Book Review: The Maze Runner by James Dashner

I read this book A) because I saw a movie trailer and was mildly curious, B) because the guy who wrote it, James Dashner, is LDS, and C) because people keep telling me how good it is.

But... I'll warn you now. I'm gonna tear this thing to shreds.

Ultimately, I give it 2.5 stars out of 5. I know SO MANY people like it (it's got a movie coming out, after all), but I really wasn't very impressed. It was decent enough for me to read the whole thing, and I'll read the sequel just to see what happens, but it wasn't anywhere near my favorite.

As I read, I kept notes about what I thought, so here they are in order. Read at your own risk. If you want to read this book, I'm going to spoil a lot of things. In fact, I'll tell you now, DON'T keep reading if you want to read this book and enjoy it first. But if you HAVE read it, please read on and let me know what you thought of it. If you agree with me on some of these points, yay! If you don't, tell me what you liked about it so I can consider the positive points and maybe give this book a second chance.

Update: After sleeping on it, I felt really bad about my tone, so I went back and tried to make this a more constructive criticism. Still don't read ahead if you haven't read the book yet, but if you already read my mean comments before, I'm sorry. Here are some relatively nicer ones. :)

#1. Okay, first of all, the swear words. My friends were telling me about the infamous swear words before I even picked up the book, and they were right. They're...interesting.

I mean, the main character gets to the maze, and other characters have to explain to him, "We use 'klunk' to refer to poop!" (That's almost a word-for-word quote from the book.) Your characters shouldn't have to be told what your swear words mean. They shouldn't just be nonsense words replacing real swears.

Swear words should be taboo for a reason. That's what makes them swear words. Plus they should actually reflect on the culture or surroundings, not just be pulled from thin air and incorporated into a language for absolutely no reason. As a linguist, I kept wondering, "Why do they say shuck? Is shucking corn the worst job in the Glade or something?"

Dashner's words seem to be made up on the fly just to substitute fake words for real-world strong language which would have made this a banned book if he'd included it. It's so transparent that he might as well have left the real swears in. I knew exactly what he was implying, so in my mind, I heard sh-- when he said "klunk," and f--- for "shuck" (I mean, THAT one was so obvious it was laughable.)

That was probably one of the worst offenses, for me. The rest of my critique might be kind of petty. I've studied linguistics, and I've read great books that include realistic fake swear words. Like in Sanderson's "Way of Kings," the characters use "storm" as a swear word because the storms in that world are literally the most chaotic, destructive, terrible thing they know. It makes sense that it would be a strong word with emotional ties in that setting. But when Dashner's characters swear, there's absolutely no connection between the words and the characters' lives. No one goes, "*Gasp!* Watch your mouth!"

#2. The memory loss. I liked how he described the memory loss, at first. Basically, Thomas can remember the names of things, and he can identify smells, sounds, tastes, etc, but he can't remember how he knows those things. He doesn't remember his past at all, just has a bunch of random knowledge in his head. That's fine.

But Dashner tells us this four times in the first sixty pages. FOUR. TIMES. I think we get it, Dashner. Thomas is frustrated. He knows things but can't remember how. You don't have to keep using metaphors and analogies to explain it to us when you already told us. We get it. Poor Thomas. Now move on. You don't have to keep reminding us that he doesn't remember anything. It's pretty obvious from the get-go.

#3. The plot development was just...cheap, if I have to give it a word. When Thomas arrives in the Glade, the other kids could have easily explained everything to him from the beginning, but they don't. They act all reluctant to tell him anything for no logical reason, just because it makes it easier for Dashner to keep the reader in the dark and ensure that we read the whole book from beginning to end.

It's especially obvious when a new character shows up and practically begs to tell Thomas things, but he runs away and doesn't tell the others...because he finds her weird. That's right--he's been thrown into a freaky maze, has no memory, has been dying for answers, knows that his life probably depends on answers, but when someone shows up with info, he gets creeped out and in one rash move throws away his only chance to hear the whole truth.

Yeah. Our hero, everyone.

#4. The characters were so inconsistent that I still didn't feel connected to them even 100 pages in. And at the end of the book, I'm still not very attached to them. Why is Chuck Thomas's friend? I must've missed their defining character moments, because to me their friendship seems forced.

Why is Thomas our hero? Because he's special? His character is so bland that I don't feel for him at all. Yeah, his memory is wiped, but he could still have some character that would make him admirable. Rushing into things without thinking first didn't feel like a heroic character trait to me. It seemed like idiocy. Yay, he saved people, but lots of other characters made rash decisions, too. Any one of them could've been made the hero of the story instead and I wouldn't have noticed a difference in the book's quality. I honestly didn't care what happened to Thomas in the end.

One thing I can't stand about most YA characters is that they're inexplicably better at everything than the other characters. They should have to work their butts off to get to where they are, and in that process learn some cool skill, not just have it automatically for no other reason than to be the "best" character in the book. People love characters who are flawed and have vulnerabilities, not those who are "just the greatest!!!" at whatever they do. In this book, Thomas is revered for being the first kid in two years to come up with a "wait-and-dive" tactic for fighting Grievers.

Really? NO ONE ELSE tried that? Over the course of two years? All those times they were charged by Grievers, not a single person thought to wait until the last second, then dive out of the way? Seriously??

Apparently not, because when Thomas does it on his first night in the maze, everyone's like, "Wow, you're a blooming genius!" (or should I have said "shucking genius"? No...it still feels wrong to me.) "How did you do that?" "You're so special!" "Be our leader!"

Give. Me. A break.

The boys in the story are set apart by appearance only. Their personalities aren't very distinct at all. And the bad guy looks like a bad guy. Come on. At least make it interesting and make him drop-dead handsome, just to shake things up a little. Giving him greasy black hair and stinky yellow teeth is so cliche. I hoped against hope that Gally would actually turn out to be a great guy, but nope. He looks and acts mean, so therefore he's the bad guy. Yawn.

Also, why do people always give the dorky sidekick friends dorky sidekick names? Like "Chuck"? There's no law saying you can't name a dorky kid "Leon" or "Nolan" or "Emmett." Are we going with the theory that when you give a kid a dorky name they grow up to be insecure and unpopular?

Oh, and the girl is exceptionally beautiful. Because apparently there's also a law that says that girls in YA fiction have to be incredibly pretty, even though they're 14 and should (in all reality) be in their most awkward stage of life. Teresa has no personality, so it's not like it would've hurt to make her gangly and youthful, rather than stunningly gorgeous with (and I quote) "perfect skin" and "full lips" and beautiful black hair. The story would have been much more interesting to me if she'd been some scrawny girl with frizzy red hair, instead of the VERY obvious love interest.

#5. When Dashner isn't describing how pretty Teresa is, or how confusing it is that Thomas can't remember things (we get it), his descriptions are just weird. "It made Thomas feel like a small rat." "He had a nose like a fat lemon."

...so you didn't just use "mouse" and "orange" ...why...?

Also, the whole maze-at-night scene was told blow by blow, so we know exactly what Thomas did the whole time. Now, either the nights in the maze are only like two hours long (I dunno, maybe they're actually at the North Pole in summertime?), or Dashner underestimated how long nighttime lasts. Literally, they get stuck in the maze, Thomas saves Alby, Thomas fights Grievers (and we get a blow-by-blow, so I know it didn't take him five hours), Thomas runs into Minho (immediately after fighting the Grievers), they run together to the Cliff (maybe twenty minutes spent here), they beat the Grievers (in like five minutes), and then it's dawn.

What kind of freaky short nighttime is that? I guess I'll just suspend disbelief and say they're actually in Alaska in summertime.

#6. The resolution of the story wasn't satisfying enough at all because everything was so short. Most of the boys in the maze had been there for quite a long time, but our first-person narrator is only there a week before he solves the maze.

One week. Now, don't you think it would have been much more interesting to hear this story from one of the boys who had been fighting for years to get out of there? One who was frustrated and depressed and driven by failure to save everyone and get them out of there? Wouldn't the ending have been much more satisfying? Wouldn't we actually care?

And Chuck's death was so predictable. SO. PREDICTABLE. As soon as Thomas promised him (and only him) that he'd get him home safely, I knew Chuck was done for. That trope of "I failed to keep my promise!! Woe is me!!!" is so overdone. Thomas should have actually cared about multiple people and promised them all he'd save them, and then maybe it would've come as a surprise. Maybe. Instead, Thomas literally sees dozens of kids killed, and...we get nothing. I had absolutely no sympathy for those people because they were just bodies with blank faces thrown into the story to fill space. The nameless extras, if you will. Thomas didn't seem to feel bad about it, either. I vaguely remember him telling us that he was sad, but he sure didn't show it.

Conclusion: So I have two possible theories for why this book was so lame to me. A) Maybe Dashner just isn't a good writer. I don't know. I haven't read anything else of his. Or B) maybe Dashner thinks that, because he's writing to young adults, he has to dumb down the plot.

Because subtlety and real conflicts are too difficult for 12- to 16-year-olds to understand. Not according to J.K. Rowling, but whatever. Anything to add to the YA dystopian society hype that's going around.

The movie looks like they're trying to make this story much more interesting than it actually is. The maze scenes in the trailer alone were more action packed than anything that happens in the book (which is good, because the maze was a huge letdown. Not nearly interesting enough). I'm slightly interested in seeing the movie, just to see if they make it better than the book. But if it is true to Dashner's story, then I don't care to see it. I'm actually surprised anyone decided it would be a good story to turn into a movie. This first book at least has no conflict, and it's so generic. It's got the whole "thrown into an arena with no escape" concept from the Hunger Games, mixed with the "group of special kids all collected together to save the world" trope from Michael Vey.

Maybe the trilogy as a whole will surprise me and turn out to be good. I mean, Dashner published a whole trilogy and a companion novel, so I'll give the second book a chance, anyway. But I just wasn't impressed with this book. As if you couldn't tell from my ranting. I only give it 2.5 stars because I can see why it would be entertaining for kids, and I am sufficiently curious to see the end to the puzzle (so...kudos for that, I guess, Dashner), but as an ELang major who's studied writing and has seen this kind of story a thousand times, it does nothing for me.

I dunno. Maybe I'm just tired of Young Adult fiction in general.

I don't want to tell you not to read it, and I'm sorry I slammed it so hard if you liked it, but this post is mostly for my own benefit. Just to get my thoughts down on paper.

Enjoy or enjoy not. Doesn't really matter to me. :)