Thoughts While Reading The Death Cure

One of the upper school instructors at my school recently gave her class the following assignment to complete on their class blog site.

This weekend’s homework is to read for at least 30 minutes.

Then, please comment on this blog post with:

1. a brief summary of what you read,
2. 2 interesting facts/ideas, unique to the author, or challenging words, thoughts, or pieces of figurative language you found in the book, and
3. 1 prediction you make about the book.

Can’t wait to see what the class is “up to” in our reading!!

As I am the Library Media / Technology Integration Specialist at my school, I try to participate in assignments such as these as often as I can.  Dr. Salemi and I set high expectations and expect quality responses, so we both responded to the prompt based on our own current reading.  Our purpose in doing this is two-fold:

1. The students see us as readers also.  It's important that they know that the adults in their lives READ.  If we do not have time to read and to think about our reading then the work we are having them do is not authentic.
2. By modeling high quality responses, students have a better idea of the thought and effort that they should put into responding to the prompt.  We have found that students are more likely to produce quality work when they have examples to follow.

I have re-posted my response below:

I’m currently reading The Death Cure, the last book of The Maze Runner trilogy, by James Dashner, recommended to me by my nephew and oldest daughter. While I liked the first book and found it interesting, the last two have seemed to just be stretching the story out in order to have three books. (I am not sure that was necessary; we shall see.) The author just isn’t really giving enough clues about how the action in the story is advancing the plot to hold my attention, and there is not enough character development to keep me interested in continuing to read. Although for people who enjoy a lot of action and excitement in their books, there is more than enough action and excitement in these books. What a roller coaster!

I predict the characters will be able to find a cure for the “Flare,” the awful disease that has struck the inhabitants of earth after a massive solar flare, but I’m not sure if everyone will survive. I’m extremely worried about one of my favorite characters, Newt. What I want to know most is how all the horrible experiences the characters have been through in these books are supposed to help them find the cure for the Flare! The characters have been treated basically like lab rats, and they have been put through some absolutely awful experiences. I do hope that there is a very good reason for all of those experiences, or I may just have to figuratively throw the book across the room.

The author of these books has made up his own language of sorts so that his characters’ don’t actually say ugly things to each other. For example, the characters will tell each other to “Slim it” when they want to tell someone to be quiet so they use that phrase instead of “shut up.” It is pretty obvious what the characters mean when they talk in “Maze” speak, but I think this writing device would have been much more effective if it had been used less frequently. It is used so often that it has gotten to be rather annoying as some characters communicate almost entirely in “Maze” speak. It also bothers me that the characters are so unkind to each other. Even though, they don’t use the unkind words we might say, the meaning is still obvious and that bothers me. It makes it much harder for me to develop any real empathy for the characters because they are so unkind to each other.

Dashner was much more effective in using an acronym and oxymoron in his work to make his readers think. In the Maze, there were signs stating that “W.I.C.K.E.D is good.” Of course, the word spelled by the acronym W.I.C.K.E.D makes you think just the opposite of good, thus creating a oxymoron. Oxymorons are usually word pairs that are opposites. For instance, “jumbo shrimp” or “open secret,” but they can also be longer phrases that create a paradox such as “invisible ink” or something wicked being good. The reader has to wonder, “Is W.I.C.K.E.D really good?” or since they don’t know what the acronym W.I.C.K.E.D stands for is it good in another sense — is it good at being bad? Confusing, I know. Considering the horrible things that the boys must survive in The Maze Runner and during The Scorch Trials, the first two books in the series, it is hard to imagine that W.I.C.K.E.D is good as we think of something being good, especially given the title of the third book, The Death Cure.