The Scorch Trials by James Dashner

The Scorch Trials by James Dashner picks up right where the first book in this series, The Maze Runer, leaves off.  The story begins with Thomas and the rest of the surviving Gladers learning that the Maze was only the first in a series of tests designed to weed out the people most capable of rebuilding the world after the Flare, a catastrophic natural disaster.  Their next challenge is crossing the Scorch, in which the boys must travel 100 miles across open desert to reach a mysterious safe haven.  As extra encouragement, each of the boys have been infected with a disease that will eventually turn them insane.  The cure is waiting for them at the end of their trial, if they can make it there alive.  As always, the mysterious organization WICKED is pulling all the strings behind the scenes, and Thomas continues his struggle to remember exactly what is going on and what his role is in these torturous experiments.

Perhaps it's because I just came off of a month of reading only nonfiction, or perhaps it's because my expectations for this series were significantly lowered after reading The Maze Runner, but I actually enjoyed this novel more than its predecessor.  It's still not particularly well-written and it still uses the cheap trick of Thomas suddenly "remembering" things at critical moments, but I found myself getting into the story more this go-around.  I wanted to find out what exactly was going on with WICKED, and what would happen when the Gladers reached the end of the Scorch.  In short, I was sucked right into this action-packed mess.

It helps that there were a few more female characters this time around.  The Maze Runner was hampered by its lack of girls.  It's only major female character, Theresa, was your typical Mary Sue type, and thus, not interesting at all.  The Scorch Trials introduces a few more females into the mix, along with the more-successful-than-the-boys Group B, an entirely female group that also escaped a Maze.  The depiction of these girls is still clumsy and uneven, but the more diverse collection of character types helps round out the story.

The strongest point in The Scorch Trials' favor is the fact that its story is just more interesting than Maze Runner.  I like the idea of the group going on a quest with an unknown goal at the end, and I've always been a sucker for survival stories.  It played better for me than the interminable Maze from book one.  My ultimate rating is still a 2/5, because high literature this is not.  Books like Harry Potter have raised the bar for how good young adult writing can be, and Dashner's prose doesn't really measure up.  The writing is too simple, the characters are one dimensional and the plot turns on lazy devices. It was a decent adventure though, and I enjoyed it more than the first.

Now I'm on to read book three and see how this story ends!