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As a general rule, I don't read a lot of YA fiction. I've read all the big name ones out there: the Twilight series, The Hunger Games, the Percy Jackson series, The Fault in Our Stars, etc. But modern YA has never really been my cup of tea. When it comes to my favorite books, I tend to favor older, classic books like Gone With the Wind (one of my all time favorites), or modern classics of my childhood like Harry Potter.
But lately I've been dying for something new to read. The last two books I read were Ender's Game and Memoirs of a Geisha and neither one really did it for me. So I caved and decided to read Divergent since its movie had just come out and everybody was lauding it as the next Hunger Games.
Wow. What a let-down.
Let's start with our heroine, Tris Prior. Tris was so boring. I had no concept of her personality at any time throughout the book. I can't find words to describe her because she literally had no defining personality traits. You know another YA heroine who also has no strongly defined personality? Bella Swan. That is not a good comparison to make. By the end of the book, all I could say about Tris was that she belonged to the Dauntless faction and she was in love with Four/Tobias.
So the main character was disappointingly bland. How about the plot? Equally as bland. Divergent felt like Ender's Game to me, since the majority of both books revolves around the selecting and training of the initiates, with no real plot coming into play until the very end. In fact, the two are almost identical in this aspect. Ender/Tris have a special quality that sets them apart from their otherwise equally gifted peers. They go to special training where they learn to utilize their abilities. They get picked on by other kids and learn to fight back to prove themselves. Meanwhile, they are being closely supervised by the leaders of their worlds. At the end, their specialness comes into play in a climactic event. My problem with Divergent is exactly the same as my problem with Ender's Game. It's boring. Tris is literally training for 80% of the book. She fights people, goes into the fear simulator, talks to her friends, and romances with Tobias on the side. I didn't feel any stakes, any urgency to the plot.
And this leads me to the flimsy world building of Divergent. The society Tris lives in separates the people into different factions that subscribe to different lifestyles because...I don't know why. In the Hunger Games, it's explained that the Games and the districts are set up by the Capitol as a means of oppression. No solid reason is given for the factions of Divergent. We're told it was because there was a war and each faction represents people who think the war started for different reasons, but that is an extremely shallow reason to separate society like that. Are the people of Divergent really so simpleminded as to think there is ever only one reason for a war starting? Perhaps the real reason for the faction separation is explained in a later book, but if it's not well explained enough in the first book, I just don't accept the world as plausible.
In the end, I finished the book severely underwhelmed. I'd gone into the book knowing next to nothing about it, so I didn't have any expectations and even then the book managed to disappoint me. I honestly think this was a book that was pushed out into the market to ride the Hunger Games wave. The HG parallels in Divergent are immediately obvious. The aptitude test and choosing of a faction=reaping; the Dauntless born=Career tributes; both settings are post-apocalyptic America; Jeanine=Coin, and of course Tris=Katniss. I think with more work Divergent could have been something great, but it fell short, and I don't think I'll ever read it again.
