Review - The Maze Runner by James Dashner

Genre: dystopian, young adult, science fiction, teen
Pages: 374
Rating: 3/5
Goodreads

Summary 
When the doors of the lift crank open, the only thing Thomas remembers is his first name. But he's not alone. He's surrounded by boys who welcome him to the Glade - a walled encampment at the centre of a bizarre and terrible stone maze. Like Thomas, the Gladers don't know why or how they came to be there - or what's happened to the world outside.

My thoughts

After seeing the trailer for the movie of The Maze Runner I got excited to read the book. However, it took me a really long time to get into this book and even at the end I felt a little bit like I had to push myself to continue reading. The concept itself is really interesting, a bunch of teenagers trapped in a maze and no one has any memory of who they are or why they are there. My main problem with this book was that I didn’t really feel anything while reading, only annoyance from time to time. I just felt indifferent towards the book.

I had a really hard time connecting to the main character Thomas. I didn't think he was very likeable; he had a high opinion of himself and he was constantly telling everyone in the maze how they should behave eventhough he had been there for only a few days himself. Thomas and one other character have sort of a psychic ability which makes them able to comunicate with each other even though they are far apart. I felt like it was a bit unnecessary because it did not add anything to the book. It was only used for communicating things like 'Hey where are you? We need to talk. Do you want to come over?'
The other characters did not seem to have distinguishable character traits and only seemed able to be either angry or supportive, often switching back and forth between the two in only a couple of minutes. I thought it was a little strange how all the kids in the maze expected Thomas to know everything pretty much from the moment het arrives, eventhough they all lost their memory too and when they first arrived they also didn't have a clue as to what was going on. They were not willing to tell Thomas anything, for no apparent reason whatsoever.

The book felt really descriptive to me and the story unfortunately didn’t really seem to come to life. There was a lot of telling instead of showing and the writing often seemed a little inconsistent. For example at some point Thomas mentions something along the lines of 'Somehow everything always seemed to lead back to the girl'. For one she had only been there less than a week so the term 'always' was hardly applicable and secondly; Thomas had hardly ever thought about the girl before and there hadn't been anything else that lead to the girl. This is maybe not a major issue, but there were lots of these kind of sentences that pulled me out of the story over and over again.

I was going to give this book only two stars, because I thought the concept was pretty good, but apart from that it was a a letdown. That was until I read the last two chapters and (especially) the epilogue which were really surprising. I didn't intend on continuing the series, but now I am a little curious after all, hopefully the series gets better in the next books!