Book: The Maze Runner by James Dashner

Genre: YA, Dystopian

Description (from goodreads) “If you ain’t scared, you ain’t human.” 

When Thomas wakes up in the lift, the only thing he can remember is his name. He’s surrounded by strangers–boys whose memories are also gone.

Outside the towering stone walls that surround the Glade is a limitless, ever-changing maze. It’s the only way out–and no one’s ever made it through alive.

Then a girl arrives. The first girl ever. And the message she delivers is terrifying.

I have generally been a big fan of the YA dystopian society genre.  Series like The Hunger Games and Divergent really opened my reading horizons to include just about any YA books that look like they might exist in a dystopian setting.  For some reason though, I had a really hard time getting into The Maze Runner.  I probably wouldn’t have finished it, except that several people in an online book group recommended sticking it out.  Kind of against my better judgement, I kept reading and just prayed that the story would pick up and I wouldn’t feel like I’d wasted a couple hours of rare free time.  They were right.  The story did pick up.  It just took me a while to get into the writing style, on top of the fact that it seemed like the story was just free-floating down a river for ages.  You knew the river was supposed to end in a waterfall, but there was no way of knowing when the calm, steady flow of water was about to disappear off a precipice.

I did learn something from this book.  Namely, I despise made-up profanity almost as much as I despise normal profanity in writing.  I understand that Dashner was probably making some kind of point, either about how ridiculous it is that we assign different levels of good/evil to completely arbitrary words, or possibly insinuating that people will just always find a way to curse, whether they remember the s-word or the f-word, or not.  Either way, my skin crawled each time I read one of those words.

All things considered, I’m glad I read it.  I also read the second book, and have the third book out from the library right now, so stay tuned for my reviews of The Scorch Trials and The Death Cure.

My rating: 3 out of 5 stars