Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Book Review: The Maze Runner

MazeRunner cover Maze Runner Series 
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?

3 comments:

  1. Yeah- I read this one and the second one a few years ago. I thought they were okay, but by the time I got the 3rd one in (it was on hold for a long time), I'd lost interest and never read it. Definitely not my favorite dystopian trilogy!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Evan's been wanting to see the movie. Now, I'm not so sure.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hmmm, I had thought about watching that movie when it came out but forgot about it. I may not have missed much by your review of the book since the books are usually better than the movies. :-)

    ReplyDelete

Thank you for being interested in my life as I blog it and for leaving a comment. Comments make me happier than reading a good book and drinking a cold Coke. Almost :)