especially in his fast-paced Alex Cross series. However, I found phrases like The flock! The tribe! The family! a bit irritating this time around. The only thing missing from that sentence is a Yay! [return:][return:]There is a successful Young Adult spin-off called Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment based on a slightly older Max. I m waiting for it to come out in mass paperback.[return:][return:]In general, Patterson is a quick read because his short, tight chapters and masterful hooks just keep you hurrying along to see what happens next. He is not just incredibly prolific; he is extremely versatile as well, although it shows better in books like Suzanne s Diary for Nicholas , where he writes from the perspective of a woman better than most woman authors do. Yes, I m a big fan.[return:]return:

Patterson's atrociously elementary prose aside, ‘When the Wind Blows' is an afront to good storytelling sensibilites the world over and is another example of literature of the lowest possible common denominator. Whilst the likes of Dan Brown have been the most recent perpetrators of this populism, Patterson has certainly been the more consistent of the two and quite arguably the worst offender of all modern hacks. I must surmise that even the combined powers of Dickens, Poe, Kafka or the most literate modern storytellers could not bend Patterson into writing a competent tale should they slap him a thousand times in the face with their own manuscripts.

The plot is an absolute mess having to do with the secretive genetic manipulation of a little girl and the two protagonists who find themselves tangled up in the whole scheme and whose mission becomes to free the girl from her experimental captivity. How that happens, one can only hope to care a little less about as the “story” unfolds with all the grace and weight of a weekday television drama. Pathetic romance between the tale's heroes degenerates into being laughably absurd at its worst moments (and soap opera-esque at best), the action throughout is completely lacking in suspense or thrills; but perhaps the worst offense of them all can be summed up in the cartoonishness of the narrative, chock-full of plot turns so contrived as to make M. Night Shyamalan at his worst blush. The characters are developed with as much interest as one might put into stapling together a cardboard box and much of the inanity takes place over the modern mass market fiction phenomena of brisk three-seven word dialogue sessions, which can go on for seeming pages at a time with little to no cognitive progress made, narratively-speaking. One would assume even a writer of Patterson's lowly capabilities could at least muster up some sort of detail when describing his characters, settings or set pieces... yet we get about as much an impression of such vitals as one might make of the Taj Mahal through the bottom end of a foggy glass.

An Amazon.com reviewer summed this novel up perfectly with the headline of his review: “When the Wind Sucks.” To say a Berenstain Bears book is written with decidedly more wit, charm and readability would be uttering the very least of truths in regards to Patteron's immeasurably awful writing. Spare yourselves this waste of paper and introduce yourselves to literature worthy of your time and mental faculties. Mass market drivel like this undoubtedly contributes greatly to the sharply declining literacy of our society, even if its pedestrian characters, Bruckheimer plot and by-the-books action do at least make for the most pathetically lazy of easy, diet reads.

For those who actually enjoy great, well-written literature, I can't warn you away from this book or its brand of modern “mass market appeal” writing strongly enough. Avoid at all costs and your IQ will certainly show no end of gratitude.