The Godhead Complex
The Maze Cutter #2
by James Dashner

My rating: 2 / 5
Genre: YA dystopian

The Flare, the Cure, Cranks, the Maze, the Remnant Nation, the Godhead, the Evolution, pilgrims, villas, Orphans…I don’t know what is going on in this series anymore, it’s just so convoluted and bloated with characters and plot threads. The pacing is slow enough that even in this 2nd book in the trilogy, I feel like nothing really happens until near the end. That’s not to say that actually nothing happens, but it all felt so underwhelming. By the end of the previous book, I knew so little actual information, and then in this book, almost everything I thought I knew turns out to be either wrong or at least suspect. I still am not entirely sure who the good guys and bad guys are (maybe they’re all bad? or neutral? or just trying to survive?). And I really don’t care about any of the characters enough to want to hang in there to figure out what I don’t understand when everything is so messy.

I really wish that someone had explained to Dashner or any of his proofreaders that every single use of “god(dess)” in this book should have been a lowercase G. It’s a minor detail, but it grated on me that Alexandra, the our main connection to the Godhead (at least this is something of a title, so I guess the capital makes sense) in these books, is always referred to as a God with a capital G, amongst other uses of the word. I’m going to finish this series, but only because I jumped the gun and requested an ARC of the 3rd book in the trilogy. Considering my track record with this series, I can’t imagine the final book is suddenly going to make everything better. At this point, I wouldn’t really recommend this continuation series to anyone, whether you’ve read the original trilogy or not. (On the other hand, if you enjoyed the entirety of the first trilogy, that probably means that what bothered me about it doesn’t bother you, so there’s a decent possibility that you’ll enjoy these newer books more than me.)

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