K-SCORE: 24
Author: James Dashner
Spoiler Level: Moderate
“I basically wanted to know: what was above the maze? what was below the maze? how was it built? why? Only the last question was even attempted.”
After two hundred pages of The Maze Runner I grew tired of making excuses for the novel. Initially I kind of liked the premise though I tire of dystopias. At no point did I find the writing style at all acceptable. It is packed with horrible descriptions, dry characters, inauthentic dialogue, and statements about how confused and angry Thomas, the protagonist, is about everything going on.
The story involves a bunch of kids living in a giant maze, running from land-dwelling vaguely robotic creatures called Grievers. Though it was clear to me from the beginning that the kids are test subjects like rats in an experiment, this is treated as a revelation at the end. Twists are little more than finding out who lived and who died. Thomas is supposedly smart and talented, though only ever successfully advances the plot by sheer luck, or by remembering at convenient times pieces of his life before the maze, before his memories had been stolen from him. There’s a girl too, sent to the maze right after Thomas who is important because Dashner says so, and a handful of kids that have been living in the maze for two years, waiting, apparently for Thomas and Teresa to come, “trigger the ending.” All answers to any questions are either nonexistent or unsatisfying and the very end has a shameless deus ex machina. I’m not sure, if you’re going YA, that you should have the central idea of your project be - look, kids can get stuck in an easily climbed maze because kids… are stupid.
I basically wanted to know: what was above the maze? what was below the maze? how was it built? why? Only the last question was even attempted.
But you know… reading bad YA makes me feel better about my own writing. Enough George R.R. Martin will make me feel like a talentless moron who couldn’t tell a knock knock joke let alone a story, so that I know my work is at least better than this poorly-conceived shit is refreshing.