Review of The Rule of Thoughts by James Dashner

Review of James Dashner's The Rule of Thoughts

Release Date: August 26th, 2014

Synopsis as found on GoodReads.com:



From the New York Times bestselling author of the Maze Runner series comes The Rule of Thoughts, the exciting sequel to The Eye of Minds. Fans of the Divergent series by Veronica Roth and The Hunger Games will love the new Mortality Doctrine series.

Michael completed the Path. What he found at the end turned everything he’d ever known about his life—and the world—completely upside down.

He barely survived. But it was the only way VirtNet Security knew to find the cyber-terrorist Kaine—and to make the Sleep safe for gamers once again. And, the truth Michael discovered about Kaine is more complex than they anticipated, and more terrifying than even the worst of their fears.

Kaine is a tangent, a computer program that has become sentient. And Michael’s completing the Path was the first stage in turning Kaine’s master plan, the Mortality Doctrine, into a reality.

The Mortality Doctrine will populate Earth entirely with human bodies harboring tangent minds. Any gamer who sinks into the VirtNet risks coming out with a tangent intelligence in control of their body.

And the takeover has already begun.



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I will start out by saying that I wasn't the biggest fan of The Eye of Minds, but I liked it to an extent that I wanted to see where the story would go after they left off in book 1. Sadly, everything I did actually like from the first book is missing from book 2. There is no extensive gaming world where the characters fight off fictional players (called Tangents in the book) to beat games. There was less mystery and the believability factor went down exponentially.



The whole book takes place in the real world, where, after Michael found out that he had been a Tangent all along, he is now in the body of a human boy. While, the villain of the story, Kaine is still locked inside the game (or so we assume), he has downloaded Tangents in to the bodies of humans all over the world to wreak havoc and chaos.



After reading The Maze Runner series, I really had my hopes up for Dashner's new series, but sadly it is nowhere near as exciting. I realize the premise is completely different and maybe I am just more of a fan of dystopian books, but when there is no real mystery or excitement, the book is not fun to read. This book felt like it dragged on and on... well until the end. Then I just powered through it.



Books I found I liked better from this genre:



Julia Durango's The Leveller
Claudia Gabel & Cheryl Klam's Elusion
Eve Silver's The Game

To name a few...