Michael Ledwidge

"A kind of pleading in his almond-shaped brown eyes"

Oh wow is this book awful. Someone took a cliché dictionary out of the library, cobbled every entry together into something like a cop thriller, and put a famous name on the front cover.

The protagonist, Lauren, is a hypocritical adulterous whiner who has an affair... to teach her cheating husband a lesson. Um... ironic, much? So when this revenge turns out to be full of salmonella and gunshot rather than being served cold, it's pretty show more tough to have any sympathy for her.

Oh, but never mind the conflict of interest in the upcoming prosecution case, she's the best, she's going to take it... "Bronx assistant DAs practically fought to take my cases because they could just about read my reports aloud for their prosecutions". For someone who's so bullish about her own abilities, she uses a whole lotta qualifiers in that sentence.

Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I promise never to open another novel bearing the James Patterson brand as long as I live. For my penance, I agree to rid my shelves of this rot.

(seriously, it's too bad even for BookMooch. I'm going to leave them on the Tube.) show less

This book had me glued to the pages. It's an eco-pocalypse thriller in which the natural behaviour of animals across the globe starts to shift, including their hunting and feeding habits, and there is a corresponding rise in brutal attacks on humans. Jackson Oz, a young biologist, has been monitoring this for years, but as things escalate it becomes a matter of international importance to finally get the message into the public eye and try to work out what's causing the change. It's been show more made into a TV series, which I haven't seen yet, and I found the book gripping, infuriating, suitably shocking in places, and oddly plausible. show less

I'm not sure whether this was written for a YA audience or a middle grade one. Either way, it's a bad book. If it was written for a YA audience, it's quite possibly the worst traditionally published YA novel in existence.

I'm pretty sure I picked this up at a “going out of business” sale at a used bookstore. One thing you can count on, when a book has “James Patterson” stamped on the cover, is a fast-paced, quick read. The only positive thing I can say about The Dangerous Days of show more Daniel X is that it didn't take a lot of time to get through.

This book is terrible. Really, really awful. In usual James Patterson style (in this case, probably written almost entirely by Michael Ledwidge), each chapter is only a couple pages long, and it's all action all the time. After all, who needs pesky things like descriptions and characterization? Exclamation points, italics, and all caps were used in a lame attempt to up the story's excitement.

Daniel's parents were killed within the first few pages of the book, and their deaths packed absolutely no emotional punch. There was not one character in this book that I truly cared about. The only one I felt even a twinge for was Phoebe, a girl from Daniel's school, and that was only because Daniel's interest in her sent shivers of revulsion through me.

You see, Daniel was filled to the brim with superpowers. He was super-strong, super-fast, and super-intelligent. He could telepathically rewrite people's personalities and memories. He could shapeshift into something as large as an elephant or as small as a gnat. He could create living, breathing, real people out of thin air and then make them disappear again at will. His favorite people to create were his family members and a group of friends. One of those friends, Dana, was sort of his girlfriend. Yes, he was attracted to a girl he created with his mind, and, of course, she was attracted to him. Daniel could also read minds, a power he used in order to best figure out how to respond to Phoebe so that she would like him. This made Dana a little upset with him. As you can imagine, Daniel's girl troubles garnered no sympathy from me.

Despite all these many, many superpowers, Daniel almost died when an alien tried to kill him via a phone call. Depending on what the story called for, Daniel's powers either weren't up to snuff or were so powerful that it was a wonder he'd ever had any trouble at all.

It was painfully obvious that Ledwidge (and/or Patterson, if he even bothered to look over the manuscript) was trying to appeal to a younger audience. Pop culture name dropping was everywhere. There were mentions of the Lord of the Rings movies, Shia LaBeouf, The Grudge, and more. When the book wasn't trying really, really hard to appeal to “young'uns,” it was preaching at them. At one point, Daniel hitchhikes...and takes the time to warn readers that they shouldn't try it themselves. At another point, there's an anti-drug message, as Daniel sees an alien kid selling what he immediately assumes is drugs, grabs them, and stomps on them.

The heavy-handed messages for readers aren't just limited to PSAs. No, there are book recommendations as well. Daniel referred to Water for Elephants as “A honey of a story!” (54). What kind of teen thinks or talks like that? Later, he briefly interrupted the action to tell readers that he got his latest idea from The Iliad. That wouldn't have been so bad, except here's the full paragraph:

After all my thinking and searching through annals of every strategy and warfare book ever written, I'd actually gotten the ploy from The Iliad, by Homer. Achilles gets Hector outside Troy's walled gates to fight him one-on-one while both their armies watch. Check it out in The Iliad. Great story! (216)

Those last couple sentences were completely unnecessary and once again made Daniel seem less like a 15-year-old boy and more like a desperate adult begging kids to read books he thinks will be good for them.

This felt like a parody of action-filled science fiction. Its attempts at humor fell flat – including lame jokes every few sentences does not automatically make a book funny, and neither does including telepathic elephants and cheerleader cows.

(Original review, with read-alikes and watch-alikes, posted on A Library Girl's Familiar Diversions.) show less

I wanted to like the book. I truly believe that authors write to please their audience. Sadly, I am not in the audience for this book.
It feels like a combination of Jurassic Park, Mighty Joe Young and King Kong, gone wrong. What could have been a really exciting novel descends into a fantasy, not quite believable. The author has used the book to advance his political agenda with issues that range from environmental abuse, to governmental arrogance and incompetence, to almost all other social show more issues, even including a lesbian couple that is attacked in Africa, although their sexuality has nothing whatsoever to do with the story.
After more than a decade of unusual animal behavior, indicating an animal population behaving contrary to their natures, turning on humans, the powers that be, meaning government officials, finally wake up and turn to scientists for the answer which will solve what seems to be the possible arrival of the end of days. They turn to a man who originated the concept of a human/animal clash but was previously very unsuccessful in warning the public or getting the ear of the people in charge. Originally on the fast track at Columbia, working toward his PHD, Jackson Oz is undone by this theory. Unemployed and no longer at school working toward his degree, he can’t shake the thought that there is “a paradigm shift underway in the world of animal life, and that animals are behaving strangely” out of character, in a way that will be catastrophic for the world. Too soon, his theory becomes the nightmare of reality.
He rants about an ineffective, corrupt government, peopled by arrogant, spoiled Congressmen, etc., making decisions based on politics rather than common sense(sounds a bit familiar), and he even casts a female President in an important role, but not a thoughtful President in charge of the crisis, rather one that overreacts and makes poor decisions, making the crisis worse. It is not too far into the future since she is the 45th President. Jackson Oz is the name of the quasi hero of the novel. Many of his decisions are uninformed and immature, as well.
The book further declines, in my opinion, with the inclusion of irrelevant sex scenes and very often inane dialogue. In addition, the effort to add wit to the tale, failed for me. The subject matter was not funny, and if addressed with greater seriousness, the author might well have made this novel a warning about what might come if we continue to abuse our world, rather than engaging in an implausible flight of fancy.
Those that like books that combine fantasy, science fiction and horror, and those who eagerly await the next Patterson novel, will undoubtedly find more to like in this book than I did. It is a fast read, it is exciting, but it left me wanting. Perhaps it would best be read on an airplane or on a beach, somewhere on vacation, preferably where there are no wild animals. show less