Book Review: The Maze Runner

 

image from here

This is the first book in a series. As are most books for teens these days, it is a bleak view of our future. Thomas, the main character, finds himself arriving in The Glade with no memories. And the current occupants of The Glade are in no big hurry to fill him in.

The book starts with, what I thought was agonizing, slowness, as we learn along with Thomas, what The Glade is all about. Eventually the pace does pick up however. One thing that I thought Dashner did really well was amp up the suspense. I was more scared reading this book than I have been reading other things. Probably being introduced to the strangeness of everything from Thomas' point of view aided this feeling of unease and terror.

Much of the time I was reading the book, I was complaining to Dave about how awful I thought it was. He told me to stop reading it then. (Probably because he didn't want to hear me complain!) However, I rarely stop reading a book because I don't like it. (One notable exception is Atonement by Ian McEwan). I feel like sometimes a book redeems itself at the end. However, for me, this one didn't.

I guess in the genre of dystopian teenage literature, I just think there are just better options out there, like The Hunger Games or Divergent. It wasn't until I was writing this review that I realized this might be one of the first series I've read where the main character is male instead of female, but I really don't think that skewed my opinion. I also checked out the plot summaries for the rest of the series on Wikipedia, and they didn't make me any more interested in pursuing the rest of the books.

If you've read this book (or the series), what did you think? Am I missing something that makes it better than I'm giving it credit for? Or, like me, did it just leave you feeling lukewarm?