DanySpike

What's it about? (from Goodreads): When Thomas wakes up in the lift, the only thing he can remember is his first name. His memory is blank. But he's not alone. When the lift's doors open, Thomas finds himself surrounded by kids who welcome him to the Glade-a large, open expanse surrounded by stone walls.
Just like Thomas, the Gladers don't know why or how they got to the Glade. All they know is that every morning the stone doors to the maze that surrounds them have opened. Every night they've closed tight. And every 30 days a new boy has been delivered in the lift.
Thomas was expected. But the next day, a girl is sent up-the first girl to ever arrive in the Glade. And more surprising yet is the message she delivers. 
Thomas might be more important than he could ever guess. If only he could unlock the dark secrets buried within his mind.

After a long time wanting to read this book, I finally did it as part of my 2104 TBR Pile Challenge and my 2014 Alphabet Soup Reading Challenge.

The first thing that caughts one's attention is how short each chapter is. With just a few pages long each, the author doesn't fill you with meaningless situations just to occupy pages, but instead he makes everything goes faster, only showing you what you need to know for the story to advance. And that served another purpose, too: since you only know what Thomas knows (and that's not much, to begin with), and then the author doesn't show much of this new world either, you feel just like Thomas, confused and frustrated, trying to understand what's happening and not getting too many answers.

You only know there's a maze outside with awful monster-like creatures called Grievers that want to kill you, that once a month you get a new guy and also new supplies, and that so far, they haven't found a way to get out. And they have TRIED. Everyday, a bunch of kids run through the maze risking their lives, in order to find an exit or a clue for anything that can get them out or that giant, ever-changing maze. It's a disturbing situation.

What I didn't like was that everything was completely predictable. There was nothing that caught me by surprise, every bad guy, every good guy, every character's reaction, every death, every discovery, every turn of events was something you could see from miles away (except for the very last pages, with I didn't predict at all, and I won't say what it was!). HOWEVER, strangely enough, that didn't stop me from really enjoying this book. I have no idea why that happened, but even though I knew what was going to happen, I never got bored (once again, the short chapters were a very good move) and I never stopped being interested. Maybe it's because I liked the general idea of somthing like that happening and I really wanted to know how it ended. Either way, I hope to read the next books in the series.

The good news is that there's a movie coming out so it's going to be interesting to see how they capture the Grievers, the maze, and the characters in general. I just learned that Thomas Brodie-Sangster is portraying Newt and I've loved that kid since Love Actually, so I could not be happier about this! 

And just so you know, you can also see him in HBO's Game of Thrones :)