Book: The Scorch Trials
Author: James Dashner
This is the second book in The Maze Runner trilogy. The tag line says “the maze was only the beginning” and boy is it the truth. At the end of the Maze Runner, the boys thought they were safe, which couldn’t be further from the truth. WICKED-World In Catastrophe Killzone Experiment Department, are the evil creators of the maze, the ones who put Thomas and his friends through their hell in The Maze Runner. Now they’ve tricked Thomas and his friends all over again.
Here is a short synopsis of the book:
Thomas was sure that escape from the maze meant he and the Gladers would get their lives back. But no one knew what sort of life they were going back to. The earth is a wasteland. Government and order have disintegrated and now Cranks, people driven to murderous insanity by the infectious disease known as the Flare, roam the crumbling cities hunting for their next victim and meal.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? The pulse-pounding sequel to The Maze Runner.
WICKED made Thomas and his friends think that they were safe but now they are thrown into a new kind of hell-the Scorch Trials-they have to make their way across a vast expanse of desert, destroyed by the sun flares that ruined the world and meant the boys ended up in the maze. Dashner once again does a great job of describing how horrible the Scorch is, the oppressive heat and the awful lightning storms that could fry you if you get hit by a lightning strike. The plot as with the Maze Runner was incredible and I feel like you know a little more about Thomas by the end of the book as some of his memories start to return although we still don’t really know anything about anyone else. There is some development of the Teresa/Thomas romance but it gets smashed to smithereens-I won’t say much on this so as not to ruin the book for those who haven’t read it but essentially Teresa is not who you think she is and you find yourself wanting to punch her by the end of the book for hurting Thomas so bad-and I think he feels the same! She thinks she can get away with anything and do anything to Thomas and she’ll still be his best friend-I was glad that Thomas doesn’t really seem to trust her anymore by the end of the book though. A few new characters are introduced in this book, the most important being Brenda and Jorge.
I liked Thomas’ relationship with Brenda, more so than that of Teresa and there is a huge cliffhanger involving her, so I really want to see more of her past now. Jorge only has a short role in The Scorch Trials which will hopefully be expanded in the last book as I liked him and his scenes with both Minho and Thomas were great. This book is amazing, even better than the first. The addition of the cranks-people who have been infected by the flare-a disease occurring since the sun flares ruined the world which makes you go crazy and which the boys where put in the maze for as WICKED supposedly infected them with the flare to analyse their brain patterns and work out a cure-the cranks are a great addition, they add an extra dimension of horror to the book. After The Scorch Trials, the maze does seem incredibly tame. My love for Minho increased with this book because he kind of echoes my thoughts in his suspicions of WICKED and he’s really determined but he manages to bring some humour to the book which is nice-it’s more sarky humour but that fits really well with the book.
Another new character in this book is Aris and I wasn’t really drawn to him and since he was involved in the bad thing that Teresa did to Thomas, I kind of hated him by the end of the book.
Basically this book is amazing and anyone who thinks they might like it should go out and buy it!
My rating-5/5
The next book review will be for the final book of this series The Death Cure-I’m reading it at the moment, and I’m kind of sad that this amazing series is almost over for me.
bookloversblog 