James Patterson: Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment

Fans of the TV programme Dark Angel will likely enjoy this teen sci-fi adventure from best-selling thriller writer James Patterson.

Maximum Ride is centred around a group of "experimental" children who featured in Patterson's previous books

When the Wind Blows and The Lake House, although it is for a younger audience than its predecessors.

The resemblance between it and the unrelated telly drama is strong at times, down to the name of their respective heroines, both genetically engineered young superwomen called Max.

Dark Angel's Max was created in a lab to be a soldier and possessed superhuman physical powers. She escaped from her creators, hid out in the big wide world and played a protective, motherly figure to others of her kind. She was pursued by the evil corporation which made her.

Maximum Ride's Max is the leader of a group of children and, like them, is a human-bird hybrid. She has superhuman strength, vision and endurance — and she can fly. She and the youngsters manage to escape from their evil makers, and take refuge in the big wide world. Max is a mother figure to the others and they are like family. They are pursued by other mutants, vicious wolf-human hybrids, also a product of the lab, called Erasers.

Like the TV show, the book has a tone of bruised worldweariness, abandonment and longing for love — and there's a lot of butt-kicking.

Patterson doesn't shy away from violence in his adult thrillers and although this is toned down for younger readers, Maximum Ride is still a hard-edged adventure.

The story takes off, literally, when the youngest of the group of flying wonderkids, Angel, is abducted by a posse of Erasers and dragged in a helicopter back to the lab. Max knows only too well the fear and pain which awaits her "little sister", stuck in a cage and subjected to all sorts of torture in the name of scientific tests.

The chase takes them back to their scary home turf to rescue Angel and then on to New York on a quest to find the true nature of their origin — and, if they exist, their parents. Along the way Max is accompanied by a mysterious and an ever-more insistent voice in her head.

Maximum Ride is up there with the best in terms of pacing and tension, Max is an appealing heroine and the human-birds are convincing as characters. Even more attractive, though, is Patterson's portrayals of the power of flight. This adventure really does take wing.

* Hodder Moa Beckett, $29.99