Stormy Night Reads

*May Contain Spoilers*

In Beatrice Prior’s dystopian Chicago, society is divided into five factions, each dedicated to the cultivation of a particular virtue – Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent). On an appointed day of every year, all sixteen year-olds must select the faction to which they will devote the rest of their lives. For Beatrice, the decision is between staying with her family and being who she really is – she can’t have both. So she makes a choice that surprises everyone, including herself.

During the highly competitive initiation that follows, Beatrice renames herself Tris and struggles alongside her fellow initiates to live out the choice they have made. Together they must undergo extreme physical tests of endurance and intense psychological simulations, some with devastating consequences. As initiation transforms them all, Tris must determine who her friends really are – and where, exactly, a romance with a sometimes fascinating, sometimes exasperating boy fits into the life she’s chosen. But Tris also has a secret, one she’s kept hidden from everyone because she’s been warned it can mean death. And as she discovers unrest and growing conflict that threaten to unravel her seemingly perfect society, Tris also learns that her secret might help her save the ones she loves…or it might destroy her.

To start this review off, let me say I didn’t plan on reading this series. I had heard good things and knew the hype was growing, but I’m not that huge on dystopian novels per say. So, I some how inherited a copy of Divergent and with the film releasing, I decided to give it a whirl. And what a great whirl it was too.

Beatrice Prior was born into Abnegation, the selfless faction, and has spent the last sixteen years trying to uphold the ideals of the faction for her family. Wearing drab grey clothes, no games, or pets, and only allowed to look in a mirror once a year, but Beatrice knows that she doesn’t belong and finally the day of her aptitude test arrives and she hopes it will tell her where she does belong. However, the results turn out to be inconclusive. As it turns out, she doesn’t test into a single faction because she shows dominant traits that are found in Erudite (knowledge), Abnegation (selfless), and Dauntless (brave), thus making her part of a rare subset known as Divergent. When her time to choose her faction comes, she chooses Dauntless, where she learns what she is truly made of and what it means to be Divergent.

Divergent ended up taking me by surprise. I liked the idea of the factions and breaking down of society to just five traits, despite the implausibility of this in real life. It would be extremely difficult to conform society like that, into specific categories because of all the different dreams, personalities and feels people have, but Veronica Roth took the main categories you would think of and created a great story, and an even greater heroine.

I felt that Tris helped make this book. She is trying to find herself, surprising herself, she learns who she is and kicks some butt along the way. But Tris is a great example to show that, sometimes you have to take a leap of faith and do what you want, to be what you want to be instead of falling in line and doing only what people expect or want you to do. Tris also isn’t your classic book character, she gets beat up, she’s selfish, she’s manipulative, blunt and vengeful, which allowed me to connect to her more because she felt so human, and not so ‘perfect’. I loved the tension between herself and her fellow initiates, the discrimination she feels for being an abnegation – born, and how tough she grows to be.

Also with that, I liked how Roth was able to sink the nails in and kill off people, even ones that readers may have liked. Some authors can’t kill off their characters, especially secondary or main characters, so I give Roth props for that, especially for a debut novel. The pacing of the book and high adrenaline nature of this book surprised me and turned out to be a great read!