OK, so maybe this assignment does suck a little (when the book does)

Week 2 Journal
The Scorch Trials
James Dashner
Pages 1-340 (the whole thing!)

This week, I have to put aside Born Round for a very simple reason – I checked The Scorch Trials by Dashner 3 weeks ago from the local library, the book was due, and I couldn’t renew it because someone else was waiting on it. A practical reason for allowing The Scorch Trials to jump ahead of the other books in line, but as I found out this week, not one that lends itself to making me like the book unnecessarily.
First of all, I chose to read this book because I read the one that came before it. Dashner has proposed a trilogy and The Scorch Trials is the second one, coming after The Maze Runner which I read over the summer on a recommendation from my “Book Tracker” function on Facebook (which I love). In The Maze Runner we were introduced to a group of boys who lived in a controlled community (I’m a BIG fan of Dystopian Adolescent Literature – that means books for teenagers which are set in a very bleak future). Every month, an elevator arrives in this community carrying supplies the boys need and a brand new boy who has no memory of his past. One day, the main character arrives. The next week, three weeks ahead of schedule, another person arrives in the elevator, but this time it’s a girl. She carries a note saying “I am the last one ever.” The story goes on from there, and it was quite interesting. The boys worked together to finally make their way through a maze that surrounded their community and made it, in the final pages, to freedom.
The Scorch Trials picks up soon thereafter. It turns out that the boys are NOT safe and that the Maze was merely the first step in a plan to prepare them to save humanity which has been overcome first by sun flares that wiped out a lot of humanity and then by a new virus which slowly turns the carriers into zombie like creatures. The survivors from the first book are then given the task of making it through 100 miles of desert towns to reach their goal.
This book just didn’t work as well as The Maze Runner for many reasons. First of all, the setting of the maze – the creepy atmosphere and the unseen puppet masters that are so central to the first book are completely absent. It’s sort of like we already know too much and can’t recapture any kind of suspense that is really needed in this type of story. I liken it to when the couple in a TV show that everyone wants to get together finally does and then the show falls apart. There was no reason for me to keep caring about these characters.
There are parts of The Scorch Trials that I found cool, if not really enough to carry the whole book. The zombie type characters are really scary. That said, I would have liked to see more fear and less resignation in the characters who know they have been infected and who know they will lose their minds but haven’t yet. Wouldn’t that be terrifying?
Also, it should be mentioned that both The Maze Runner and The Scorch Trials contain this sort of hybrid language developed by the boys while they were trapped in the maze. I guess it makes sense that confined people would create new words for things – especially kids who had had their prior memory wiped – but it’s clunky. I guess I see THAT they would create a new language; I just don’t care for the one Dashner has created. It feels like a cheap knock-off of Lord of the Flies, and he’s no Golding.