Review: The Scorch Trials by James Dashner

The Scorch Trials (The Maze Runner #2)
by James Dashner
Pages: 321

Genre: Dystopian, Science Fiction
Format: e-book
Published October 12, 2010 by Random House Children's Books
Goodreads // Amazon UK

Solving the Maze was supposed to be the end. No more puzzles. No more variables. And no more running. Thomas was sure that escape meant he and the Gladers would get their lives back. But no one really knew what sort of life they were going back to.
In the Maze, life was easy. They had food, and shelter, and safety . . . until Teresa triggered the end. In the world outside the Maze, however, the end was triggered long ago.
Burned by sun flares and baked by a new, brutal climate, the earth is a wasteland. Government has disintegrated—and with it, order—and now Cranks, people covered in festering wounds and driven to murderous insanity by the infectious disease known as the Flare, roam the crumbling cities hunting for their next victim . . . and meal.
The Gladers are far from finished with running. Instead of freedom, they find themselves faced with another trial. They must cross the Scorch, the most burned-out section of the world, and arrive at a safe haven in two weeks. And WICKED has made sure to adjust the variables and stack the odds against them.
Thomas can only wonder—does he hold the secret of freedom somewhere in his mind? Or will he forever be at the mercy of WICKED?

I really enjoyed The Maze Runner. I think this series is quite different than many series out there, even though it has recently been advertised as similar to The Hunger Games. After reading the second instalment of James Dashner's dystopian series, I really see that this is not the case. The brutal world of disease Dashner creates is a post-apocalyptic nightmare, where the boys (and girl) from the maze are dropped off in the wasteland to survive the Scorch Trials. I'm just not sure how I feel about The Scorch Trials. I liked it, I just wasn't thrilled with it.

I didn't feel that there was much character development outside of Thomas and Teresa. The supporting characters remained the same from the first book. Minho and Newt were just there, even though they were some of my favourites in the previous novel. I also wasn't crazy about the addition of Brenda. Don't get me wrong, James Dashner is such an incredible writer to really make the reader think that she's about to come off her hinges from the Flare, I just thought she was really unpredictable (even if she was a key plot advancer).

This book was a mediocre middle novel in a trilogy that functioned only as a bridge between the first and last. I felt like the boys were just walking the desert for the whole book, while Thomas magically knew what to do and passed out at the end of nearly every chapter. I'm genuinely invested in trying to figure out what WICKED is doing with the Gladers, so I will probably read the final instalment, The Death Cure. I hope it doesn't let me down and lives up to the mystery of the first novel.