Ok, so, umm… WHAT THE HELL, DEATH CURE? How did these books go from teenage guys fighting slug-machines in some dystopian maze to me crying, literal tears falling down my face? I wasn’t expecting so much emotion. I wasn’t expecting… the things that happened. I wasn’t expecting to be in tears or near tears on numerous occasions. And I definitely wasn’t expecting to care so much about these characters who I hadn’t felt all that invested in in the first two books.

And you know what else? I’ll be damned if this author doesn’t know how to end a chapter. Those last lines are always timed and written so strongly that they just hit you, and you can’t help but whisper out a profanity, shiver with chills, or ask, “WTF?!” out loud (don’t worry, I wasn’t in public).

This book, like the others, was intense. More so. Terrible things happen. But they aren’t glossed over or made out to be less terrible than they are. They impact you. At least, they impacted me. And I think that was my favorite thing about the book. Even when people are dying and Thomas just runs past them with barely a moment to think about it, maybe one line written about it, it impacts you because you get it that he has no choice, and you get how torn up he feels about it, you get that it’s an illustration of what the world has come to and how dire the situation is, and that one line is powerful enough to convey everything. I know people complain about not liking Thomas because he doesn’t have much personality… but I don’t know. Somehow you feel the horror of what he’s going through. It was like the emotion came more from the writing itself, the descriptions of things, the contrast of Thomas’s actions to his feelings and the terrible things happening around him.

I’ve noticed that a lot of people seem to hate the ending. But there seems to be this trend to give books too much closure with epilogues explaining how everything changed over the years, tell us what each person did for society, tell us what the character’s kid’s name are–I hate that. So I was perfectly happy just to have the story end how it did. Plus, I felt like all the necessary questions were answered, and I didn’t need to know every detail. I can’t give any of the books in this series a perfect rating because I’m still a character person and I didn’t get enough of that, and some things (like the experiment in the maze) seemed to work out a little too perfectly, and this or that could’ve been better, etc., etc., but they affected me enough that I kind of just don’t care about the imperfections. They surprised me. I enjoyed them.