While it failed to build emotional connections between this reader and its characters, The Maze Runner is an entertaining, quick read which is fine for whiling away a few hours.
When the doors of the lift crank open, the only thing Thomas can remember is his first name. But he’s not alone. He’s surrounded by boys who welcome him to the Glade, an encampment at the centre of a bizarre and terrible maze.
Like Thomas, the Gladers don’t know who or how they came to be there, or what’s happened to the world outside. All they know is that every morning when the walls slide back, they will risk everything to find out.
My take:
The Maze Runner is a well-written page turner. It was sufficiently mysterious to keep me reading, but not so mysterious that I wanted to throw it against the wall for being infuriating.
I tried not to think about The Hunger Games while reading this book. But it’s difficult. The similarities are there: after all, it’s about a group of children who have been thrown to the wolves and have to fight for their lives. And The Maze Runner suffers from the comparison. While I will one day get round to reading the other two installments in the trilogy, I’m in no great hurry to do so. And that’s because I still don’t care enough about any of the characters. It’s not surprising really. None of them can remember who they are, so we don’t learn enough about them to form an emotional bond. This book is missing a Katniss Everdeen.
My other take away? The Maze Runner made me long to re-read Lord of the Flies, which I think was Dashner’s source of inspiration for at least a couple of his characters (Piggy! Read it and try to disagree with me!).
I’ll be interested to hear what you think. Can anyone tell me if the other 2 installments are worth it? Do we find out more about the characters and start to get more attached to them? Please let me know! 🙂
I love the Maze Runner series so much! I flew through all of the books!
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Good! Right, I’ll definitely stick with it in that case 🙂
I get the feeling there was a lot of “foundation laying” in book one and things could really take off in book two…
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I read The Maze Runner last year and I remember not being completely convinced by it. The characters, prose… Something was just missing. I have a copy of both sequels though so I will probably read them at some point.
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I agree. I couldn’t put my finger on what was missing exactly, but I think it was a lack of a central character you could really care about. I’m hoping the sequels will allow the characters to grow because the set up is good.
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Same here! The blurb for the sequel sounds promising so hopefully things will improve.
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Great review! I agree about it getting hard to attach to characters, but (SPOILER ALERT) I was sad when Teresa died in The Death Cure.
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Thanks! And yes! about Teresa. That was one of my problems. They killed her off in about 2 paragraphs and then just left!! I know they all would have died if they hadn’t, but I just felt she had been so important previously it was such a shame to do away with her so quickly 😦
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