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Series: Divergent (Book 2)
Genre: YA Dystopian
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books; 1st edition (May 1, 2012)
Page Count: 544 pages
What I liked: There was a lot of mystery in this book. Lots of deep plots and high tension. I like the twist with Amity and the reason behind the factions. The realism of Tris dealing with grief was very in depth. When Erudite captures her at one point (trying to keep this spoiler free so I’m not telling you why 😉 ), it is very intense and creepy. The studies about her brain are intriguing. I like the arch with her and Christina, and a line between them really touched my heart. The book left off in an intriguing place.
What I didn’t like: I didn’t see Tris grow very much. She just seemed to stagnate and became kind of whiny. I didn’t like her always throwing herself into situations in almost a suicidal way. This author claims to love God, then why didn’t she have Tris seek God or any help for healing? She had an opportunity for it to happen when some Amity were worshiping God, but no Tris just wallowed in her misery with no hope.
She diverged from Tobias so he wasn’t there much for her. Additionally, there was a brief homosexual reference in it, I thought unnecessary. It didn’t help the plot. It just seemed to be injected there for no reason. Concerning writing, Roth bunched up some of her paragraphs and put actions of another character on the same dialogue line as another so I got confused a few times.
Content Cautions: There is of course some action, but not too much gore. What bothered me most was the swearing. H*** was used several times.
In Comparison to the Film: I actually enjoyed the film far better than the movie. The plot was altered to a degree, but in doing so they fixed so many problems I had with the book and added so many amazing elements to it. I really enjoyed the movie. It is one of the few cases where I can say it’s better than the book. You can check out my full review of the movie on Geeks Under Grace.
In conclusion, I was unfortunately disappointed with this novel. I hope the movie mends some of these things.
About the Author:
Veronica Roth is from a Chicago suburb. She studied creative writing at Northwestern University, and wrote DIVERGENT (Katherine Tegen Books, May 2011) and INSURGENT (May 2012). The third and final book in The Divergent Trilogy, ALLEGIANT, will come out on October 22, 2013. In the meantime she will spend endless hours browsing Wikipedia in her pajamas as she eats corn flakes. (Or some other kind of bland breakfast cereal.)
You can find her on Facebook, Twitter, Goodreads and her blog!
With the homosexual reference thing, I'm getting suspicious that authors are being pressured to put these in. (There's one in the third book too.) A lot of times, the authors throw them in willy-nilly with minor characters and something about it feels off. (Also, it seems like half the homosexuals are dead within the book the situation came up in.) I'm not sure if they think they need to do it for diversity or if the publishers are pushing for it.
Yeah. I'm curious about that too.
What's also interesting is it sometimes seems like this kind of thing doesn't come up in the first book of the series. (I'm guessing either the author is worried about sales if the situation comes up in the first book, or maybe there's some suggestion they've been given.)
Perhaps. Thank you for commenting!