The Death Cure from Newt’s POV: Crank Palace by James Dashner (spoiler-free review)

Welcome back to Musings of an Arthritic Artist! Today I’m going to be doing a review for Crank Palace, the Maze Runner novella that came out on my sister’s birthday (August 25) last year. 

Seeing as this is a novella, this review is going to be much shorter than my other ones. 

Let’s get into the review!

Crank Palace follows Newt. If you haven’t read The Death Cure, I wouldn’t recommend reading this. It spoils what happens in that book. I’d highly recommend reading at least the original trilogy before reading this. Personally, I think the original trilogy and The Fever Code should be read, since some of Newt’s past is covered in there. 

There are characters referenced in Crank Palace that are pretty much introduced in The Fever Code, so I’d highly recommend reading those before this, if you haven’t already. The Kill Order could be skipped. It’s not really relevant to this novella. 

Newt is my favorite character from The Maze Runner series, so I was super excited when I saw that this novella was going to be released. It took me many months to read it, since it was first only published as an audiobook and my library hadn't gotten it. Then, once the e-book was released, my library got it, and I immediately put it on hold.

I wish it was a bit longer and had tied up some more loose ends. It's only 166 pages long, so it left me feeling slightly disappointed. Only because I kind of wish the original trilogy had been from Newt's perspective instead of Thomas'. I like Thomas, but Newt is much more interesting. I wish we could've gotten a novel from Newt's POV instead of a novella, but I'm glad we got Newt's perspective, as small as the finished product is.

Because this story is so short, I can't say much about it without spoiling the novella and the original trilogy. All I'll say is that this story made me feel a spectrum of emotions. There were times I was happy, though there were times where I was sad. 

It was interesting to read the Author's Note at the beginning where James Dashner talks about the pandemic and the writing process for this novella. It gave the story a different feel, especially when you read about why the world is the way it is in The Maze Runner. Because of the nature of the original series, I wouldn't recommend reading it during a global pandemic. 

There were a couple times during this pandemic (mostly toward the beginning) where I thought about the Flare. There seemed to be a few similarities between the Flare and the virus that surrounds us now. I'm not going to lie, it lightly scared me, so I was slightly apprehensive when I started to read this one.

Overall, I'm glad I did. I gave this 4 stars on Goodreads. I wish it was longer (and had included the reaction of another character, not going to mention who), hence why it wasn't a 5, but I did love reading about what happened to Newt in The Death Cure.

That's it for this post! 

See you Thursday, 

Lexi K🖌