Book Review: The Maze Runner by James Dashner

The Maze Runner by James Dashner
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Paperback Release Date: August 24, 2010
My rating: 2.5 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

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.

Nice to meet ya, shank. Welcome to the Glade.

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.

Everything is going to change.

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

Remember. Survive. Run.

The Maze Runner is a young-adult dystopian trilogy. Thomas wakes up and discovers he’s in the Glade, an area where young boys are confined. None of them know how they got there and have no memories of their lives before the Glade. Outside of the walls of the Glade is a maze that opens to the Glade during the day. The boys who are Runners run in the maze day after day, hoping to find a way out.

I read the Maze Runner because my nine and eleven year old boys really liked it. They wanted me to read it so we could talk about it. It was so hard to get through! The character development is almost non-existent. I kept getting a lot of the boys mixed up and would have to keep flipping back to remember who they were. Thomas is supposed to be special and smarter than the rest of the boys but it wasn’t clear why everyone thought that because of the sparse character development.

And the language! To avoid using curse words (I’m assuming), Dashner has invented substitutes that the boys use. “Shuck”, “slinthead” and “shank” are some examples of the words the boys use. And they use them all.the.time. It became grating after a while.

The writing was simplistic. It was written more like a middle-grade book, which may explain why my fourth and fifth grade boys enjoyed it. I couldn’t get into it, mostly because I didn’t care what happened to the characters – they were strangers to me. I’ve read so many good YA dystopian novels and there are many more out there that I still want to read that I can’t afford to read any that are just okay. ’m not invested in this trilogy and I won’t read the rest of it unless my boys beg me to.