I’ll be honest: when I got an advanced reading copy of The Maze Runner, it was in a bundle with Catching Fire. Me being the Hunger Games fan that I am, I went straight for Catching Fire. I set aside Maze Runner for a little bit. To be fair to James Dashner, I didn’t want to read it so close to another arena survival book that I knew I would obsess over.
I did pick up Maze Runner and enjoyed it. The focus is not so much on nature survival as it is on trying to figure out why the teens are in the maze. Protagonist Thomas has had his memory wiped and wakes up in a box. When the box opens, he is in The Glade, a place for Peter Pan-esque Lost Boys to congregate. Thomas gets curious about the maze and wants to be a Runner to help map out the pathways and perhaps lead the other teens out of the maze.
It is a definite first book to a series. A majority of the book is focused on setting up this strange world and building intrigue into who the creators of the maze are. There are some action sequences throughout, like facing off against maze denizens such as the Grievers, but the big action sequences are saved for the end.
