as a child there's nothing cooler than a kid who gets subjected to evil experiments and gains special abilities. it's even cooler if these abilities also cause unfathomable suffering to use/against others. children love stories like this.

the maximum ride books are so fucking insane. james patterson wrote down literally whatever he wanted about a group of weird bird kids, threw in some wild plot about eugenics or global warming or nuclear winter or whatever, did not edit or proofread the manuscript, and then sent it to his publisher. he did this nine times. not once did anything in them make sense. and the books had a CHOKEHOLD on middle schoolers everywhere