How I Felt About The Maze Runner Series
So I think my opinions about this series are opinions that are unpopular with fans of the books and with people who hate these books. So here I go! BTW spoilers might happen. Not specific detail spoilers but tone or general how I felt related spoilers. No who died or what exactly happens type!
By the time I reached the end of the first book I was angry at James Dashner. I felt like he wrote 90% of a good book the. Just ended it with a few chapters worth of resolution missing. I wanted answers that I thought either the author didn’t know the answer to or that he didn’t understand how to structure the end of a story. I also thought it was weird that all these smart kids couldn’t figure out some simple problems before Thomas came and figured it all out. I gave it 4 stars because I was annoyed but found the story interesting and fast and thought it had fun cool characters! But I decided to read on.
The Scorch Trials infuriated me. I would fly through portions then force myself to read other parts. And the unanswered question were growing in number. They were growing without any of the older questions being answered satisfactorily (or at all). I would read for 30-70 pages then get angry and put it down for a few hours then go back. I came close many times to stopping reading the book altogether. I still wanted answers. I decided I would read the last book sometime but had no idea when. I gave this book 3 stars because I still thought some things were good and kept going back but it made me mad quite a few times. Eventually I thought I might just watch the movie and never get around to the book, then my friend texted me out of the blue demanding I read this series. I told her I had read the first two but wasn’t a huge fan. Her enthusiasm made me go back and pick up book three.
Before I write about book three I want to address some of the answers I wanted. The biggest question in my mind was “Why will their brain patterns help cure a disease? Your brain (as far as I know) is not what is in charge of if you are immune to something or not?” This was my biggest question. I also wanted to know everything Thomas wanted to know (a sign of a good first person book, wanting what the character wants) but this was behind my frustration of not understanding why they needed brain patterns at all.
Then I began The Death Cure. Full disclosure: I read parts of it from my copy of the book and I listened to parts of it while I was at work, maybe this affected me but I don’t think I would have had this big of an impact. I found this book wonderful. I believe I found this wonderful because about four chapters in I realized my biggest question was not something I was going to get an answer for. This was just a fact of the made up world. Made up world facts don’t have to perfectly align with real world facts! Once I was in this mind set I was 100% with the characters. I got answers to a sizeable chunk of my other questions. Some of them were not spelled out, but I felt that very few things were left unanswered. And of the things that kind of were unanswered most of them were not big or not hard to just apply other answers too and figure out while still totally staying in the canon realm. So I was 100% happy with book three. I gave it 5 stars. My ending enjoyment could be connected to low expectations but by halfway through the book I have pretty high expectations for the end. They were met. I gasped several times due to shock. In the good way.
tl;dr started meh, ended awesome. Perception problems prohibited beginning enjoyment.
