The Death Cure (The Maze Runner, Book 3): Review

The Death Cure (The Maze Runner, Book 3) by James Dashner

This book picks up where the second one left off. Thomas and the other Gladers have been taken by WICKED. Thomas has been separated from the other Gladers and Teresa let him know that they had been told Thomas has the Flare. In the finale of the series, Thomas and the others try to escape from WICKED, while simultaneously trying to figure out what WICKED's end game is.

This book had a couple of issues, which I will get to in a second. But the whole book was one action packed adventure. I could not put it down. The book did answer a few of the questions from the other books, like why Thomas was so important and what "Final Candidate" meant. I didn't really like the answer because it sounded a bit insane, but at least I got the answer I was looking for. I will say that I think the first half was better than the second half. The second half of the book was still very action packed, but it seemed very rushed. It looked like the author was just trying to hurry up and get to the ending. 

One of the issues I had was that Thomas has potentially gotten even more stupid in this final book. There were several decisions he made that literally made me scream at the book, "What are you doing?!?" Good thing I was reading it alone at home. If I had screamed at my Kindle in public, people would have thought I was crazy. One of the decisions he made (spoiler alert) was that he didn't want his memory back. WTF?!? Why would the author make the decision to have almost every character get his or her memory back, except for the main character?? I mean, if Thomas didn't remember what happened prior to the Maze, then why should the reader even care? 

And there was no point to the character of Teresa. She added nothing to the books. From the first book, I thought she was going to be more important. But then Dashner introduced Brenda in the second book and she became much more important. Of course, a question that the author left unanswered was how much Brenda knew and whether she was good or evil. She made a comment at the end of the book that left the reader questioning that very thing. One other thing that irritated me was the character of Jorge. Why did the author have to make him Hispanic. He said all of two Spanish words (the ENTIRE series), but he would say those same two words in just about every conversation. If the author didn't know any Spanish because hermanos and muchachos, then he shouldn't have bothered.

There was also no point to the dreams Thomas kept having or to his memories of his mother. Honestly, I am pretty sure Dashner could have made this series into one long book and cut out most of it. 

I thought about what kind of rating to give this book. It was fast paced, but there were way more questions than answers. I give the book a rating of 3/5.