The Angel Experiment

The Angel Experiment is a novel by the American writer James Patterson, published in 2005. It is the first book of the Maximum Ride series.

The flock are children who were engineered with avian DNA, which gives them wings and the ability to fly, and who escaped from a research programme known as the School before the novel begins. Max is fourteen and acts as the group's leader, and the book opens with the ordinary difficulties of keeping six children fed and hidden, then moves into a rescue when Angel is taken back by the people who made them. The journey to Death Valley and the fight to recover her bring the group into conflict with the Erasers, human beings altered to be able to hunt them, and with the question of what else was done to the children in the laboratory. Patterson wrote the book as the start of a series of short, fast chapters aimed at younger readers, and he followed it with a long run of sequels.

The series was popular enough to support a film adaptation and a graphic novel treatment, and the characters return to the same questions about their origins in the later books.