Reddit reviews The Eye of Minds (The Mortality Doctrine, Book One)

No. That one (the goverment-soulmate one) is actually called Matched. The Matched trilogy is a little bland but readable, if not worth the time if you're not dedicating a good portion of free time to reading in general. It's primarily an indictment of the idea of a caste system, actually, rather than about romance or soulmates. It has very little romance, entertainingly enough, relatively speaking. There's still better out there with the same or similar message. I actually had to look it up because however I paraphrase it I wouldn't be able to capture the utter horror of its reality. The Selection.

> For 35 girls, the Selection is the chance of a lifetime: the opportunity to escape the life laid out for them since birth... to be swept up in a world of glittering gowns and priceless jewels... to live in a palace and compete for the heart of gorgeous Prince Maxon. But for America Singer, being Selected is a nightmare. It means turning her back on her secret love with Aspen, who is a caste below her, leaving her home to enter a fierce competition for a crown she doesn't want, and living in a palace that is constantly threatened by violent rebel attacks. Then America meets Prince Maxon. Gradually, she starts to question all the plans she's made for herself - and realizes that the life she's always dreamed of may not compare to a future she never imagined.

And I meant, like, everything from, say, 2010 to mid-2015. All of them. Maybe starting earlier too, for that matter. If you're only counting the first book in the series and account for the fact I'd already read some of them at other times there's not really that many. I also read fast?

But, let's see, I think I read the MR series in... 2012? Maybe early 2013. Before news of the movie being produced was widely out because I distinctly remember finishing book 3 and then a few months later discovering they were making a movie. I started the prequel but the characters didn't capture me the same way the ones did in the main MR series. I do like his new Mortality Doctrine series though, which is future non-dystopian and more like classic cyberpunk than anything. Since you like Maze Runner you might want to try The Eye of Mind, which is the first book in the series.

I liked the books. I thought they were interesting and a nice inversion of what we usually see with male protagonists (male protags in YA dystopia rarely have such a significant romance plot, let alone a love triangle). The characters were interesting enough to be engaging, which can sometimes be a problem with YA books in general and YA SF/F in particular where they want a protag as generic as possible to use as self-insertion (see: Tris in Divergent, Bella in Twilight). I was interested enough to want to find out what happened and so I read through The Death Cure.

I'd like the movies a lot better if they weren't based on books. They're entertaining and more interesting than I think a lot of movie reviewers give them credit for (I think a lot of them are just so done with YA dystopia at this point...). Well-acted and while there's some pacing issues in both movies they aren't nearly as bad as they could be. I really like Dylan O'Brien, who plays Thomas, of Teen Wolf fame (I like him in TW too). But on principle it bugs the fuck out of me they've significantly changed the books in ways that are completely unnecessary (in the first one) or utterly change the story (in the second). Like, the second movie has only minor resemblance to the second book. That's a problem in books based on a series. The third movie will be Maze Runner in name only because it's impossible to match The Death Cure now.

I actually had a major problem with the Ender's Game movie for the same reason. It also way more bland than the source material justified but the primarily problem with Ender's Game is that the fact this indoctrination towards violence and encouragement towards sociopathy occurs in Ender beginning at age 5 is really thematically significant. Having him start and train as a young teen, showing the training only lasting a couple of years instead of nearly a decade, and ignoring the fact that he's been systematically abused to achieve this end since he was in (the equivalent of) kindergarten really undercut the movie. And the book's message that, in theory, the movie should also have.

Anyway, short answer is, yes, read Maze Runner.