The Eye of Minds Review

After waiting weeks, I finally managed to get James Dashner’s new book. I was really excited to get it. I enjoyed The Maze Runner and I was hoping that this book would be just as good.

It was better.

The Eye of Minds by James Dashner is the first book in the new series The Mortality Doctrine. The second book is planned to be released in autumn of next year (Pulling a Rick Riordan, are you Mr. Dashner?). The book takes place in a sort-of futuristic setting where people are spending more time in the virtual work, VirtNet, instead of the real world. It’s one of those books that takes place mostly in a digital world where there is somebody hacking the system of harming people. I have seen this before, at least twice (though I can’t remember the first time I saw this per say), the second being in the Pendragon book The Reality Bug). But even though I have seen this type of setting, this book felt different to read.

Well, the book started off fairly regular. Somebody spending time in the VirtNet, except something weird happens. It’s the type of formula that has been seen before multiple times in multiple books. The book seemed fairly average until about halfway through, when things started to get good. I can’t say what happened because of spoilers, but things got dark and crazy and the book ended with a twist that had me wishing autumn 2014 would come a lot sooner.

Honestly, I just need to talk about the setting of this book. I feel like that is a huge part about what made this book what it was. It was brilliantly done, what with the line between what was fiction and reality. That line being a very, very thin line at times. The way that Dashner talked about the VirtNet made it feel like it could almost be real – like I could go to the corner of the room and there would be my “coffin” (a sort of container-type thing where a person laid while they accessed the VirtNet) waiting for me. And while sometimes the virtual world felt realistic, other times it was written to be very clearly digital. It was brilliantly done, and the book itself kept you, as the reader, guessing as to what was going on.

It wasn't very difficult book to read. Between books that I've been reading for school and some books I've been reading for fun that were a little more on the complex side, this book was an enormous relief for my mind. No, the plot was not obvious nor was it not complex, but there were no crazy symbolisms and there was no fancy language that was akin to Shakespeare. I managed to finish in only a few hours, which is something I haven’t been able to do with a book for a long while. And it was interesting enough to keep my undivided attention for said hours.

Overall, I’d give this book a four out of five. It was very well written, very interesting, and overall just a good read. I’d recommend this book to people who want a break from extreme fantasy or crazy sci-fi. This book is a bit of a cross between those genres, while keeping a very realistic element to it. Like I mentioned before, it isn't a very difficult book to read, but I wouldn't recommend giving it to someone under the age of 12. There are some dark elements that had even me slinking under my blankets once I turned out the lights.