The Zoo: a beastly read

Let me begin by saying this is not the first James Patterson book that I have read, but this is, to my recollection, the first book where a man is the protagonist. By saying that, and my experience reading books where men save the day, I may have had a bias when reading this book.

This book starts off with scientist, Jackson Oz, who has been studying the increase in mammalian attacks on humans, but is seen as an outcast in the scientific community. That being said, we do hear about an attack, where a zoo lion killed a zookeeper. Oz goes on a trip to Botswana to meet with a colleague, but gets attacked by a large group of gorillas, leaving him the only survivor of the attack. On his way back to civilization, he meets a French Ecologist. This is where the book turned sour to me, because I believe the only reason that the ecologist was a beautiful, French, Ballerina style woman, was for the fact that Jackson would end up with her. And, boy was I right, they do end up getting married and having a child together. But, back to the premise of the book.

Jackson has a chimp, which he leaves under the care of his at-the-time girlfriend, but because of the strange behaviour of almost all animals, we find out that his chimp has killed his girlfriend and many more people in their apartment. So more animal attacks occur, killing a lot of people, turning whole cities into wastelands; this is where things get weird.

Five years pass, and we cut back to Jackson and his family (with the beautiful French lady), they hav become famous talking about this crisis, this chance in animal behaviour that has come from basically nowhere. One thing that I found strange was the fact that Oz determined the cause of the behaviour change due to pheromones, making all the mammals act like bugs. My question is that wouldn’t other scientists, especially entomologists have seen behaviour that was previously seen in insects and tell the scientific community? Why is it that it is only this one guy that has seen what is going on, and that basically no one else has noticed this?

I honestly was questioning a lot of this book, but kept reading, because I have read and enjoyed James Patterson’s books in the past. This one however, made me question and dislike the whole novel. From the fact that the only women we were introduced were love interests of the character, even the actual scientist, that’s all we get from them, just love interests and nothing past that surface. How many books out there do you men being just the love interest to female main characters (please comment below because I would love to read those)? I just couldn’t really handle this book, and the image it gave women, the scientific community, and our understanding of our world. Yes, I do agree with Patterson that there will be an affect to our pollution and how we are killing the planet, but I do not believe that a single person is going to be the hero in that case, because it is going to take all of us working together to fix what we have done. Please, if you have read this book and believe that I should read it again, and for what reasons I should, let me know, I am always ready to give books a second chance if they deserve it.