Review: The Eye of Minds

The Eye of Minds by James Dashner
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When everyone was crazy about young adult dystopian novels, I decided to jump into James Dashner’s The Maze Runner series. If the truth is to be known, it’s my least favourite of the popular young adult dystopian trilogies. I like to think I’m a pretty nice reader, in that I give authors multiple chances before I decide they are not for me. Sometimes I’m surprised and realise it’s just a single series by the author that is not for me, other times I am shown it is the author who is not for me.

James Dashner seems to fall into the latter category. As my second chance to James Dashner, I decided to grab The Mortality Doctrine trilogy – it seemed interesting enough, offering something different to The Maze Runner series – yet this first book has done little to win me over.

The Eye of Minds was interesting enough on the surface – it was an interesting idea, there were plenty of things that could have been done with this one – yet when we get down to it, this book wasn’t as enjoyable as it could have been. Sure, I kept turning the pages – but in many ways, this is because I was waiting for the something big to happen, rather than being a reflection of my investment in the story.

You see, I didn’t care for the characters at all. I had the same issue with The Maze Runner series – the characters are just a vessel to give us the story, yet to really enjoy it I need to enjoy the characters. I didn’t care for many of the events that played out – when things did seem to get interesting they were skipped over, there were many things I would have liked to understand better, and some of the details I feel as though I could have done without.

What was enough to convince me to pick up the second book (other than the fact I brought the trilogy in a pack) was the ending. I’d been so focused upon one element coming to pass that I overlooked the reality of the situation – I should have seen it coming, and yet I didn’t. I still believe some of the things I picked up on many come to pass in the future books, but I was caught off guard by what did come to pass.

In truth, this isn’t quite a full three-star rating, yet the ending was enough to have me giving those three stars.

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