The Death Cure (The Maze Runner #3) – James Dashner

Title: The Death Cure (The Maze Runner #3) by James Dashner
Publishing Info: October 11, 2011 by Random House Publishing Group
Genres: Dystopian, Science Fiction, Young Adult
Find it on the web: Buy from Amazon // GoodreadsDate Completed: September 27, 2012
Related Posts: The Scorch Trials (The Maze Runner #2), The Kill Order (The Maze Runner #0.5)

    Thomas knows that Wicked can't be trusted, but they say the time for lies is over, that they've collected all they can from the Trials and now must rely on the Gladers, with full memories restored, to help them with their ultimate mission. It's up to the Gladers to complete the blueprint for the cure to the Flare with a final voluntary test.
     What Wicked doesn't know is that something's happened that no Trial or Variable could have foreseen. Thomas has remembered far more than they think. And he knows that he can't believe a word of what Wicked says.
     The time for lies is over. But the truth is more dangerous than Thomas could ever imagine.
Will anyone survive the Death Cure?

Oh, THE DEATH CURE. What can I possibly say about you? I know there were other reviews around that were disappointed with how this series concluded — and I had expected to feel the same way — but secretly, I was hoping to enjoy it. Nope. Didn’t happen. I was disappointed too.

Firstly, I felt a little bit like I did at the end of Lost. We were left with a somewhat satisfying but mostly unresolved ending. We know where our characters end up and can imagine a future for them as we leave them at the end of the series, but I still had a lot of questions. It bothered me so much because I wondered why Thomas WASN’T curious. WICKED was all he knew of his whole life – and other people’s lives hedged on what he knew about WICKED and his decision whether it was ultimately good or if they had a hidden agenda (well, of course they do). I guess I can understand that he didn’t want to know about all of the horrible things he may have spawned before the Maze, but don’t you think ultimately, good or bad, knowing what he did could help him change things for the greater good if that’s what he wanted to do? Anyway. The whole thing just bothered me. As a reader, I hate being left in the dark unless it’s for suspense/mystery purposes. Since this was the final piece of the puzzle of the series, I expected WAY more reveals than we had.

I’m glad Minho was still with the group, but I also didn’t like that we almost completely lost all of our favorite Gladers, the people we knew and trusted from the first book. Minho is actually one of my favorite characters, so if he would have been absent from this book, I would have been really upset. I don’t really care for Brenda — even in this book I didn’t know if I could trust her – and I’m still upset that Thomas never really came back around to Teresa. We were left with Brenda and Jorge. And even after seeing him in The Scorch Trials, who is Jorge? He seemed to be there simply for the fact that he can fly a Berg and that’s it. Not to mention Dashner’s portrayal of Jorge as a Hispanic character is wildly stereotypical with every sentence ending in “muchacho” or “hermano” (which as a Spanish major, I’ve personally experienced that there’s WAY better slang than that and I’ve rarely heard Spanish-speaking people call anyone else “muchacho”) so that actually really bothered me.

Overall, I was just really disappointed with the book. The ending picked up when we got into a bit more of the action, but the first two books were definitely more exciting and suspenseful for me.

Thomas: I don’t feel like Thomas really changed much. If anything, I really liked him less in this book and really didn’t like a lot of his decisions. It felt like we were straying from the character we were building up instead of making him stronger.
Brenda: I still don’t care for Brenda. I didn’t like the introduction of her character and I kind of think she’s unnecessary. Personally, I think we could have combined her whole story line and made it Teresa’s. It would have created a much better connection AND conflict all at the same time between Teresa and Thomas.
WICKED: Okay, so WICKED isn’t a character. But close enough. I’m still disappointed with how little we learned. I guess we did find out what they were ultimately doing with the Maze, with the Gladers, how they were working against the Flare, but I still felt like there were giant holes that were never filled.

Library Read

I wanted so badly to have a GREAT finish to this trilogy but I felt so let down. I’d still say to finish the trilogy but maybe get this one from the library instead of purchasing.

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