This first book is Divergent by Veronica Roth, a dystopian novel about 16 year old Beatrice finding her place in the world. In this world, society has been split into five different factions, each one with a core value that its people live by. Each year, the 16 year olds of all factions decide what faction they will live with for their adult lives. Some choose to stay in their home factions, while others choose a different path.
One of the things I liked most about this book is the consistent dynamic between the different factions. The five faction values are honesty, selflessness, bravery, intelligence, and peacefulness. While the different factions live in different areas of the city, the children all go to school together until they reach 16 years old. While in school, it seemed like the factions were more like cliques in the school. However, once the teens chose which factions they would go with and the initiation began, the characters still stayed true, in one way or another, to their faction's belief system. This made the many characters easier to distinguish from one another as well as give a sort of interpersonal hurdle for Beatrice to overcome. While this is a dystopian novel and there are bigger problems in the world than just teenage drama, the tension between factions kept the book, for me, from getting too serious and kept it away from feeling like a long training montage portion of an action movie. Also, it speaks to a deeper theme of the book that, no matter what your reasons are for leaving home, you always carry your past with you. There were times in the book where Beatrice (who grew up in the selflessness faction) would have a gut reaction to a situation and would often say what she was feeling without thinking first and the other teens would make comments about how that is typical of someone from her faction to think that way. And Beatrice makes those generalizations as well about other factions. Overall, I found the faction basis of this world in this story to be interesting and was glad to see that it was, at later points in the book, used to further the plot and wasn't just used to insert clique drama into a dystopian world.
Over all, I really enjoyed this book and it was a quick read. However, I had a hard time moving past the point that this book felt extremely similar to the Hunger Games series. I found myself drawing similarities between the two in the following ways:
1: Both are dystopian teen fiction set in a future United States
2: Both separate what is left of society into divisible sections with a clear explanation as to what each section of society is responsible for
3: Both feature a female protagonist who leaves her home and learns to fight
4: Both see the protagonist go from the underdog to the leader
5: Both have extensive use of technology that the protagonist has to fight against in order to survive
There were other similarities that jumped up in specific scenes, but the above five are the main ones that stuck with me and that I can mention without spoiling much. This isn't to say that Divergent is just a copy of The Hunger Games, they discuss different themes and explore different aspects of their respective dystopian landscapes, but the similarities are there and they were just a little too distracting for my tastes. And this could be because I just finished the second Hunger Games book about a month ago and haven't read anything in between. I also thought maybe these are just the themes of the genre of dystopian fiction and this is a relatively new and trendy genre at the moment so it is getting a lot of attention. I'm sure the same sort of general parallels could be drawn between two science fiction books or two detective fiction books. It was just, for me, in this particular reading, the similarities were a bit distracting and took away from my immersion in the story.
Divergent - Veronica RothA fast paced, dystopian teen novel that holds your attention throughout the story.
487 pages
Rating: 4/5. Everything I wanted from a dystopian teen novel with a few extra themes for thought that I didn't expect.
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