Going for a (Maximum) Ride

James Patterson, you owe me

It started in the airport.

No, I take that back.  It started weeks before that, at the school library, where my teenager (for reasons I never was clear on) checked out the first book in Patterson’s Maximum Ride series.  And then the second and the third and the fourth . . .

Note to anyone interested in reading them: they don’t end.  They just keep coming.

There’s a reason for that.  Patterson isn’t an author the way, say, I’m an author, or even that a big name like Michael Chabon is an author.  He’s a factory.  He freely admits he works with co-authors on most of the books he writes: he comes up with the idea and the outline and someone else connects the dots, adhering to his style.  According to the New York Times article which describes this process, “since 2006, one out of every 17 novels bought in the United States was written by James Patterson.”

Why are his books so successful?  Well, I’ve started the first Maximum Ride and I can tell you that everything we’ve talked about on this blog as far as the direction kids’ books are moving in is there to the nth degree: constant action, simple language, direct dialogue, exaggerated peril . . .   This isn’t The Secret Garden.  This is hardboiled, exciting and intense thriller-style fiction.  And my boys are eating it up.

Which brings me back to the airport.  So my teenage son is reading the Maximum Ride books and he gets my ten-year-old hooked on them too, right before we head off on our two-week spring break vacation.  My ten-year-old has read the first couple of books and we’ve downloaded another one onto the Kindle.  He’s also bringing a bunch of other books on the trip: my kids read more on vacation than the rest of the year combined.  (Mostly because they watch less TV on vacation than the rest of the year combined.)  His brother is packing the most recent Maximum Ride book, a hardcover called Fang, but there’s a book between the last one Will has and that one, which means there’ll be a gap in his reading.

There’s a very small book display near where we’re sitting in the airport.  And guess what’s there?  Maximum Ride books.  Including the “gap” one–the one Will hasn’t read and we don’t have with us.  I ask him if he wants me to buy it.  And he thinks about it and says, “No, I have enough to read.”

Fine.

Cut to our family, a week later, searching through every English language store in Rome and Venice, trying desperately to get our hands on a copy of that book.  That book we saw in the airport.  That book I pointed to and said, “You want me to get it now?” and Will said, “Nah” to.  The book he now wants more than life itself.

Fortunately for Will, I like an excuse to go to English language bookstores.  Even his father, who normally thinks it’s a waste of time to shop in a foreign country, spots a store in Rome called MelBookstore and goes in (after all, my father’s name is Mel so it’s a good excuse for a photo op).    He scores the third Stieg Larsson book–the British edition.  But they don’t have the Maximum Ride book we need.

I grab the Stieg Larsson book from Rob and insist on reading it first.  (He’s used to this.)  (More on the family vacation reading to come.)  But Will’s birthday is fast approaching and the one thing he truly wants and needs is this Maximum Ride book.  I remind him we could have gotten it at the airport if he’d just said yes.  Oddly enough, he doesn’t find this at all comforting.  He didn’t want the book then.  He wants it now.

Whenever we see, the words “English books” or “International bookstore” we dart inside.  We end up at a store near the Spanish Steps called Il Mare where they have books in English . . . only they’re all about the ocean.  (Ah, yes: Il Mare.  The Sea.  A little slow on that one.)  Will is annoyed.  He wanted James Patterson; he got Jules Verne.  It’s a beautiful little bookstore, though, with an espresso machine and tables in the back and lots of artwork devoted to the sea.   But no one’s in a mood to appreciate it so on we go.  Later, thanks to the list Kim linked to in an earlier post on bookstores in Rome, we go on a journey to find the famous Lion Bookstore, near the Spanish Steps.  At this point, Will is desperate, so when–after a certain unnamed member of the family leads us the wrong way and we get lost for a while first–we finally find the Lion and it’s closed for the night, Will succombs to despair.  Dinner helps.

More bookstores, more disappointments.  There’s a cool one near our hotel that runs underground–you can go down on one side of the big intersection and come up on the other.  My kids are convinced it was once a subway stop but the employees shake their heads no, although that might have been, “no, we have no idea what you keep asking us” as opposed to “no, it’s not a subway stop.”  Anyway, that one doesn’t have any English language books but it helps us get across the street so it’s all good.

A couple of stores taunt us, promising books in English, and featuring James Patterson in their windows (he does get around, that guy).  But they don’t have Maximum Ride.  Or at least not OUR Maximum Ride.  Even the bookstore at the train station where we caught a ride to Venice–which had an enormous English language section, almost a whole floor–didn’t have the one book we wanted.  His disappointment was huge: if it wasn’t there, could it be anywhere in Italy?

It certainly didn’t seem like it could possibly be in Venice, that overpriced Disneyland of a city.  The bookstores near us carried more drawings than books, and the books they had were for gazing at, not reading.

And then.  And then.

Walking along a street, we spot an international bookstore, the Libreria Mondadori (read here for a wonderful description).  We enter.  It’s got a small downstairs but promises a bigger section upstairs.  We run up the stairs and traipse around.  Where are the English books?  In a far off corner, we discover.  We prowl, we poke, we scan the shelves. James Patterson, yes; Maximum Ride, no.  We tell Will to find something else, so he obediently–if somewhat unenthusiastically starts looking through the shelves.  He’s picked a possible contender when Johnny shouts exultantly: he’s just unearthed a single Maximum Ride book.

And it’s the one we need.

13 Euros later (Don’t think of how much cheaper it would have been in the airport, Claire, not to mention at any bookstore near home), the book was safely tucked away in Will’s backpack.

His birthday was the day after and guess what he wanted to do for it?

Stay in the hotel and read, of course.

Maybe someday he’ll see the Doge’s Palace.  But not this year.