Zoo

Note: There are some plot spoilers revealed in this review, so please read with caution if you don't want things spoiled!

I'm going to preface this review by being completely honest. When I see a book that has “James Patterson” co-writing with another author on it, I already get an expectation of what's written inside, and it may not exactly be the most flattering thing. I don't read them if I want a deeply rich and engrossing read. I don't read it if I want a compelling story or richly-written characters. None of that kind of stuff. Patterson to me has always been quick reads with entertainment as the priority.

I mean, there's nothing wrong with that. There's absolutely nothing wrong with wanting nothing more than an exciting and/or entertaining story. Sometimes, that's all you need for a book to be good. I respect that and understand that. But, I will say, that as a result, these Patterson collaboration books can come off as rather shallow to me. I don't know how much of it can contributed to Michael Ledwidge and how much is attributed to Patterson. I don't really read Ledwidge, so I can't personally anything on his behalf. I've heard from rumors that books like these, Patterson only writes a small chunk or more or less “produces” the book. Who knows? I don't, so I won't really be focusing on who might've done what. That being said, I went into this with sort of low but understanding expectations, and Zoo doesn't really do anything to change that for me. Without spoilers and without rambling on, Zoo has an interesting premise that's filled with areas of mediocrity in execution in character, plot, and prose, but is entertaining enough if you don't ask for much out of this book.

Open discussion of plot past this point, including spoilers.

The premise is intriguing enough, and one that sounds like it could really lend itself to be a cool science thriller of some kind. Animals are seemingly attacking human around the world on a widespread scale, almost in a coordinated way. The main character, nicknamed Oz, is trying to prove that this phenomena exists to the skeptics who refuse to believe and find its cause as everything descends into chaos and humans are subject to an onslaught of attacks from the animal population.

So, first things first: About the writing, I know Patterson books has a sort of style of writing where they focus on shorter chapters and sentences. It quickens up the pace and keeps things moving, which I appreciate. I can't Zoo being twice its length and having denser writing, I probably wouldn't have the resolve to finish it. And it really helps with a book like this in its job, which is to be an engaging page thriller. I will admit though, it does have the effect of making the writing feel choppy. Chapters will end quickly, scenes will come and go. It doesn't help that there's a five year time skip in the middle of the story which comes out of absolute nowhere. It's the most jarring effect. Its placement doesn't make any sense to me. Oz finds out his girlfriend has been killed by his pet chimpanzee (a bit more on that later), and he just makes some little quip about it to his new and very obviously written love interest (also more on that later) and then...time skip? No reaction to anything else? No retrospect on the firsthand data he's collected? No little narrative transition of “And Oz realized the journey had only just begun.”? It's like there was a chunk of the story that was lost in the fire, and the authors really didn't want to try to rewrite it or make smooth transitions, so they just put a time skip in there and called it good. I'm not saying that they had to write 100 extra pages of story to link together the two parts of the book (though I think it maybe would've been better, more on that later as well), but...I don't know. It's a move that utterly confuses me as a reader.

Second, something that personally stood out to me as being weak: the characters and how they're written. Oz himself doesn't really stand out to me in any way, or at least in a way that I think is good. I guess I do appreciate that he's more of an outcast in the scientific community instead of established and respected scientists, it's different and a source of interesting conflict. Or actually, it should be a source of interesting conflict, but it's only that way for about 30% of the story and then it's disregarded after the time skip (when he's now the head authority and being consulted by the President of the United States). It's like he was trying to be written as an antithesis to a stereotypical scientist protagonist, which I respect, but it comes off as Oz trying to be too cool. Cracking one-liners, being witty, listening to AC/DC and Metallica, giving thongs to his girlfriend and making hot jungle love with her. It comes off as trying too hard, but I understand that might be more a personal thing than anything else.

Any other characters besides Oz are thoroughly uninteresting and don't stick out in any other way. I can say right now that it's an absolute struggle to remember any of their names. I can remember Claire's, but only because she's the only other character in this story who gets any sort of meaningful focus, even if it doesn't fall out of the range of “obvious love interest later turned obvious family baggage for main character.” I get that the book is written from Oz's perspective, but when I can tell exactly what kind of shallow role a character is going to play just from Oz's shallow and blunt narration, it makes it harder to remember or care about them. I can say right now that Natalie's death registered very little reaction from me, something I share in common with Oz (yeah, Oz. Just a witty quote and then barely think about her afterwards. But I guess that's good, now that your Modern Ware 2 playing, high-libido, beer-drinking, one-of-the-guys neuroscience-studying girlfriend is dead, it lets you quickly move onto your second girlfriend). I guess I remember the chimpanzee. Maybe for not the right reasons. But hey, I understand that in this kind of book, it's not meant to slow down and give any kind of focus on any of the characters. Still, it would've been nice to see other written characters that weren't just walking cardboard cutouts for the story or obvious tropes that are only meant to be baggage.

Now, the last thing, and the thing where it all falls apart for me. The execution of the plot and characters, or I suppose the writing itself. Okay, I get it. This is no Jurassic Park. This is no Relic. This isn't supposed to be some deeply researched, deeply thought-provoking, multi-layered story. And I like I said before, that's 100% okay and there's nothing wrong with that. But at the same time, I like for things to still be cohesive and logical, for things to still make sense to the reader. Things that characters do and say can be utterly confusing from a reader's perspective with little to no explanation, and you just have to connect the dots yourself. And I think this is greatly illustrated in Attila, the book's chimpanzee character. So, we know Oz. He's a fringe scientist who's desperately researching the phenomena of animals attacking humans, trying his best to convince people of the danger they're finding themselves facing. He's obviously very committed to this, spending all of his money traveling to different countries to research it, risking his romantic relationship, dropping out of school to pursue it...

...so why the hell would a guy like this have a pet chimpanzee in his apartment???

Why? That literally makes no sense whatsoever. And there's no explanation for it at all. There's never a “this chimpanzee will save the humans from animals,” “this chimpanzee is different from the animals,” or even “i'm keeping it as an experiment to study animal attacks, let me sic him on the entire apartment complex.” I don't need to go into details of how chimpanzees are extremely dangerous without an apocalyptic animal attack scenario going on, especially a male chimpanzee cooped up in an apartment complex in an unfamiliar setting. And Oz is shocked and surprised when this chimpanzee goes ballistic and kills and eats his girlfriend? How is the reader supposed to take any of that seriously? I do recall that Oz briefly thinks something to the effect of “Oh damn, maybe that wasn't such a good idea. I messed up on that call.” Uh, yeah. You think, buddy? You need to use all two of your brain cells to figure that out? For being the only scientist in the world who can figure out the animal attack phenomena, he sure doesn't seem all that intelligent. I get this is a book that is meant to stretch your suspension of disbelief, and I accept that, but things should still make at least a tiny bit of sense.

There's more examples, but this review is getting way too long and I think I need to stop. All in all, Zoo's nothing more than one of those shallow thrillers that get you through a long airplane ride. And if that's all you're looking for, great. That's all this books really is. But think about anything past a shallow level, and it falls apart and becomes that much more flawed.

If Oz is the kind of hero who will save our world, maybe our world deserves to be doomed.

(Interesting little side note, I just want to say that my friend who is majoring in biology looked at the explanations for why the animals are becoming more aggressive, and laughed at it a bit. I don't understand biology at all, so the scientific explanations were okay to me, but she saw the explanations given about hydrocarbons and animal pheromones and thought it was funny. I'm not holding it against the book at all, since it's obviously just a fictional book and not meant to be taken super seriously or be super realistic. Just thought I'd point it out as a little P.S. to my review.)