Book Review: The Maze Runner

Having recently finished the Divergent series by Veronica Roth, my next YA series selection was kind of tricky; over the years my kids have read an awful lot of these series and so I have a pretty big backlog of "You gotta read this Dad" titles.

But an upcoming movie and an intriguing premise led me to a pretty easy selection, The Maze Runner, by James Dashner.

The book (the first of four) follows a young man named Thomas who awakens in an elevator lifting him into a wooded glade, populated by about 50 young men and surrounded by massive walls.

Each day four doors open in the walls and allow access to the Maze, a setting intriguing enough to read the book alone, but what Dashner has done here is to introduce a lot of great characters and show us the society they have created in this strange new world.

I could count exactly one time in the entire novel in which I disagreed with an action taken by a character - I'm not saying I liked every choice everyone made, just that they all seemed to follow the logical conclusions given the character and the situation.  For YA fiction, this is a pretty great score, as I've had some less than stellar responses from other series I've read over the last few years.

I haven't yet read the other three books in the series, but if they follow the speed and concepts in the first novel, I'm pretty sure I will have an entertaining few months ahead of me.

Well worth checking out.