Just Finished Reading The Scorch Trials and The Death Cure by James Dashner

The Maze Runner, a dystopian series for young adults by James Dashner, is a trilogy...with two bonus prequel novels.  In the first installment...also titled The Maze Runner, teenage boys find themselves with wiped memories and placed in a mysterious place called The Glades, surrounded by high walls beyond which exists an extensive maze haunted by half flesh/half machine murderous monsters called "grievers".  The boys have to figure out how to get beyond the maze...beyond that they do not know why they are there.  Thomas, the series main protagonist, is the latest one to land there and works with the others...mainly Minho, Newt, Alby...and Teresa, the only girl and who arrived a day after Thomas...to try to solve the puzzle.  That's the first book...I'm not one to give away the story, so since books two and three, The Scorch Trials and The Death Cure, necessarily build upon how that first book ends, I'm a bit limited in describing them after reading them in rapid succession.  I will only say that the danger and suspense remain in this series of attrition and mystery: who will survive to the end, and what kind of ending will it be?

One of the things I liked about this series was how the kids talk to each other, especially the repartee between Thomas and Minho, the tough no-nonsense head maze runner.  Their vocabulary is full of original Glades slang, with words like "klunk", "shuck", and "shank" liberally sprinkled throughout their speech...each with its own special meaning.  There is a special comradery here that I found endearing and memorable...much more than the background mystery of the organization with the acronym WICKED and the dire worldwide situation on the outside.  Yes, it was the characters and their relationships with each other that sold this series for me...and that's not an easy thing for an author to accomplish.  Hats off to James Dashner...

The Maze Runner and The Scorch Trials have already been adapted to movie form, and the film version of The Death Cure is due to come out on January 26.  I'm interested in seeing how well the movies stuck with the books, so I'm looking into getting hold of a DVD of The Maze Runner...hope I'm not disappointed after reading this interesting series...