Solving the Maze was supposed to be the end. No more puzzles. No more variables. And no more running. Thomas was sure that escape meant he and the Gladers would get their lives back. But no one really knew what sort of life they were going back to. In the Maze, life was easy. They had food, and shelter, and safety . . . until Teresa triggered the end. In the world outside the Maze, however, the end was triggered long ago. Burned by sun flares and baked by a new, brutal climate, the earth is a wasteland. Government has disintegrated—and with it, order—and now Cranks, people covered in festering wounds and driven to murderous insanity by the infectious disease known as the Flare, roam the crumbling cities hunting for their next victim . . . and meal. The Gladers are far from finished with running. Instead of freedom, they find themselves faced with another trial. They must cross the Scorch, the most burned-out section of the world, and arrive at a safe haven in two weeks. And WICKED has made sure to adjust the variables and stack the odds against them. 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?

Summary from Amazon.com

Since The Maze Runner was one of my favorite reads of last year, I made the rare step of actually pre-ordering this book (a huge deal for a librarian on a budget). When it arrived, I was in the midst of another book, so I handed it over to my husband to read. When I inquired as to how it was, he responded, “Bad shit happens. Then more bad shit happens.”

In a way, that perfect sums up The Scorch Trials, part two in James Dashner’s planned trilogy. The Scorch Trials deals with the aftermath of the maze, with what happens to the Gladers when they have finally escaped the experiment that they were at the center of. And that’s the key word here: “happens.” This book is action packed, careening from horror to horror as Thomas and his friends navigate their way across the scorched wasteland that the world has become. James Dashner’s imagination is vivid and his writing is incredibly illustrative (almost to the point of gross at times) as he describes the heat of the sun; the melting silver orbs that attack Gladers, encasing their heads in murderous metal; and the crazy Cranks, infected with the Flare, the disease that will soon reach Thomas and his friends if they don’t make it across the Scorch. But in the end, the book almost has too much action. I missed the character and relationship building that featured so strongly in the first book and that is key (for me) to any truly great dystopian novel. The action plain overwhelmed any character progression that could have occurred, until it seemed that no character growth had occurred.

In fact, my favorite parts of The Scorch Trials were when Thomas was regaining his memories, having brief flashbacks to his former life, when he and Theresa were young, co-creators of the maze that had ended up tormenting them. And although we learned a bit more about WICKED and the changed world that these characters now inhabited, it wasn’t enough to satisfy me.

But in the end, it is a middle book in a trilogy, and a journey across a scorched land is part for the course. And in the end, I will most definitely continue reading. James Dashner can write a mean cliffhanger, both at the end of chapters, and at the end of this book. I just hope that I find out more about these characters in the future.