Title: The Maze Runner

Author: James Dashner

Genre: YA Adventure

Length: 386 pages

Read: October 21-30, 2014

Summary: fun but flawed

Frankly, I picked up The Maze Runner because it was made into a “major motion picture” — academic interest (visa via Untimed kicked in). It was a fun enough little adventure, an easy read, but boy… flaws.

First, there are the good things (and there aren’t many):

1. The premise is intriguing. Cool “setup.”
2. The pace is fast.
3. There is a good amount of sci-fi mystery (even if kinda botched at the end). There are a lot of “rules” to the world building, which I like.
4. Because this is a male author, he’s not sentimental.
5. It’s better than Twilight.

Then there is the bad:

1. The writing is lousy. The prose is clunky. Dashner LOVES to repeat words awkwardly, and despite being short, the book is terribly really definitely overwritten.
2. Tell city. Not so much show. Even dialogue is often “told.” For an action book, the actual “action” or combat is barely choreographed. Instead it’s told in a hand-wavy way.
3. Oh, the actual dialogue is often ridiculously stilted. There is the silly (but perhaps clever) way the author has replaced all the swear words with equivalent “slang” like fuck -> shuck.  shit -> clunk.  etc. This way he can have boys swearing left and right and keep his “PG” (MG?) style. The young audience curators can be fussy about profanity.
4. The characters are marginally developed. For example, the main “girl” is in a coma until about 80% and then has barely any personality or dialogue. Nobody is very interesting or different. The characters don’t really act like real people a good bit of the time. They have no complexity.
5. There is no action (and marginal chemistry) between Thomas and Theresa (and, who names a cute girl Theresa? That’s a nun name).
6. The protagonist is too perfect and pretty much great at everything. His POV loves to point out the obvious.
7. The mystery is all mysterious. But major things like “The Maze” aren’t well explored. Then near the end a whole bunch of answers are just dumped in and everything shifts negating the setup. There are a lot of good and interesting elements, but they aren’t well explored.
8. The puzzles are lame.
9. We, the readers, are told how to feel. The emotional situation is there, but the emotion not really warranted.

Reading it, I often felt like rolling my eyes. But I did manage to finish, and toy with the idea of reading the sequel. Probably mostly because the Sci-fi is okay. Considerably better than most dystopian drivel (like this one). I think the author actually read some Sci-fi. And he’s a guy. I’m generalizing, but female authors are usually better at character and male authors at world building. Big generalization. More like a 40/60 kinda thing.

I’m betting the movie is better than the book — which is a rarity.

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[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwwbhhjQ9Xk]