Sarah's Library

SPOILERS!!!!!!

6/5 - Some of my friends have found this to be a disappointment and some have enjoyed it as much as they did the first book. I really hope I'm in the latter group. To be continued...

7/5 - Okay, I'm on page 41 and the boys have just found the brick walls and the dead bodies and everything's very mysterious - I feel about as confused as Thomas must right now. My theory for what the hell is going on and where the bodies and walls came from is that somehow they've been transported to another location exactly the same as the one they woke up in, just in pristine condition. Somehow someone 'beamed them up' without them realising it was happening. To be continued...

8/5 - Wow! Was Thomas this irritating in the first book? Rereading my review I can see that I was annoyed by him, but there was only one sentence that mentioned it, so it can't have been that bad. Maybe I'm older and wiser than I was last year and it's getting on my nerves more than it did with the last book. Anyway, whatever it is I am absolutely sick of Thomas' internal voice, the way he constantly asks himself the stupidest hypothetical questions (like 'Are my friends all dead?') and then answers them with the next sentence (like 'Possibly, but I still have to go on just in case they aren't'). It wouldn't be so bad if it were only every so often, but questions like that are being asked and answered at least every page, sometimes more than once on the same page.

I'm also irritated with Dashner's insistence on using "I have no idea what's going on" as a theme. Having Thomas, and therefore the reader, completely clueless as to what's going on for the whole book was kind of exciting the first time around, but it's gotten old now. I want proper explanations that I can trust. At the moment, as I'm reading I'm remembering what The Rat Man said about not being able to trust anyone, so I'm not sure that what Brenda has said about the way the world is now is true. My theory on what's going on has gotten wilder since yesterday, now I'm wondering if it isn't all some kind of virtual reality brought on by a drug or some kind of machine. What WICKED is getting the two groups of Gladers to do is all just too crazy and I don't really see how any of it is going to help with the fight against the Flare.

I don't understand why none of the Gladers seem to remember what The Rat Man said about not being able to trust their senses or any of the people around them. Why doesn't Thomas see that Brenda is almost certainly a plant set to test him? She attempted to tempt him out of getting to the 'safe haven' by using sex, she separated him from the other Gladers and then tried to get him to forget them, she put him in a situation that forced him to kill someone - it's all a test to see what his reactions are, what he'll choose to do.

I'm halfway between 'excited to see what happens next' and 'near-quitting-point-frustrated with not knowing what's going on' and something spectacular will have to happen at the end (like getting believable answers) to get more than an average rating. To be continued...

Spoilers!! Don’t read further if you don’t want to know the ending.

12/5 - Such an irritating book! Full of lies and false promises of explanations. Don’t believe David when he tells you that everything will be fully explained, because it won’t. It’s the same situation as at the end of The Maze Runner, promise after promise and then right at the end you realise it’s a fake out and you’re left with a gigantic cliff hanger. It’s déjà vu all over again.

I enjoyed the story, but the appearance of another humungous cliff hanger and the absence of any real explanations has really ticked me off. Also the fact that I thought this was a trilogy (possibly my own fault) and it turns out to be a quartet, so that’s at least one more book wherein I assume nothing much will be explained (a hint here and there, but no complete explanations) followed by a cliff hanger. Someone should tell Dashner that this isn’t THE formula to get his readers coming back for more, it’s THE formula to annoy the hell out of his readers so that they rage quit in the middle of his series.