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proteinscollide 's review for:
The Maze Runner
by James Dashner
This whole series is awful, really really awful. It's obvious this is cashing in on the post-apocalyptic dystopian YA genre, but even then, it's so CLEARLY recycled The Hunger Ender's Games (basically...spoilers!). Also, I'm not sure I've read anything so poorly written in quite some time, underwritten in so utilitarian a way it comes across as very leaden and clunky.
Apart from the staleness of the ideas and the poor writing, the other giant problem is the incoherent mess of plotting and characterisation. So the premise is that our hero Thomas, whose mind has been wiped clean, has been dropped into a compound of teen guys who are trying to solve a killer maze on their doorsteps. The first eleventy chapters (they're all about 5 pages long) of the first book are incredibly boring because it's endless variations of Thomas asking a million questions: "Why aren't you guys freaking out? What's this? What's that?". In answer, every other character, who supposedly know stuff because they've been in this situation for 2 years, says, "We'll tell you...but we refuse to do it now, for really dumb reasons that this author has obviously put in to try to prolong the anvilicious nature of the answer." And when they don't know stuff, none of them seem to CARE, apart from special snowflake Thomas of course. No one has any kind of characterisation apart from the very surface of their looks, and a minute degree of how cranky they are and how put out they are by Thomas. That's it.
Don't even talk to me about Teresa, the main female character of the series.
Apart from the staleness of the ideas and the poor writing, the other giant problem is the incoherent mess of plotting and characterisation. So the premise is that our hero Thomas, whose mind has been wiped clean, has been dropped into a compound of teen guys who are trying to solve a killer maze on their doorsteps. The first eleventy chapters (they're all about 5 pages long) of the first book are incredibly boring because it's endless variations of Thomas asking a million questions: "Why aren't you guys freaking out? What's this? What's that?". In answer, every other character, who supposedly know stuff because they've been in this situation for 2 years, says, "We'll tell you...but we refuse to do it now, for really dumb reasons that this author has obviously put in to try to prolong the anvilicious nature of the answer." And when they don't know stuff, none of them seem to CARE, apart from special snowflake Thomas of course. No one has any kind of characterisation apart from the very surface of their looks, and a minute degree of how cranky they are and how put out they are by Thomas. That's it.
Don't even talk to me about Teresa, the main female character of the series.