First Impression: Not impressed. 
 The Maze Runner is not awful. I did finish it, and I read it fairly quickly. The plot is different, and there are some sci-fi elements to it. 
 Thomas was an ok character, but I didn't really connect with him at all. Part of that could be attributed to the fact that he didn't have a past. I'm not really sure. Minho was my favorite character. He was a little bit crazy but had a pretty level head. He was also a little underhanded and I liked that. I think I would have liked Teresa if there would have been a little more of her in the book. 
 The best part of the book for me was the how the boys interacted with each and formed their society and how they dealt with everything that cropped up. For being a bunch of teenage boys they were a pretty well run society, they had many problems but had an organizational system in place. They all went about their business and did their jobs just like in a traditional society. 
 One thing I didn't like was that they had all these made up words (usually used in place of traditional cuss words) and it just felt unnecessary to throw that into the mix of the confusing plot line. Though by the end of the book I was reading them in my head as the cuss words that I believe they replaced. 
 The biggest downside to The Maze Runner was that I had no idea wtf was going on throughout most of the book. 200 pages in and I was still seriously confused, and not in a good way. I don't mind books being mysterious, if I'm reading a murder mystery I don't want to know who did it in the first couple of chapters, but I don't like to be confused at what's going on. Does that makes sense? 
 The Maze Runner started to get more exciting a little after page 200 and I held out hope that all would be well at the end. Now I know that it's part of a trilogy, so I didn't expect a perfect happily ever after ending, but at the end of the book I was still left with all the same questions that I had throughout the book AND there is another question posed at the end. So at the end I am still confused! The answers that are given are such non answers that it drove me nuts! 
 I still don't know if I want to finish the series. Part of me wants to because I want the answers! The other part of me doesn't want to because I don't want to waste my time reading a book when there might not be any answers.