17 year old Hawk has been alone for nearly as long as she can remember. Dropped off in a rough city corner of a drug-ridden, grimy, broken down New York when she was little, with a promise her parents would be back for her. She doesn’t remember her real name, or her parents, or life before this. All she has is her pet hawk and her fight. And every day, she waits on this corner, for 30 minutes. For years, and years. Watching the world grow rougher, harder–and watching herself grow rougher, harder, in this terror of a city. Until one day, she has enough. She’s done waiting at this corner, because this is stupid.

And then her world turns upside down.

Okay, where do I start with this… this was my first James Patterson novel, and I’d heard a lot about the guy. He’s written over 200 hundred books in his lifetime, and is the author of the Maximum Ride and Alex Cross series, among others. I constantly saw his name in used books stores, thrift stores, library shelves, and finally I was like okay, let’s see what this dude is all about.

I’ll start with the pros, so we can get what little I liked about this book out of the way.

What I Liked

Hawk has wings. It’s really cool, and I always enjoy winged characters, even though I don’t read many winged character books. It adds a sense of freedom and new adventure to a story.

The characters were really cool. Along the course of the story, we’re introduced to an entire host of characters. Hawk has a really sweet (though undeveloped) found family, and I fell in love with them in the very first scenes. And later on, with other characters I won’t spoil, we were able to see all these sides and cool concepts and lots of wit and banter, which I’m always a sucker for.

This book hooked my interest the entire way through. Technically. I got very angry at this book for reasons I’ll explain soon. I literally pulled my bookmark out and closed the book, tired of the story and ready to make it a DNF.

But I had to come back, because I really, really wanted to know how the characters ended up.

A regrettable decision, on my part. I would’ve been better off imagining my own ending.

What I Disliked

Right off the bat, we get an entire world of cursing. Like every other paragraph, with nearly every word you can think of (I don’t think there’s many of the f-word, and I don’t think we see any sexual curse words, but… pretty much everything else is here). Apparently, the authors wanted to write a hip YA dystopian, and figured the best way to show her inexperienced, harden youth is to make Hawk curse. Constantly.

I always have a problem with this in books, because it’s really not needed a majority of the time. Like okay, sure, you have a character who curses and you want to put that in your book, sure. It’s your call. But every other paragraph is so overkill.

Secondly… our main character, Hawk, is really annoying. She’s your typical YA character, always whining about how horrible her world is and how horrible her parents are and how she hates the entire world except for this small pocket of people. Yes, I get it, dystopian worlds are rough. As a dystopia writer, I get that. And really, this wasn’t why I was annoyed at her… I typically don’t hate the typical YA dystopian girl.

Maybe it was the way Hawk kept reminding us she’s not like other people, she’s a bird-person and so freakishly tall but strong and skinny. Like every chapter for the first half of the book. Maybe it was the way, after finding some solid authority figures, who she said she liked, she keeps being angsty and rash and really stupid compared to these experienced figures. Maybe it was the way she decided to kiss this guy in the first few chapters, and then proceed to angst over him, forget about him, and then angst again just for it to be widely unresolved in the ending?

And yes, that takes me into my third point.

This entire book was so underdeveloped and quick. We have all these big scenes–a kiss scene with a dude we don’t even know, a death, reunions, kidnappings–and we get no emotional for any of it. I mean, for the death, the character just sits there for a minute and cries and then goes on with their life and never thinks about the death again. For the kiss, she anguishes over this dude and their oh so sweet romance and broken friendship.

We don’t even know the guy. We were given no information about him besides him being the love interest and like some family history. And then we’re getting a kiss scene.

And oh my word, the ending. When I tell you I would’ve been better off imagining my own ending, I’m not kidding. In the climax, the POV character was hiding things from us, in a really annoying way. Like we just couldn’t know it, even though we were in her head. The ending climax was over in like five pages, with some gore, some angsty finale, a tired cliffhanger that got teased and resolved in one and a half pages.

Oh yes, and quite possibly the biggest thing. He had a character, with wings, in this dystopian sci-fi world, who could mind read, physically, and verbarlly, say “lol” out loud.

And a few chapters earlier, he had the narrator use three question marks in a row after a sentence, twice.

I know this sounds petty, but knowing how prose should be and how good writing should be, I had to get up and pace my living room. Not in hype from the story, but in hatred from the prose.

Content Warnings

Constant cursing, blood, violence, romance, reference to sexual assault, drug use, and weak character development.

Overall upset I had to finish this book. Good thrills, but weak characters, scattered plot, and way too much cursing. It took me quite a few hours, and was a total waste of time minus the wings. And I’m really disappointed, I expected Patterson to be worth the hype. Maybe this just wasn’t his best book. But Hawk felt like a fanfiction–and I hesitate to call it a fanfiction because there are really good fanfics out there.

I rate this one out of five stars, for ages 16+. I can’t recommend this to anyone, really, without hurting my reader conscience. Based on other reviews, you may enjoy this if you liked the last books in the Maximum Ride series.