James Dashner, Fever Code (Maze Runner Prequel), Scholastic Australia, 1 Oct 2016, 304pp., $18.99 (pbk), ISBN: 9781911077169
Any book that starts with an arm-wrestling challenge from my eldest son over who has first reading rights is off to a good beginning (I won by a very narrow margin, but I fight dirty). The Maze Runner series is, according to my eleven year old son and his friends, the BEST EVER! And if you’ve read them you already know that they are a tightly paced, tense series that begins with a teenage boy in a dark lift with no memory of where he is, or who he is, other than the name Thomas. As the lift rises, Thomas finds himself in a strange, enclosed world called the Glade, surrounded by a massive Maze full of lethal dangers. The only way out of the Glade, and the only way to find out who he is, is to face the Maze. The series is a futuristic blend of just the right amount of heart-thumping action, mystery, and terrifying twists.
Fever Code is the prequel, going back to Thomas’ early childhood and the events that brought him into the WICKED program. While it isn’t absolutely necessary to have read the Maze Runner series, Fever Code makes much more sense if you know the context. Fever Code explains a little more about the terrible disease that has wiped out most of the world’s population or reduced them to zombie-like Cranks. Thomas is one of the rare children who seem to have developed an immunity, and through his story we see the people who are desperately trying to find a cure.
What I found particularly fascinating about Fever Code was the moral and ethical dilemma at the heart of WICKED – what would you be willing to do to save humanity, and what actions are unforgivable even if the intention is pure and the stakes are high enough? In the enclosed world Thomas grows up in, it’s very hard to gauge what is right and what is not, and the reader is drawn in to Thomas’ narrow field of vision, trying to understand what is going on and whether cooperation or rebellion is the right thing to do. Who can Thomas trust? Who can he believe? And what heinous acts is he willing to excuse or commit for the greater good? Can he even know what the greater good is, when his whole life has been circumscribed by the adults of WICKED?
And the twists keep coming right up until the moment when Thomas finds himself heading for the beginning of Maze Runner.
The structure of Fever Code is a little broken, being written in chunks of time that leap from one year to the next, but I didn’t feel that this did the story any disservice. If anything, it fed the sense of long periods of sameness and mind-numbing boredom and loneliness that Thomas goes through, broken by swift moments of intense experience.
There are many books which have been compared to the Hunger Games series, but in this case I think the comparison is a fair one. The series is fast-paced and sometimes scary, with fascinating characters who keep shifting your perceptions, but when you finally come up for air there is a lot to think about.
I think Fever Code will be enthusiastically greeted by kids and teens who have already read the Maze Runner series, and for those readers aged ten to adult who have an interest in dystopic action, the Maze Runner series is waiting.
Reviewed by Emily Clarke
