Um, owwwww.

If Newt is your favorite character or has made any impact on you throughout the series, this will make you cry.

The way you watch his slow descent into madness as he tries to help reunite a mother and daughter to give him a sense of purpose before his untimely death is beautifully crafted and one of the best things I've ever read.

Definitely recommend. ( )

*Creys with feels and immense love!* ( )

I quite enjoyed the Maze Runner series by James Dashner and looked forward to reading the novella, Crank Palace. The story opens as Newt, suffering from flare, worries that, if he stays with his friends, he might hurt them. He decides to turn himself into one of the containment centres known as the Crank Palace. On the way, he meets Keisha, a young woman with her son, Dante, who tries to convince him that, as bad as flare is, the Crank Palace is even worse. But, as they talk, they are picked up by the soldiers and interred in the Palace. As Newt succumbs to the flare, Keisha helps him deal with it and he even finds a place for himself inside the camp...that is, until his new friends devise an escape plan.

I enjoyed Crank Palace but I felt like the story should have been longer. It just seemed that too much of the story was taken up by Newt's crank episodes, not that this was a bad thing as it let us see what the disease was like from a sufferer's point of view but I would have liked more about his relationship with Keisha and Dante as well the other people in the camp. Still, if you are a fan of the series, it was nice to get more of the story from Newt's perspective.

( )