The Maze Runner - James Dashner

The Maze Runner - James Dashner

Pages: 371
Publisher: Chicken House
Release Date: 2nd August 2010

Other Titles in this Series: The Scorch Trials (US 12/10/10), The Death Cure (2011)

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 why 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 - even the Grievers, half-machine, half-animal horrors that hunt the Maze’s walled corridors.

The Maze Runner throws you straight into a world of terror, mystery and complete unknowns.

Without any warning or prelude, we’re thrown straight into the action with Thomas, knowing nothing about him, the world he came from or the world he’s just inexplicably landed in. In exactly the same boat as Thomas. These question didn’t get answered, they just kept on piling up. The mixture of frustration and intrigue that these questions brought to the surface made The Maze Runner a slow burner for me, but I soon became caught up in it and got addicted.

I was fascinated by where Thomas found himself: the Glade. Run completely by teenage boys, it’s not the Lord of the Flies set-up that you’d expect. It’s highly controlled and organised with a job for everyone and everything and held together by rigid rules. The only way that Alby and Newt (the leaders of the Glade) keep all of the Gladers alive. In contrast to this is the Maze. A dangerous place of moving walls, WICKED spies and deadly Grievers: half, slug, half robot creatures that can cause agonising death. There’s also the strange dialect the Gladers developed, introducing words such as ‘klunck’, ‘shuck’ and ‘shank’.

But what I really wanted to know more about is the world that lays beyond the Maze. Alby’s hallucinations had hinted at a barren place riddled with disease. And I desperately wanted to know the how, the why and the when. Although a little was revealed near the end, more mysteries emerged and a highly intriguing epilogue left me with not much more knowledge than when I started the book!

I’m now anxious to read the sequel, The Scorch Trials, and can only hope that it makes it’s way over to the UK pretty sharpish.

For my 2010 100+ Reading Challenge

Sophie