I've been trying to move away from teen/young adult fiction and focus on more university level books. However, everytime i go in my local bookstore it's like there's a magnet in the cover of this book so I finally caved and bought it. The Maze Runner is Dashner's 2009 dystopia, which has now been made into a major motion picture. There was no doubt it would be an amazing book with 11 awards and 9 other nominations for book awards so I was buzzing to finally start it, and I was in no way let down.
This book can be seen as a beautiful blend of Divergent and The Hunger Games (other great examples of teen dystopias). From the moment Thomas wakes up with no memory of anything but his name inside the Glade surrounded by a load of complete strangers it's impossible to not be hooked. Dashner is the master of all cliff hangers with almost every chapter having one, making it impossible to put it down and wait for the next chapter. As a book lover who always reads to the end of the chapter this made it impossible to stop reading, and is the reason the first night I picked it up I didn't sleep. (Dashner, I blame you for my need to nap in school).
Granted the parallels between The Hunger Games, Divergent and The Maze Runner are well defined, but personally that just tells me that between them Collins, Roth and Dashner have established the perfect recipe for dystopias. The post-apocolyptic setting, mixed with a young hero/heroine fighting an authoritarian regime and a battle for life and death as a blend clearly work - so i say hey, why change it? But much in contrast to Roth and Collins, who gently guide us into the action and brutality, Dashner throws us right in at the deep end. With no clue of who's controlling the 'trial' and why it's been set up all we know is these boys are in the Glade and they either die there or conquer the maze.
I feel Dashner may have slightly evil tendencies because as if a gigantic maze isn't tough enough, the walls move every night creating new paths. Discovering these paths is left down to "the Runners" a position Thomas is eager to be promoted to, for good reason. With Thomas's help the Gladers are closer than ever to escaping the maze. In contrast to The Hunger Games, the boys are not being pitted against each other, it seems more like the boys are being tested to see if they are able to survive as a group, however Dashner leaves the real intent of the trial a mystery!
Supporting himself as King of the Cliff Hanger, Dashner's astounding double ending left me confused for days and unable to start another book. I have been guilty in past years of ignoring prologues and epilogues because they've never felt as thrilling as the rest of the novel, and honestly with The Maze Runner ignoring the epilogue may have been in the best interest of my own sanity. Of course this is all in jest, Dashner's use of the epilogue is impeccable and I've never read an epilogue like it (at least in the few I've actually bothered to read, oops). "The subjects will be allowed one full night's sleep before Stage 2 implementation", my first response was something along the lines of 'what? There's a stage 2? As though surviving for yourself for 2 years as a teenager isn't hard enough!' But credit where it's due, if it hadn't been for this epilogue, as much as I enjoyed the novel, I probably wouldn't have been so eager to read the sequel.
Dashner has a fantastical skill with words (and cliff hangers, if you hadn't noticed) making The Maze Runner an impossible book to put down. Normally I would refrain from discussing film adaptations but I feel like to a degree the movie actually did Dashner's work justice, obviously as a book addict it can never beat the paper version, but all the same The Maze Runner is a brilliant read and a fantastic film. It's a 9.5/10 for you Mr Dashner!
