The category for this spork has been “AMGEL” for a week and nobody told me aaaaaa
Chapter 5
Max infodumps about her mom, probably since JPatterson doesn’t expect us to remember her after not showing up in the last book. Then Max goes back inside and Nudge shoves a cookie in her mouth because we’re still not over the freaking cookies. Meanwhile, Ella is reading some Tarzan book to Iggy.
I’d been sharing her room at night for the past week, and the conversations we’d had in the dark, when everyone else was asleep, made me feel like a normal teenage girl. (pg 18)
But don’t show us any of these conversations or anything. Developing characters’ relationships with each other is entirely unnecessary! Oh and Ella has a crush on Iggy zzzzz
Of the five (formerly six) of us, they’re [Angel and Gazzy] the only real blood siblings. Which I suppose explains why I have brown hair and brown eyes, Fang has dark hair and darker eyes, Iggy is tall and fair and light-haired, Gazzy and Angel are both blond and deceptively angelic-looking, and Nudge is African American, with light brown skin, curly corkscrew hair almost the same color, and eyes like melted chocolate. (pg 18)
Why yes, Max, that would explain it. Also, if you’re going to pointedly not include Fang in one sentence, do try not to include him in the very next one. That’s pretty sloppy.
Angel says that Jeb and Dr. Gunther-Hagen are coming, and Max tells us about how Angel can “pick up on people’s energy and emotions, from a distance” and pretty much completely read their minds at close range. I guess we finally have an explanation of how Angel’s powers work after seven books, though it seems as if her mind control has been dropped. Also, uh, Dr. Gunther-Hagen? Why is he still around? Last we saw him he was in the middle of a lab in which he had against Fang’s will injected him with something that ended up killing him. And the flock just… let him go? I mean, come on. If a bunch of kids rioting was enough to take down Itex, there’s no way Dr. Gunther-Hagen couldn’t have gone down for his actions.
Max is angry with her mom for letting Jeb come and her mom says that Jeb wanted to talk with Max about something urgent. Let me guess, it’s “the world is in danger you have to save it that’s it bye.”
I looked into her warm brown eyes that were similar to mine. Her hair was darker and curlier than mine. We didn’t look much alike. (pg 19)
I saw a dog. I pet the dog. The dog ran away. I was sad.
Chapter 6
A small plane lands behind the house. The house is also described as small, which makes me wonder how eight people are living in it. Also, you know, why Jeb is arriving via plane.
Jeb and Dr. Gunther-Hagen enter the house. We get a bit of exposition about them, but at no point do we actually learn what happened between the flock and Dr. Gunther-Hagen in the last book. JPatterson almost gets there, telling us about Dr. Gunther-Hagen killing Fang, but manages to also fail to mention why this murder went unpunished. GOOD WRITING.
Jeb says that there’s something bigger than all of them going on (you know, like always). According to him, there are a lot of labs around the world making genetically altered kids like the flock in order to speed up the evolutionary process. Max is unimpressed by this despite having been driven to take down Itex in the first three books for doing exactly that because what is continuity. Jeb also mentions that the flock were the fifty-fourth generation of experiments, which makes little sense given that the six of them share four different ages. (As this is a scientific context, “generation” isn’t a grouping of people base on their age but rather something more akin to a version number for software). But the age gaps never made sense anyway, so.
The Erasers, meanwhile, were generation fourteen. The Erasers from the last book aren’t mentioned here for some reason, oh yeah, the reason is “what is continuity.”
Max is all “get to the point” and they go back and forth a bit more and then Dr. Gunther-Hagen cuts in:
“These children, this new generation, are the ones you’ll be leading, after you save the world. It’s time you start leading them. Now.” (pg 24)
Uhhh, what? Max is supposed to lead them, future tense, after she’s saved the world, except… she’s supposed to lead them now? C’mon, Dr. Gunther-Hagen, you’re a fictional character, your dialogue is supposed to actually follow a coherent train of thought.
Chapter 7
Okay, slight flicker of interest. I’d been doing the “save the world” thing for a while, and so far it had been mostly saving the world one small part at the time. (pg 25)
Max, you’ve completed three major plot victories over these books, and out of the two that actually affected the world, only one was saving a “small part” of the world. The other was saving two-thirds of the population.
These new genetically modified (well, some of them are described as having “spontaneous genetic evolutions” but, um, no) kids are called generation seventy-seven, and it’s “very likely” that a lot of them will be among “the human survivors of the apocalypse.” So, yay, Dr. Gunther-Hagen’s mysteeeerious apocalypse hasn’t been forgotten. Now if we could just be told what it is and how the flock are suited to survive it, why Fang needs to be away from Max to make them survive better, etc., I would be much obliged. Really, this all sounds a lot more like some sort of big war than a “universal or widespread destruction or disaster” as this usage of the word is defined. Unless Jeb and Dr. Gunther-Hagen are using apocalypse to mean a “revelation or prophecy” haha we never told you which definition they were using PLOT TWIST!
So these kids, who are all from the same generation, have incredibly varied powers like underwater breathing, telepathy, or thermal vision. Either we’re meant to believe they achieved all these different powers through the exact same form of modification, or Jeb and Dr. Gunther-Hagen’s scientific community is crap at using the term generation to mean anything useful.
As Dr. Gunther-Hagen said, he and Jeb want to lead these kids under Max. How Max is supposed to be a singular leader to the kids when by the sound of it there are dozens of them, I’m clueless. Oh, and Dr. Gunther-Hagen has some sort of surprise, but Jeb doesn’t want him to tell it and then Angel reads Jeb’s mind (but not Dr. Gunther-Hagen’s?) and puts her hands on her cheeks and says “oh, no. Not that!” (that’s a direct quote) and BRB, laughing at that hilarious image. And… I’ll end the spork here since it’s getting long. I won’t give you a cliffhanger, though: the thing is that Dr. Gunther-Hagen wants Max to have kids. Which is… yeah, but not really deserving of Angel’s reaction.
Soulish Exhortations 