Review: The Death Cure

The Death Cure (Maze Runner, book three)
By James Dashner
Published 2011 by Delacorte Books for Young Readers

WARNING: There will likely be spoilers ahead. Read my reviews of books one and two first.

Thomas and his friends have, against all odds, survived the Maze and the Scorch. They've made it to WICKED. Will they find the answers they're looking for?

If you read my reviews of the first two books in the series, you can see that they're not exactly glowing. I'm afraid this will be more of the same.

As I've mentioned a time or two before, I'm pretty far behind on writing my reviews. I'm still struggling with figuring out how to stay on top of this, but, in the meantime, I've got a backlog built up. This means that, frequently, I'm reviewing the books quite some time after finishing reading them. This can sometimes be a good thing - with more time to think about the book, my thoughts tend to gel better, and the distance can give me some perspective on the book that I might not have had if I reviewed it straightaway. But, of course, this can also obviously be a bad thing, as is the case here: when a book was so forgettable and not my cup of tea that I can barely remember it enough to review it.

If you recall, my fiance was pretty much the driving force behind my reading the rest of this series in any sort of timely manner. He liked the books, but I think mostly he wanted to get to the answers. As I checked the books out for him, I read them myself, as long as I could squeeze them into one checkout period. I read books two and three a couple months apart and I still haven't read the prequel (which my fiance says he liked best of them all).

As I said, I found this book pretty forgettable. I think what I remember most are my emotions while reading. For the majority of the read, I was aggravated - aggravated at the characters for the ways in which they were acting (which was frequently inconsistent with how they'd acted previously) and aggravated at Dashner for dragging out the story and not providing the answers I'd hoped for. Now, it seems as if one MUST read the prequel in order to get any sort of closure with the series, a frustrating turn of events for me. If you're giving me a trilogy, I expect a trilogy, and I expect some answers by the time we're done. I can definitely see why some people gave up on this series partway through - it just doesn't live up to expectations. However, I know this series also has its fans and I can see their side as well - the action is pretty relentless, so if that's the kind of read you're looking for, you probably won't be disappointed by these. Personally, though, I don't think I'll be giving Dashner any more chances.