The Maze Runner by James Dashner Book Review

             The Maze Runner begins with a boy named Thomas standing in an elevator going up a shaft. When the elevator reaches the top he is pulled out of it into a large room about the size of four football fields with a house, a garden, woods, and an animal farm in each one of the four corners of the room. Thomas is told by the other boys there that the Glade, what they call the big room, is in the middle of a huge maze which they have been trying to survive and find a way out of. The next day a girl is sent up the shaft to the glade carrying a message that says she is the last person coming up ever and Thomas decides that he would like to help find the way out of the maze by becoming a runner. Then that night Thomas is stuck outside of the walls of the glade and forced to spend the night in the maze after he tries to rescue some other boys who came back to the glade too late in the day. After Thomas and the boys survive the night he is treated with awe by the other boys because there are creatures called "grievers", balls of skin and knives, that come out at night and Thomas saved the other boys with him from them. The boys' need to find a way out begins to become urgent after the sun in the sky of the glade disappears. After the attempts to find a code in the maps of the maze are stepped up they find that the maze spells the words float, catch, bleed, death, stiff, and push and that there is a hole in the sky floating near the cliff edge of the maze that the grievers disappear into. Thomas gets himself stung by the grievers and remembers that if they get into the room that the hole leads to then they can type in the code they found and escape. After finding that out they decide to do so because the doors to the glade no longer shut and the grievers are attacking them during the night. They charge through the maze and battle the grievers to get into the hole where Teresa, the girl who came the day after Thomas arrived, finds the button to shut down the maze.

                Thomas is described by Chuck, a character in the book. "I'd say you're sixteen. and in case you were wondering, five foot nine… brown hair. Oh, and as ugly as fried liver on a stick". Thomas has an urge to help others, demonstrated in the book by his wish to become a runner, even when he knows the dangers and risks, and by when he ran out into the maze to save Minho, a maze runner, and Alby, their leader, when they are about to be trapped outside the glade "Thomas knew he had no choice. He moved. Forward. He squeezed past the connecting rods at the last second and stepped into the maze." Some people would call Thomas's urge to help people self destructive and it seems to increase after he develops a relationship with Teresa. Theresa and Thomas share a telepathic bond, with them being able to share thoughts and carry out verbal conversation in their mind. This, and the fact that even though both have had their memories erased they seem to know each other begins to make them closer than either is with any of the other gladers.

                The theme of this book is that hope survives in the strangest of places. In the text it says that "The maze was never meant to be solved" and even though they know that, they still persist in attempting to find an exit. They would have never even tried for two years to solve the maze by running if they did not have hope that it could be solved by doing that.  I have been swimming for over six years now and at first I was not very good, but I stuck with it because I had hope that I would get better at it. When the boys decide to one, last ditch effort to get out of the maze, they only do that on the hope that the maze will allow them to escape.

                 The Maze Runner plays with some interesting ideas regarding freedom and memory. All of the boys stuck in the maze have had their memories taken away, with no idea of how they got in the maze or even any idea of the details of the world outside the maze. The only way the boys can get their memories back is to be stung by a griever and get what the boys call "the grief serum"- a sort of antivenin that counteracts the griever poison. There is a catch though- going through the process of being stung and recovering is incredibly painful. What was really interesting was that the boys who did get their memories back were not always that happy about remembering. After Ben recovered from the griever sting he went crazy and tried to kill Thomas, and after Alby recovered his memories he became very glum because the world outside the maze is apparently destroyed by a disease called "the flare" and actual solar flares. The book asks the interesting questions like "What would you do for your memories?" and "What would you do if they are not what you expected?".

                I really liked reading The Maze Runner because you think it should be a science fiction novel because of the setting, but it is actually more of a mystery story. I kept reading the book because I wanted to find out why they are in the maze, and if the group would escape. The Maze Runner relies on suspense, not some overarching theme like a science fiction novel would. I really enjoyed reading this book and would heartily recommend it to anyone who asks, but anyone who enjoys a mystery should pick this up as well. The Maze Runner was a fun read.

I got the cover picture from here.

I got the maze picture from here.