Book Review: The Maze Runner

So I kind of got a bit bored of reading A Storm of Swords and started reading The Maze Runner... Oops? Anyway, after 12 days of reading the book, I have finished it and have a little review for you guys.

1. The chapter lengths are perfect - going from reading A Storm of Swords with epically long chapters to reading The Maze Runner with short chapters (each only 5-10 pages long), I felt like I was in heaven. Some chapters were a little too short, but none felt too long, which I loved.
2. The characters were fairly good - I had quite a bit of sympathy for most of the characters, none were particularly easy to dislike though I did feel like three of the supporting characters (Minho, Newt and Alby) all kind of merged into one at some parts of the book for me. I don’t know if it is because I read it so fast so didn’t have time to separate them in my mind, but they all seemed very similar.
3. It is hard to believe their ages - so this book is based on teenage boys, aged around 14-18. I understand that being in such a mature environment will cause people to grow up at a young age, I just found it tough to picture the characters as being 16.
4. I’m not a great fan of Thomas - I quite liked Thomas, the main character, for the majority of the book. However, as it got towards the end, I felt like he was a massive martyr and given how short of a time he was actually in the maze for, I felt like he changed too much, which made it less believable for me.
5. It isn’t a very compelling read - I stopped reading this book for a while because I had quite a busy few days. It would have been quite tricky for me to have been able to have fit reading into that schedule however I feel like part of the reason why I couldn’t is because I didn’t feel compelled to. While I did want to find out what was going on and what the ultimate purpose/explanation of the Maze was, the book itself wasn’t very compelling.
6. The writing is quite simplistic - there were a couple of times throughout the book where I thought “I could have written that”, or “I have written better than that and I’m not published”. I’m not saying the writing is bad, but I just found it quite simplistic, almost as though I was reading a first draft of the book that was about to go through the ringer with an editor.
7. It is an easy book to read - I think the simplistic writing helped a little in this case, as it wasn’t too tough for me to follow the storyline or the description, so the book was very easy to read.
8. I was waiting for new plot depth - for almost the entire length of the book, I was waiting for the plot to deepen. For me, it just didn’t get to the depths that I would have liked it to have reached. I felt like there was set-up, and more set-up, and more set-up, and then it was the big finale and the end. Personally, there wasn’t a great climax there and I was waiting for a bigger plot arc to develop.
9. I got quite frustrated in the beginning - so I stopped reading this book for a few days around the 25% mark. Stopping reading and realising I was a quarter of the way through the book really made me realise that I didn’t know a lot about what was going on in the book. The fact that it was an easy read meant I didn’t notice this until I stopped to look at it, but I don’t like the fact that we (the reader) were learning about the Maze alongside Thomas, or the fact that no one would just sit and tell Thomas what was happening during the first few days - I felt like that made it a bit less realistic as, in my mind, people wouldn’t be so hesitant to share what was going on.
10. I am interested to see where it goes from here - the ending is quite peculiar and while I am interested to see what happens to the characters, I’m not in any rush to pick up the next book, which I think is a shame as I really wanted to love these books.

Overall, I found the books fairly entertaining but not amazingly written. I think the books are more suited to a tween audience, as opposed to a teen/young adult audience and maybe if I had read this book as a 13-year-old, I would have loved it. Who knows?

Entertainment: 7/10
Predictability: 4/10
Density/weight of story: 3/10
Quality of writing: 4/10
Inspires reader: 3/10
Characters: 6/10
Overall rating: 6/10

What book do you think I should read next?

- Taisie ♥ | Bloglovin ♥ Twitter ♥ Tumblr ♥ Pinterest ♥ Instagram