There were a lot of things I enjoyed about this book. It was very fast paced, had some interesting turns, and definitely had me rooting for the main character. It was also a fairly clean book, aside from the constant violence—but I never felt that the violence got too graphic. This is the kind of book I could give to my eleven year-old niece and expect her to finish it in a week, saying “ohmygosh, this book was so awesome!”
With that said, the book did have its flaws. Half of the dialogue was some variant on: “why won’t you just tell me what’s going on?” “shut up, ya skank, and do what I tell you to do!” “no, you shut up, you klunk for brains!” Fortunately, that was easy enough to skim. Also, there was quite a bit of hyperbole: everything that happened was the scariest thing, or the awesomest thing, or the most surprising thing ever. At one point, Dashner described an unconscious character as “lifeless,” and I had to stop and go back to see if the character was actually dead (he wasn’t).
But without giving any spoilers, the main reason I’m only giving this book three stars is because the ending explains everything—how they got into the maze, why the maze exists, what the goal of the maze really is—while somehow, at the same time, not explaining anything at all. It’s like the author spent all of his time worldbuilding the actual maze, and very little on worldbuilding all the other stuff that led to the maze’s creation. Also, there are a lot of loose threads at the end, and while I assume that most of them get tied up in other books, some of them are just plain inconsistencies that can’t be tied up.
But yeah, it was a fun, quick read, sort of like Lord of the Flies run by Aperture Science, except that the kids actually think and act like real kids, and all the allegorical garbage has been scrubbed out of it. I think this is a book that my ten year-old self would really enjoy.