Title: The Death Cure
Author: James Dashner
Publisher/Year: Random House  1/8/13
Length: 352
Series: The Maze Runner #3

Overview

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. To complete the blueprint for the cure to the Flare.

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.

My Thoughts

This series has taken me on a journey that’s taken significantly longer than i ever expected it to.  After reading book 1 that i really enjoyed and then getting stuck on book 2 and having to put it down, i was hoping that i’d get re-inspired to want to continue on.  Nope – i started reading The Death Cure and it’s taken me WEEKS when it usually just takes me a matter of days to get through something.

So…where are we in this series?  We’ve gotten through the Scorch and we know that everyone’s been taken over again by WICKED and things are going to be downhill from there.  Thomas is in a position where he doesn’t know if he’ll ever trust Theresa again, which isn’t a bad thing, and he’s found a new ally in Brenda which is rather surprising to me.  Her role in this story is a turnaround from where we were in book 2 – and it’s not until just a little bit later that we see that she was a pawn in things – and put in a position to lead the gladers in the direction that the Chancellor wanted.

So we spend much of this installment on the run, in Denver trying to find the cure – since that’s what we’re being led to believe is the ultimately outcome.  We come across Gally here, whom i think that we all knew wasn’t dead, and turns out to be somewhat of an important person in the series.

What gets me about this story is that it’s a very long winded path to get where they need to go, and once they’ve gotten to the end, it’s kind of like ‘um….yea – that’s kind of what i figured’.  Once they are back in the hands of WICKED, the group is split up not even Group A v. Group B – but a mashup of the two – so we wonder throughout who is going to be with us in the end.  The other revelation that comes of all this is that there are ‘munies’ or people that are immune to The Flare -and WICKED has a plan to reinstate the trials to get new subjects to test variables on in the hopes that they can find a cure.  It’s really round about since i think that we all know that there’s not going to be a full circle of another trial set up, but really just understanding what’s going to happen to keep that from happening.

So – after getting stuck about 200 pages in, i put it down, and then kept trying to pick it back up.  with about 100 pages left to go last night, i just put my head down and pushed through it just so that i could get to the end.  What i’m not surprised about in this story is what they watned Thomas for, and what the ultimate experiment would be to find out why he was ‘The Final Candidate’  If anyone else was surprised – then i don’t know.

The ending felt like it was a bit rushed – with explosions, deaths, another flat trans of sorts – a secret letter and map from The Chancellor and then the sketchy email correspondence that we saw at the end of book 1 and sporadically in book 2.

all in all, i’d say average, or maybe even less than average.  I’m curious if i come back to it a few months down the road that i’d change my mind since that’s what happened when i re-read The Scorch Trials, but i can’t say that I want to be bothered to do it.  The good news here though is that finishing this book puts me over my 2014 Reading Challenge from Goodreads – so that’s the positive that i can take from this.