My honest review of Zoo by James Patterson

    I did not enjoy this book and if you know me you’ll know that I am a huge James Patterson fan and I’ve read almost every book he’s ever put out. My favorite series being Alex Cross and Maximum Ride. I liked the theme of this book, this crazy idea that animals of all kinds could be evolving to react to human pharamones in a way that makes us become prey is just the kind of science fiction I enjoy. But I felt like this was very lackluster. At the beginning I couldn’t put it down, it started off with a bang. But as the chapters progressed it just felt like things were dragging out, specifically around chapter 50 when they fast forward to five years later and our main character is still being pushed around as if he didn’t have credentials by military and government employees. In the beginning chapters there had been huge outbreaks of animals hunting down humans, even lions changing their social behaviors way out in the deserts of Africa away from dense human populations in order to push the storyline along. It just felt like fast forwarding five years would have had significantly more damage to the human race, more research and evidence to back up out protagonist and the reasoning behind the attacks. Maybe I’m just picky but the timeline seemed too rushed and too slow at the same time. I also felt like there were some inconsistencies in police involvement throughout this book. In one chapter Oz is thrown out of a government building after attempting to see the governer of New York.  (why’s all this crap always happening in major cities?) He gets thrown in jail and actually pressed with some charges against him but just a few chapters later, comes home to find his pet chimpanzee went absolutely feral and murdered his girlfriend and it’s never mentioned what happens after. In the real world he would’ve been slapped with a manslaughter charge even if the government didn’t look into his research about the Human-Animal-Conflict (HAC in the book) to know that he very well knew his pet could be affected. Just because the chimp was his property that he didn’t actually have a license for. But this is the fake book world so I digress, the inconsistencies just really bothered me. Can I spoil the ending? Cool, thanks. So it turns out that radio communications, (cell phones and major technology) and the increase in usage of petroleum products were the major cause for the animals’ amygdalas to become enlarged and create aggression. The president orders a two week ban on all electronic communications and animal attacks seemed to come to an immediate halt but as people returned to their normal routines things picked back up. I do not plan on reading the second book yes there is a sequel called Zoo 2. Honestly I had to really force myself to finish this book. Give it a read if you’d like, you might enjoy it more than I did.