Rachel Pennington

The Gray Man is a hit man, who wears only gray, and was instructed to find the Greywaren, an item that can steal items from dreams and carry them out to the real world. He raids Monmouth Manufacturing, Gansey's home where Ronan stays, and discovers nothing that he needs for his search. His employer, Greenmantle, calls him, at minimum, once a week, to catch up on the Gray Man's progress. The Gray Man realizes that the Greywaren has something to do with Ronan Lynch's family, and follows him around. He sees Ronan with Kavinsky and sees them drag items out of their dreams. Having expected the Greywaren to be a box, the Gray Man is confused. The Greywaren, in fact, is not an item, but a boy. A human. Ronan Lynch is Gansey's best friend, while Gansey is Blue's true love, and Maura is Blue's mother, whom the Gray Man has fallen in love with. Everybody is connected, and he doesn't want to hurt Maura or her family. The Gray Man decides to lie to Greenmantle and tell him that the Greywaren isn't in Henrietta, but Greenmantle doesn't believe him. Greenmantle does research on the Gray Man, and finds out that the Gray Man's true name is Dean Allen. Greenmantle informs the Gray Man of his knowledge, and tells the Gray Man: "I want the Greywaren by the 4th of July, or I will send your brother to fetch you." The Gray Man knows his own brother well, and realizes that this is a dangerous game to play. He must run away from Henrietta, and leave everyone behind, including Maura, his love, and the Greywaren, Ronan Lynch...

Adam runs away from the retreat with Gansey's family. He's been having visions of dead people walking around and reaching out to him, begging for help. This seems to be a result of Adam's sacrificing himself to Cabeswater and the Henrietta ley lines. Adam travels 15 miles away from the Gansey's house and only later remembers Gansey's number. When Gansey picks up the phone, he is relieved, distressed, and angry. What was Adam doing wandering on his own 15 miles away?! Gansey and his family go to pick up Adam, and the entire ride home, Adam is silent. When they arrive at the house, Adam apologizes for any inconveniences he's caused, and goes up to the room he's staying in. Gansey wants to know what Adam was doing, so he goes up to speak with him. Adam and Gansey argue, and Gansey gets hurt by how selfish Adam acts. When Gansey and Adam arrive back in Henrietta, Adam goes to see Blue, who finally tells him that he's not the one she's meant to be with. Adam is broken, and goes on his own to Cabeswater. He is Cabeswater's source of transportation and communication. Adam goes to where Cabeswater would normally be, which has long disappeared from all of Kavinsky's dream-thieving, and feels the immense loss of energy there. Adam describes this loss of energy as "frayed wires". Meanwhile, as Adam is out exploring Cabeswater's remnants and trying to fix it, Blue calls Gansey and asks him to take her somewhere, anywhere but where she is. He picks her up, and they drive until it's dark outside. Gansey realizes how attracted he is to Blue and wishes he could kiss her, but knows he can't, for she has been told that if she kisses her true love, he'll die. Although Gansey still doesn't know he's the one she's meant to kill with a kiss. 

Joseph Kavinsky, a long-known enemy of Gansey and his friends, knows how to take items from his dreams; a talent that he and Ronan have in common. Kavinsky uses up more of the power of Cabeswater and the ley lines with every item he takes from his dreams, and Ronan realizes he needs to stop him, once Kavinsky trains him how to perfect the skill. Kavinsky tells Ronan he needs to be a thief, to sneak into the dream world, take what he wants, and sneak back out. Ronan originally needed Kavinsky's help with learning how to take specific and intended things from his dreams because he wrecked Gansey's Camaro, and Ronan needs to get one exactly like it from his dreams. Although Kavinsky was extremely helpful in training Ronan and helping him figure this problem out, he still intends for Ronan to become his partner in crime and create a dream world. The ley lines are slowly being drained of power and Ronan thinks he might have an idea of how to fix it, but he'll have to converse with his dead father to do it...

Blue & Adam started dating, but Blue knows that she's meant to be with Gansey, and she's meant to kill him. Gansey is starting to realize that he kind of likes Blue, but doesn't know anything about the prophecy that states that Blue is supposed to kill him with a kiss. Blue, Gansey, Adam, Ronan, & Noah explore more for Glendower, the long lost Celtic king. Noah suggests that he & Blue kiss, if she wants to know what it's like, because Blue can't kill Noah since he's already dead. Gansey takes Adam to his family's house for a retreat because he needs to help his mom run for Congress, and Adam needs sponsors in order to get into a good college...

Blue Sargent is a daughter of a psychic, Maura Sargent. Everyone in family is a psychic. Unfortunately, she was not born with the same talent. Instead, she just enhances her family members' abilities whenever she's around them. Her mother's two best friends, Calla & Persephone, are also psychic. Neeve, Blue's half aunt, is also visiting and living in their house. Currently, they have approximately 342 people living in their house with them, but only a few of the family are mentioned in the book. Maura, Calla, & Persephone have foreseen that Blue will kill her true love with a kiss. When Blue turns 16, she meets him. His name is Gansey. Richard Gansey III. Gansey and his 3 friends, Ronan, Adam, & Noah, all go to Aglionby High School, in other words, the rich kid school. Gansey has a good family, they all love him and he is very loved by all of his friends. He's mysterious, and will always shoot for what he wants most and will not give up until he has it. Ronan is straight-forward about everything he says and will always say exactly what he feels, unless he's sad or hurt somehow. His father was murdered by a secret and he knows what the secret was. Noah is extremely quiet and always speaks in riddles. He'll never explain exactly what he means and will just smile wickedly when he's guessed the truth about someone without any clues or hints. Adam is poor, the only poor one of their group, and wears hand-me-down clothing to school. His father is an abusive drunk and he is crazy for Blue. Unfortunately, Blue already knows that Gansey is her true love and will end up dead because of her, because she's seen his dead spirit from 12 months in the future...

Thomas stays in the white room for two weeks, Teresa talks to him once and tells him that WICKED says that he’s been infected with the Flare virus and cannot leave the room until further notice, then Thomas tells Teresa to leave him alone and stop talking to him. One day, the Rat Man (Jensen, a man who works for WICKED and always would and continues to consult Thomas and the rest of the Gladers about their next trials) comes to the room, and tells Thomas that he is their final candidate for the Cure for the Flare virus, but Thomas does not want anything to do with any more of WICKED’s plans for him. Jensen assures him that he will be getting his memories back, and will also be losing all abilities to communicate with Teresa in his mind. He also tells Thomas that it is up to him to decide if he wants his memories back. Finally, he carefully tells Thomas that Newt has the Flare virus, and is not immune to it. Thomas thinks that not being able to connect with Teresa sounds like a wonderful idea, but does not want his memories back. He tells himself that, no matter what, he will not get his memories back. He is scared for Newt, and is slightly swayed in finding a cure for his close friend. He is then let out of the room, and led to a bigger room with the rest of the remaining Gladers and Group B, where Teresa tries to talk him into getting his memories returned. A list is given of who is and is not immune to the Flare virus, some people crying, some staring off into space. Thomas, Minho, and Newt decide they will not allow their memories to be returned. Thomas sees Brenda at the end of one of the beds where the people getting their memories back will lay. She yells his name, runs to him, and hugs him. In his ear, she whispers to him only to trust her and Chancellor Paige, but he does not understand what this means. Jensen screams at Brenda to return to her post the whole time, and she apologizes and said she could not help it for she had not seen Thomas in so long. Thomas, Minho, and Newt then try to escape the big room, but end up getting taken to a small dorm where they must stay in captivity away from the others, still healing from having their memories returned. Eventually, Jensen and a few guards come back and say that Newt, Minho, and Thomas must have their memories returned anyways, even though they previously gave the 3 a choice. Thomas gets separated from Newt and Minho, and is taken into a room where he will be given his memories. Brenda is there, and Thomas remembers what she whispered to him. Thomas is nervous, but Brenda winks at him when the guards behind him are not looking. Thomas then understands, and Brenda gets a syringe full of sleeping medication, and tells him to relax. She then “trips” on something and stabs one of the guards with the syringe, injecting the sleeping medication into him and making him collapse in confusion. Thomas then takes out the other guard and steals her Launcher, a gun that shoots grenades that explode electricity.

The Gladers walk farther until they run into Teresa and Group B with spears and sharp knives. Teresa whispers to Thomas to trust her, then Group B kidnaps Thomas, and drag him along the ground in a bag until they get to an uphill slope, where he has to be carried. When the girls of Group B are out of sight of the Gladers, they let Thomas walk the rest of the way to their camp, and never before has he enjoyed walking so much. When they reach the camp, he is tied to a tree and left to fall asleep. He tries to convince the girls that killing him is a bad idea, that it is part of the test, but they do not quite know who to believe. Teresa goes out to explore places, and the girls have a conversation about whether they should kill Thomas or not. When Teresa comes back, the girls convince Teresa that they should not kill him. But as they walk towards the Safe Haven, Teresa forces Thomas to follow her and Aris. Aris is a part of the murder, and Thomas feels betrayed, hurt, and scared. He follows them, and they push and beat him until he goes into a green room, with a concussion from Teresa’s spear. Teresa and Aris are together and act as though they are dating, as though they have always been best friends. Thomas is both emotionally and physically hurt, and uses all the energy he has left to push back, but ends up being trapped in the green room anyway. The room sprays gas at him, and he passes out, waking to an open green room, with Teresa and Aris waiting for him. He is still alive, and he hates Teresa for what she has done to him. Aris looks like he is the most embarrassed person in the world as Teresa explains to Thomas that they had to make him feel completely betrayed and take him to the room or WICKED would kill him. They walk down to join Group B and the Gladers, and Thomas explains to Minho and Newt what they did to him. Minho and Newt are furious, and want to kill Teresa. Thomas does not know how he feels about the situation. Soon, giant pods come floating down to the sand, and human-like creatures slip out of them. The creatures have orange, bulbous-like spheres on every joint and all over their backs and chests. There is about one creature for each person to fight. A storm brews and starts raining on them all. Thomas fights his creature, and soon realizes that with every orange sphere he breaks, the slower and weaker the creature gets. He can only hope that others have realized the same. Soon, when majority of the creatures are defeated, only a few left to crawl after them, lightning starts striking, and Thomas, Jorge, Brenda, and Teresa run to take shelter in one of the pods. It is completely dark inside, and lightning starts to strike the pod. The pod can only take so many hits before they’re all burnt to crisps. They soon hear a loud noise outside the pod, and open it up to see what is going on outside. A berg, a giant flying machine like the one that rescued Thomas after being shot, is floating outside, waiting for them to board. Thomas and the rest race to reach the flying ship, and almost miss it, but everybody makes it inside safe and sound. One of the people on the ships, a man with red hair, demands that Thomas tell them who Brenda and Jorge are, and why they brought them along. He demands that Thomas decide which one to keep and the other gets thrown outside into the storm. Thomas picks Brenda, hoping that the people of WICKED would then toss Jorge aside instead, but he is wrong. He attacks just as Brenda is about to be thrown out of the ship, and states that there will be no more deaths. The man with the red hair smiles, and tells them to get comfortable. Thomas falls asleep on a couch, but in his dream he hears Brenda in his head. She says to him to be ready, because things are going to get very bad. He then wakes up in a big white room, with nothing but a desk that he can not even touch.

When Thomas, Minho, and Newt, the 3 main leaders of the Gladers, open the secret door, they are nearly blinded and burned by the sun. They have been in the dark for so long that their eyes require adjusting, but also the sun has grown much much hotter over the years. They have to unpack everything and pull sheets out to use to cover their heads. They walk out into the desert with the hot sun, and soon walk for the whole day. They go to sleep with the sheets over their heads, but soon a storm starts to brew. There is no rain, only tornadoes and lightning. Everybody is afraid, but soon the wind dies down, and they run towards a building. They see a girl with long flowing black hair come out of the building, and Thomas tells the rest of the Gladers to wait there and that he will go talk to the girl, in secret hopes that it is Teresa. It does end up being Teresa, and she was only pretending to not remember him, she cries and hugs him, and tells him to run. He listens, and feels horrible for it, but he convinces the Gladers to run away from her before she can hurt them. She is being controlled by WICKED, as well. The Gladers run from her and eventually come across a boy named Jorge. He says he is “in charge of these parts”. Thomas asks to speak to him alone, and Jorge agrees and leads him to a dark room where they talk. Thomas convinces him to lead the Gladers to the “Safe Haven” that WICKED told them about. Jorge agrees, but says he only wants to bring one other person with him, Brenda. Jorge says that Brenda is the most competent and the best of the fighters in the group of Cranks that he leads. Jorge also says that they need to eat before doing anything, and sends the rest of the Cranks away to where nobody will hear what is going on, and be angry that Jorge is leaving without them. Jorge and Brenda then lead the Gladers to where they store food, and feed the hungry Gladers. While Brenda, Jorge, Thomas, and the rest of the Gladers eat, Brenda flirts with Thomas and lets him know that she likes him, also previously having kissed him on the cheek. Thomas does not know how he feels about this, for he wants to stay loyal to Teresa, but also thinks that Brenda is very pretty and has a nice personality. He finds himself liking her hugging him and sticking around, and feels guilty for it. Suddenly, as they are eating, the tunnel they are in starts collapsing; the rest of the Cranks found out what was going on and made the tunnel collapse on them in an attempt to kill them. But Brenda and Thomas escape, and start wandering through the tunnels, meeting some far gone cranks on the way. The Cranks try to kill them, but they hide in a small cavern for a while. When Brenda thinks the Cranks are gone, she turns on the flashlight, but the leader Crank is silently waiting for them, and grabs Thomas by the shirt, repeatedly smashing his face against the rock sides of the cavern in attempts to get him out of the cavern. Brenda grabs her knife and stabs the Crank in the hand, tackles him, and makes Thomas kill him. He does, but he is in shock afterward, because he had never killed someone before then. Thomas tells Brenda that he will not kill anyone else, and he just wants to see the sun again. Brenda then leads him out of the tunnels, and eventually they make it to a city filled with partying Cranks. Thomas and Brenda hide in a truck, sleeping for the night. When Thomas wakes up, it is morning, and he sees something glimmering outside the truck. He gets out to go investigate, and it is a plaque just like the ones in the maze. But instead of WICKED, it reads: Thomas, you’re the real leader. He is confused, and Brenda speaks up behind him saying that those are all over the place and she meant to tell him. She doesn’t know what they mean. After they finish speaking, two men and a woman come up to the alley, one of the men has a gun. They threaten Thomas and Brenda into going to their party, and make them drink something that burns their throats on the way down. Next thing they know, they wake up in a dark room with bright lighting on their faces. Thomas wakes up first, and is questioned by the two men and woman, but soon they hear banging and thumping up the stairs, and the men and woman leave to go see what the noise is. Brenda wakes up then, and Thomas and she wait, terrified. Minho and Newt end up coming down, and untying them. They leave the building but just as they get out, the man with the gun runs out and shoots Thomas in the shoulder. He passes out and wakes up several times until finally he wakes up in a room with WICKED employees healing him and making sure he’s okay. He hears them say to each other that the gun was not supposed to be part of the Variables in the test, so they had to make sure he didn’t get infected from that. He then passes out again and wakes up to rarely any pain in his shoulder, back on the ground where he was before. Everyone is surprised and confused, and Thomas does not know how to explain what happened...

Thomas finally got in contact with Teresa, but she had no idea who he was, or why he was in her head. She must have gotten her memory wiped again. Thomas is sad, but he has other things to worry about. The loud bell stopped ringing, and when they got out of the room, the bodies were completely missing, including the stench that went along with them. The Cranks screaming through the windows were also gone, replaced by brick walls and there are no longer any metal bars. Thomas and the rest of the Gladers are confused, but decide that they have nothing better to do than sleep off the confusion. When they awake, there is a strange man in a case in the Common Room, but the case is invisible. Thomas tries to get to him, but ends up smashing his nose against a glass-like surface. The man later tells them that they are infected with the Flare, and must reach a certain point across a desert to get treatment for it. When they leave, they have to walk through dark tunnels for hours, maybe days, and nearly 3 people lose their heads. Thomas saves one of them, but the other 2 are doomed. The one who is saved, they see everything that happens. There is a liquid-like mass of silver, eating away at their face and sticking to their flesh. Thomas and the other boy have to wrench the liquid silver off, and once they do, it morphs into a perfect ball shape, and floats away. The other boys that got killed by this liquid silver lost their heads completely, the silver completely severing their heads from their necks and swallowing it whole. But finally, the Gladers find their way to a dead end, where there is a secret opening.

Thomas and the other Gladers were rescued, or so they think, and head to a hotel-like building with “the people with guns.” They eat pizza and stay the night there, and Thomas and Teresa telepathically communicate, as always. She gets put in a different room from the boys, and Thomas falls asleep, but he can hear Teresa trying to contact him in a dream, and desperately tries to wake himself up so he can respond to her. When he finally wakes up, she no longer responds to him. The Gladers are freaking out around him, they have been awake longer than he has. “Cranks” (people with “The Flare,” a disease that takes over the brain and causes your skin to break out with huge blisters and you basically turn into a psychotic living zombie) are shattering the windows that have bars, and are frantically trying to break into the room where the Gladers are staying. Thomas frequently tries to contact Teresa with his mind, but she never responds. The Gladers break their locked door open, and leave into the hallway. Corpses that have been long dead are hanging by the neck all throughout the hallway. Their stench is overwhelming and Thomas has to fully focus on his thoughts to not release everything he had for dinner the night before. The boys go to Teresa’s room, but instead of her being there, a boy named Aris is there. He explains to the Gladers that he was stuck in a maze with a bunch of girls. He was the only boy. In the maze Thomas was in, Teresa was the only girl. Everything was the same except switched around. The Gladers notice something on Aris’s neck. A black-inked tattoo with the words “Property of WICKED. Group B, Subject B1. The Partner” etched into his flesh. All of the boys soon realize that they have tattoos as well, tattoos that they didn’t have the night before. They were tattooed during the night while they were sleeping. Which is probably why it was so hard for Thomas to wake up. They were all probably drugged when they were given the tattoos, and Thomas could not get himself to awaken. Newt’s tattoo says “The Glue,” while Minho’s tattoo says “The Leader,” and Thomas’s tattoo says “The person that will be killed by Group B.” Thomas is confused and scared, when a loud ringing goes off. The same ringing that would go off in The Glade when a new arrival came to them. Thomas only recognized the sound because it was the sound that echoed across The Glade when Teresa arrived.

Things have gotten really intense in this book! Thomas still does not remember anything, but a girl showed up! Her name is Teresa. She and Thomas have a past that neither one of them can remember. She is in a coma for quite a long time, but finally wakes up and can only remember remembering Thomas. She can speak to him telepathically, but they have not explained why yet. She tells Thomas while in a coma that she “accidentally triggered the ending”. He does not know what that means, and does not tell anybody about her being able to speak to him with telepathy. He just puts it out of his mind until the next day, but what he does not know is what lies in wait for him in the morning. When Thomas awakens, the sky is completely grey. The sun is gone, but there is still light somehow. The Gladers can still see everything clearly. His best friend, Chuck, says that it looks kind of like a ceiling. Thomas then starts wondering if maybe they are trapped in a room that looks like they are stuck in a maze. Later that evening, the walls do not close as they usually do, to keep the Grievers out of their living space. This worries all of the Gladers, because something like this has never happened in the 2 years that they have been there. Everybody is blaming Thomas and Teresa for what is occurring. The Gladers’ leader, Alby, even locks Teresa up in their  jail for a full night, the same night that the doors do not close and the Grievers break in. Thomas is frightened, along with all of the other Gladers. The sky has not changed, still the exact same grey it was in the morning. The maps that the Runners have spent 2 years creating, get burned in the hut they reside in. One of the Gladers certainly does not want to leave. When the Grievers’ noises come closer to the Glade, the Gladers hide in the biggest hut they have, boarding up windows and cracks that might give them away. They make sure there is no light coming from the hut. The Grievers are not very smart, and they have been programmed to only take 1 person every night. Before the “Ending” was triggered, they were not programmed that way. They were programmed to stab or kill any Gladers that were stuck in the maze at night, or if they ran into a Griever during the daylight. Teresa and Thomas have to find a way to keep everyone safe, or soon people will be taken one by one. One person would be taken each night, and Gally, a bully who did not like Thomas from the very beginning, was the first to go.

I am still reading The Maze Runner, and I like it very much. I know more about what is going on and why Thomas is stuck in the Glade. I have almost finished this book, and cannot wait to move onto the second one. The movie came out exactly a week ago, and I liked it a lot! It is not the same as the book in a lot of ways, in my opinion, not as stressful. The Grievers do not look like I imagined them to look, and some of the characters do not look as I had pictured, but other than that and a few changes made in the story line, it is a very good movie. I recommend watching the movie before reading the book if it bothers you when things are not exactly as they should be, because in my experience, you remember what is supposed to happen and if it is not the same better than when you watch the movie first before reading the book. It might be different for others, but that is how I like to see movies and read the books. I was about ⅓ of the way through the book when I went to see the movie, which was a bad idea, I think. I was not sure if some of the things that happened were supposed to happen that way, so I ended up asking my mother a lot of questions while we were in the movie theater, which, of course, annoyed her.

I am reading the book The Maze Runner. So far, it is very interesting, but it makes me emotionally confused. I do not know how to feel about some of the things that have happened or will happen. I like this book a lot, it is very well written and I have only noticed a few spelling errors. Normally just a missing "s" on the end of a plural word, etc. The main character is Thomas. He has lost his memory, and all he remembers is being sent up to the Glade. The Glade is the place that all the boys get sent up to. He came up in a big metal box, and when he climbed out, there were many other boys staring, waiting for him to come out. They called him "Greenie", or in other words, "New Kid" or "Noob". He becomes quite popular after surviving a night in the maze, which has never happened before. Everybody before him who tried that died before the next morning. When he comes back the next morning, alive and healthy, people are shocked, and do not know what to expect from him. They don't know what to think about him. He asks them questions about his new life, but nobody really gives him a straight answer, and that frustrates him. No one in the Glade understands much of anything about where they live or what is happening or why they are there. Everybody had their memories taken away before being sent up to the Glade. It is a very troubling story, and it kind of gets on my nerves that I don’t know why Thomas is there, or how he got his memory erased. It irritates me that I am reading a book I do not understand, but that is also what makes it so intriguing. I would definitely recommend this book to other readers, especially if they liked The Hunger Games, because those series are similar in numerous ways.