The Maze Runner by James Dashner

In looking for the above picture for the blog, I ran across a film article that states that the director of the first Twilight movie, Catherine Hardwicke, will direct the film version of The Maze Runner! This is fantastic news, as many Twilight fans will tell you that there's just a great feel and indescribable addictiveness to that first Twilight that the others, while very good movies also, did not have. The other really great thing is that The Maze Runner is a wonderful young adult novel that will make a very exciting movie.

The Maze Runner is mostly the story of a boy named Thomas who arrives in some kind of mysterious elevator called "the box" and is dropped into a place called "The Glade." Thomas, like all the other boys who have been brought to the Glade in the past two years, cannot remember anything but his first name. But Thomas is a bit special, because he does have a feeling that he knows some of the boys and the single girl who shows up. He also has an strong, inner calling to become one of the maze runners, who daily go out to find a solution or way out of the huge stone maze that surrounds the Glade. The Maze walls move around at night, and lurking around every corner are bulbous, monster-creatures they call a "Grievers" who have horrible, half animal, half machine appendages to kill anything that come near them.  

The boys in the Glade also talk a bit differently, and this, to me was the only real weakness in the book. We are introduced to the idea that the boys have formed their own "slang" and dialect, but really all it is is a way for Rashner to include a lot of swearing and cussing without actually saying all those words that parents would object to. I call it "pseudo-swearing," and while I appreciate the idea of eliminating bad language in young adult books, it was used so much in The Maze Runner that it became distracting and felt unnecessary.

However, all the wonderful details about The Glade and the Maze make for an exciting book that really is about many ideas that are so important for people to develop for the survival of a community and a world:  the power of hope, the strength of the individual, and the even greater strength of working together to solve problems and having the courage to attack them at any cost. All-in-all what you get here is an exciting, easy-to-read novel that will appeal to a wide range of young people. Strong male and female characters abound, exciting action is throughout, and those messages about how we can train ourselves to overcome anything make for a fun read. For those of you who loved The Hunger Games, this book is for you! And luckily, there is also a sequel that I'm putting on my reading list called The Scorch Trials.