Divergent by Veronica Roth
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
Rating: ★ 1/2 out of 4 Stars
Recommend: The Sorting Hat & Hunger Games as a new series
Pros: The interactivity
Cons: Crazy-cliche dialogue and characters

Summary: As a citizen in futuristic Chicago, your life is depended on which faction you choose; Candor, Dauntless, Abegnation, and Erudite. One girl Beatrice Prior falls into the un-faction category and finds out dangerous secret plans.

Observations: This first book of Roth's series felt like Harry Potter's Sorting Hat on crack. If you're brave or smart you belong in Dauntless or Erudite, respectively. Or you may belong in Abegnation or Candor, if you're selfless or honest. And, there's Amity which is pretty much forgotten about because it's about peacefulness.

But if you don't belong in any faction - which holds more value than your own family - you will belong in Divergent. Members of this group means the government can't control them; they go on living homeless, jobless, without any respectable place in society.

In a high school aptitude test, the one girl who results in Divergent is our main character Beatrice Prior. An original resident to Abegnation, Beatrice grew up selfless. Citizens in this faction wear grey, keep their heads down, and selflessly serve everyone around them no matter how they feel.

After the aptitude test, each student of each faction can choose to stay within their own family, or one of the other factions they scored highest with. Since Beatrice didn't score with any other group, she can feel free to choose.
This mystery binds the book for nearly 500 pages (486 to be exact). Beatrice chooses Dauntless, the group of the brave. She changes her name to Tris to begin her new identity. Herself and other initiates travel around the city by hopping on moving trains, are forced to physically beat each other to a pulp, train with knife throwing, perform through hallucinatory tests where they experience their greatest fears, get tattoos...and so on.

As a reader I couldn't distinctly tell one faction from another. Fellow Dauntless initiates Christina (who was originally from Candor) sounds like Al who sounds like Will (from Erudite) who sound like Beatrice. As a reader it was hard to decipher if Chicago is broken up into actual factions with borders that cannot be trespassed, or are the citizens allowed to commune with each other in public but not privately. The sphere of how these factions interact was all over the map - literally.

Told in first person from Beatrice's point of view, the entire story feels blurred together. There is no clear line between where the true danger lies, no feeling of the other factions, or why we as a reader do not want to be Divergent...when the ending just leads people there anywhere.



The mysterious unrest within Erudite is slowly unraveled. Its leader is raising an army of sorts. Honestly, I was interested in reading this book because of the summary. Once I started I found that my interest lay deeper in that Kate Winslet is going to be in the movie.

Her character Jeanne has perfected a serum with a microchip which has been injected into the people of Dauntless. Besides turning them into robots so a violent killing spree of Abegnation through the streets of Chicago, I couldn't find much of a villain.

The climax is bloody and violent, but the antagonist came off as more of a control freak on a rampage instead of a government member with a master plan. Because of the brutal violence, everyone pretty much becomes factionless. The one fear we are meant to feel from the beginning of the book comes just comes true. I wondered if this would have been better as a second book rather than a first one, so there was much more interest in the factions before they were just hinted at and then their communities torn apart.

Roth is admirable for creating a series that has seemingly hit it big. Along the way of reading Divergent, I began to question which faction I would fall into naturally and which one would I choose to be apart of. On the same level of Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, it has a unique level of interactivity between the words on the page and the reader.

Overall though, looking at the writing, I found it to have really poor world building, cliche prose, and a mix of popular aspects that worked for other series. As it seems to be with every big phenomenon I'm the last to join the bandwagon. Similar to The Hunger Games, I'm completely clueless as to why this too is a colossal hit.