Maze Bummer?

I recently finished up The Maze Runner by James Dashner.  Dashner is an American young adult novelist who typically writes in the survival and science fiction genres.  I may be well past the young adult age group, but I still love to read young adult fiction.  They tend to be short, easy reads and they’re perfect for vacation or when you don’t have a lot of time to devote to reading but still want to read something.  Dashner tends to write series.  He’s written several including The Morality Doctrine, The Infinity Ring Series, and The Jimmy Fincher Saga. 

My sister let me borrow her copies of the Maze Runner Series a few months ago and I finally started reading a couple of weeks ago.  Typically it doesn’t take me long to read a book of this size but I’ve found this one hard to get into.  I don’t know yet if it’s because of the writing itself, or because I’ve already seen the movie and the movie stuck fairly close to the plot of the first book.  For those of you who haven’t read the book or seen the movie yet the first book in this series (The Maze Runner) is about a group of teenaged boys who have been living in a little clearing in the center of a maze.  None of them know how they got there, or what life was like before they were put in the maze.  By the time Thomas, the main character, is put in the maze the boys have been there for two years.  The book follows them as they try to find out who put them in the maze, how they can get out of the maze, and what it all means. 

As I said before, I struggled a bit with keeping myself interested in reading this book.  I got a little bored with it and stepped away for a while and then picked it back up again.  I’m thinking this may be because I already knew what was going to happen, having seen the movie.  I typically like to do things the other way around but I didn’t realize there was a series of books until after I had watched the movie.  I’m going to give it the benefit of the doubt and continue the series.  I’ve already started to read the second book and it seems to be deviating greatly from the second movie so I’m hoping I’ll enjoy reading it more than I enjoyed the first book.   

Another problem I had was with the slang the boys made up for different things while they were in the maze.  I suppose substituting common curse words with things like “Shuck-Face” and “klunk” may have been the author’s way of keeping bad language out of the book but it was distracting to me.  The boys may have had their memories of their previous lives removed, but their speech is still fully intact.  Introducing new slang words seemed a little unnecessary to me. 

All in all I was a little disappointed.  I enjoyed the movie and I expected to enjoy the book as well but it didn’t seem as interesting.  I didn’t care about the outcome as much.  I’m hoping that this will change with the second book.