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dingosenior79 's review for:
The Maze Runner
by James Dashner
Read at Liam’s request, as he blitzes through YA dystopian fiction. He liked this series more than Hunger Games, although that had more to do w the end of the HG books than the first volume.
I’d say I found this a reasonably compelling yarn—the decisions to mind-wipe the characters and remove almost all knowledge of the state of the world outside the Maze make it a little harder to gauge the stakes of events here, but it does keep the reader focused on the action at hand. It is sometimes trying how cagey the older Gladers are w orientation and background info: they try awfully hard to resist revealing that they really don’t know anything. This does seem more reasonable in light of their desire to reduce typical anxiety of new arrivals by presenting a confident appearance of authority. The combination of mind wiping and cagey veterans results in the need for a whopper of a exposition dump late in the novel that results from a plan that seems like it would’ve come up before.
The generally successful society the Gladers create seems miraculous and a little chilling—there’s no pig’s head, no conch, and no sucks to your asthmar, so the boys have quelled the most troublesome demons, but they’ve done so with rigorous devotion to order and a willingness to ostracize and even execute non-conformists.
Lastly, aside from knowing it’ll provide a good(ish?) tagline, what possible reason could an organization have for concocting a name that becomes the acronym WICKED. First of all, the I is for In, and that’s almost cheating. Second, did everyone who survived just do so w a very bleak sense of humor, or was it just that the apocalypse was very hard on marketing people so no one is left that understands branding. “WICKED is good” is the same kind of bonkers, manifesting incorrect, reality-shredding insanity that you get from Roadhouse’s Dalton (Patrick Swayze as the second-best bouncer in America) in his epic rejoinder, “Pain don’t hurt.” Yeah, thinking you’re wrong about this one.
I’d say I found this a reasonably compelling yarn—the decisions to mind-wipe the characters and remove almost all knowledge of the state of the world outside the Maze make it a little harder to gauge the stakes of events here, but it does keep the reader focused on the action at hand. It is sometimes trying how cagey the older Gladers are w orientation and background info: they try awfully hard to resist revealing that they really don’t know anything. This does seem more reasonable in light of their desire to reduce typical anxiety of new arrivals by presenting a confident appearance of authority. The combination of mind wiping and cagey veterans results in the need for a whopper of a exposition dump late in the novel that results from a plan that seems like it would’ve come up before.
The generally successful society the Gladers create seems miraculous and a little chilling—there’s no pig’s head, no conch, and no sucks to your asthmar, so the boys have quelled the most troublesome demons, but they’ve done so with rigorous devotion to order and a willingness to ostracize and even execute non-conformists.
Lastly, aside from knowing it’ll provide a good(ish?) tagline, what possible reason could an organization have for concocting a name that becomes the acronym WICKED. First of all, the I is for In, and that’s almost cheating. Second, did everyone who survived just do so w a very bleak sense of humor, or was it just that the apocalypse was very hard on marketing people so no one is left that understands branding. “WICKED is good” is the same kind of bonkers, manifesting incorrect, reality-shredding insanity that you get from Roadhouse’s Dalton (Patrick Swayze as the second-best bouncer in America) in his epic rejoinder, “Pain don’t hurt.” Yeah, thinking you’re wrong about this one.