The Maze Runner

[Jocelyn]

The Maze Runner
Have you ever woken up not knowing where you are? Who you are? Where you came from? All you know is your first name. Something’s are familiar but you don’t know why.
In the book “The Maze Runner,” James Dashner creates a world familiar to our own but in a futuristic way, a future that seems possible but hasn’t happened yet. He always keeps you wondering. You need to figure out what is going on and why this happening to these teens.
Dashner throws you into a world where only boys between the ages of twelve and nineteen survive. The only way to get there is through a big metal box that brings up but will not bring anyone or anything back down. Once a week it brings supplies, and every thirty days a new boy arrives in the box. This alternate world is called the Glade.
The Glade is a huge rectangular prism with no top, only the sky. On each wall there is a set of doors, solid rock doors. They open in the morning and close at night. These doors lead into the Maze. Every time the doors close the Maze changes. There is only eight people allowed in the Maze during the day and they are called Runners. No one is allowed in the Maze at night, no one knows what goes on during the night. These Runners run through the Maze every day looking for changes to try and find a way out of this weird place.
The Gladers have their own language, which can be somewhat confusing but draws you in even more to this promising world. Its landscape is made more intriguing with its very strange insects like Beetle Blades, or menacing Grievers.
Thomas, the protagonist, arrives on the regular thirty day interval but the day after a girl arrives. There has never been a girl in the Glade, but the girl is in a coma. When the box came up to the Glade with her in it she had a note in her hands, and the note said “She’s the last one. Ever.” This throws the Gladers world into chaos. First Minho, The Runners Keeper, finds a dead griever in the Maze and doesn’t know how or why it got killed, so Minho and Alby go to check it out. Alby got pricked by the Griever and the duo ran back to the Glade and weren’t going to make it before the doors shut for the night so Thomas had to be the hero and break the Gladers number one rule and go into the Maze. No one has ever survived a night in the Maze, but Thomas, Minho and Alby did. Ironically, this is just the beginning of a downward spiral.
This spiral makes these teens believe in themselves, trust their fellow Gladers and force them to find a way out of this Maze. They perserver through everything and anything you can think of; they face things you could never imagine going through.
I would recommend this book to all ages. It has a genre of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It is defiantly a page turner, and I highly enjoyed this book. It was so hard to put down.

Jocelyn