The Death Cure by James Dashner

Wow, how disappointing. Granted I found the series just average anyway, with the first being the most interesting, but this one just completely fell flat for me. Still, I'll put my usual disclaimer here, don't bother reading this one unless you've read the others. This series is meant to be read in order.

Having defeated the trails by Maze and the barren land known as the Scorch, Thomas and the other survivors are taken to WICKED headquarters. There, they are presented with the opportunity to regain the memories taken from them, but Thomas is suspicious. He hatches a daring plan to escape, but with all the variables that are presented by WICKED, he's never sure he's doing what he's supposed to do, or what they have planned for him. And as the disease known as The Flare keeps spreading, will they even have enough time to come up with a cure.

I didn't really have any compassion for Thomas at all in this book. Nothing he did was logical or made any sort of regular sense. It's like he was just doing things to keep the plot moving without rhyme or reason. And everyone else kind of fell into the backdrop as a result. Characters that were such a big part of the first two novels barely got any time in this one and I think it really lost something because of that. The only other character that really had any time in the book was Brenda, and even she wasn't the character that we were familiar with from the previous book. It might as well have been another person.

The plot also didn't have much of a point. The ending was a cop out in my opinion, but I won't say anything further than that as not to spoil it for anyone. And the variables and trials made no sense whatsoever even after the end of the novel where you would expect it to be explained. It's almost like Dashner didn't think that part out and had to throw something together to at least make an ending. And it doesn't work. There is a lot of violence in this book too, and while some of it is appropriate, some of it just seemed meaningless, like filler. If I have to summarize everything about this book, it just didn't provide satisfying answers.

Not a good ending to the series and as a result not a series I would particularly recommend. There are better dystopians out there.

The Death Cure
Copyright 2011
324 pages

The Scorch Trials by James Dashner

The Scorch Trials is the second book in the Maze Runner series by James Dashner.  I always recommend starting at the beginning of a series, and this one is no different, but to be honest, I had a hard time following this one even having read the first.

After escaping the maze, Thomas and Co. only think they are somewhere safe when all of a sudden, they find themselves in the middle of another test.  This time they're turned loose in the Scorch, a hot dry area with sickened "zombies" roaming about.  They all have the sickness too, and are told that in order to get the cure, they must reach a place one hundred miles away in just a few short weeks.  From there it's fighting death and facing betrayal and Thomas has to make several decisions that aren't easy.  But the need to survive is strong in him.

Thomas isn't that great of a character.  I don't connect with him at all and it seems like things happen a little too easy and coincidental for him.  With everything being a test it's hard to say that that isn't on purpose, but without revealing enough of those tests, as a reader I simply don't care.  Some of the characters I did really like, like Minho, take a back seat in this book too and it's always about Thomas, which gets a little wearisome since I don't care for him.  Teresa too doesn't improve with this book and in an odd sense, she and Thomas really are perfect for each other, because I rate them at the same level of interesting.  The new girl, Brenda, at least has some fire and real human emotion in her.

The plot moves along very quickly but even so it was filled with violence and different descriptions that would make your eyes bug out.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it just seemed like filler to me.  Yes this is a middle book, but it can have a decent plot of its own without merely being words to connect two other books.  I also wonder at how some of the things in this book are written, we have description but it isn't really complete.  I can't picture the places they are talking about very well or even the people.  Thomas himself is supposed to be sixteen, but I always get the impression that he's younger than that based on his description.  It just is hard to form an idea in your head on what the world is like with the little information given.

This is just average reading for a dystopian novel.  It has an interesting idea but there's so many loose ends and the fact that this book was filler does it no favors.  I want to know what happens so of course I'll read the last book, but I can only hope it improves on the flaws of the first two.

The Scorch Trials
Copyright 2010
360 pages

The Maze Runner by James Dashner

The Maze Runner was a book that came recommended to those who like dystopian novels and in general the sort of fiction that's being put out for teens right now.  As most of those can be hit or miss I approached it with trepidation.  The results; I thought it was ok, but not nearly as good as it was hyped up to be.

Thomas wakes up in a dark box which rises to the surface of a hostile world.  Here there are just boys who are doing their best to survive, and he's the newbie who's entered their world.  Aside from once a month supply deliveries, they are on their own.  The have their own little place to sleep and grow food, but outside those walls is a maze none of them have been able to solve.  And if they are unable to solve it, they don't get to go home.  The special task of handling this running of a maze is given to the select few, known as Runners.  And you would think solving a maze would be easy when there's so much time to do it; but dark things come out at night, and the maze is always changing.

I couldn't really connect with any of the characters in this book.  There were some stand out ones, sure, but the large majority of them just didn't spark that connection.  Especially Thomas, he's our main character and while I can appreciate his intelligence and fortitude, I don't particularly like him and am really sort of ambivalent to him.  The same goes for the only girl in the story, Teresa, who was just a little too perfect.  The only character I really did like was a boy named Minho, who had a bit of spunk to him and was a runner.  There were a couple of "bad guys" I suppose and the author made it easy to dislike them, so that was saying something at least.

The plot was ok.  I liked the maze concept and why they were in there and I thought the ending had a nice twist.  But the pacing was a little rushed and everything seemed to happy a little too easy for the main protagonist.  I realize that it was somewhat supposed to be, but it lessened the sense of excitement and struggle that you wanted to perceive in this book.  Being dystopian, it just should have been harder to do what they were doing.  I did like the beginning though, as Thomas is dropped into this world it has a whole different lexicon that he has trouble understanding at first.  And it's the same for the reader, but as he starts to understand, we begin to understand the different slang terms being used, and that made the book kind of realistic.

It's not a bad book, just not up to par with some of the other dystopian series out there.  I will of course read the rest of the trilogy though and hope that it improves with each book.

The Maze Runner
Copyright 2009
374 pages