Poudelivre

And so, after a year of waiting and putting it off, I finally had the last and final piece of The Maze Runner trilogy in my hands. The Death Cure. It was clear from the start that this would be the book where all the answers were given, were every secret was spilled and I was very excited to find out the truth about WICKED, the world and Thomas himself.

Like The Scorch Trials, The Death Cure jumps in right where the previous book ended. Thomas, saved from the Scorch after the final trial but now locked in a room for his own good after hearing that he has the Flare. But when Thomas gets out of the room he finds out that that’s not true, that he is, in fact, immune. But WICKED is still not done with the mapping of their brains, in order to find a blueprint, a cure to the horrible disease, the Flare. They want Thomas and his friends' help, but Thomas has other ideas. He’s done with WICKED and each and every one of their games. He breaks out of WICKED headquarter with a few of his friends and they travel to Denver in order to seek answers and possibly start a new life. But it turns out that everything is not that simple. Denver isn’t just a city. It’s a city with quite a few plot twists in its back pocket.

Like I said, I was very excited to have the final book so that I could finally get all the answers. In the previous two books, every question has been answered with something that makes you ask a new question. But since this was the last book I figured that everything would reveal itself. It turned out that I was wrong about that.

I remember reading The Maze Runner. I liked it, but I didn’t love it, yet, being as curious as I am, I wanted to know more, get the answers. So I kept reading. And now… well, it’s not a waste of time, but there are certainly better books to read, in my opinion. Throughout The Death Cure, I kept waiting on that thing, that spark that would blow up the entire book with a big bang and then everything would reveal itself. But it never came. It was 300 pages of nonstop action, true, but it almost got a bit too much. I found myself wanting to breathe, but behind every door Thomas opened, a monster was always waiting. He could barely take two steps without someone trying to kill him and in the end, that got me exhausted trying to keep up.

The Death Cure, all three books in fact, are fast-paced and I have no problem with that, I don’t. But in this case, it might have been a bit too fast. I found myself thinking, more than once, “This is it?”, because Dashner speed-told practically every event. Thomas faced it, he was scared, he punched some guy and barley escaped with his life still intact and then onto the next similar event. Some more meat to a few situations in the book and I think it would’ve been nicer to read.

Another thing that bothered me was the characters. Teresa, especially. She had something that I just didn’t like. She always did the weird things and explained it with her “WICKED is good.” Throughout the books, she is a mystery and not a good one. She’s there and doing all the weird things and I was waiting for an explanation but it just didn’t come. Not even at the last pages. I couldn’t grasp her or understand her and that, for me, made the book a lot weaker. There are other characters that I think aren’t completely worked through, but none as strange as Teresa.

As I mentioned earlier, I kept waiting for the big blow-up. In retrospect, the whole book was the blow-up. Something new and crazy popped up on every page and it gave me a headache, from time to time. And then, in the end, everything really blew up but there were still not any clear answers. And then it just ended. And I got my answers, well, kind of. I got about half of them and for me, that’s not good enough. I’m not saying Dashner had to reveal every little secret, but there were so much that happened and so little that was explained. That, along with the characters and the too fast-paced story ruined the whole thing for me. I am thoroughly disappointed.