K-SCORE: 31
Author: Veronica Roth
“Roth can condense all faction on faction friction into a fight in the street with firearms”
Spoilers: Major
Divergent certainly isn’t a high-quality novel, but it’s honestly not as bad as I anticipated, really fast-paced, occasionally entertaining, with a decent, if familiar, premise. The dystopian Chicago with five factions living in a segregated society, where you're exceptional if you have a mind prone to more than one of amity, erudite, abnegation, dauntless, or candor, is a fine concept for a YA book mostly targeted towards female readers. Though it’s not my taste to have a book written in the first person from the perspective of a sixteen to seventeen-year-old girl, and especially not my taste to have a book in the present tense, I got over those things.
“At the very least, could someone have adjusted the faction names so they’re all nouns?”
What I didn’t get over is the sloppy characterization and really sloppy plotting at the end of the novel. Beatrice didn’t charm me, is often striking out foolishly, and seems to be driven by spite more than selflessness, courage, or intelligence as her psyche profile indicated she should be. Four / Tobias isn’t as bad, but constantly makes it seem like he has lots of inside info on what’s really going on in their society that he just doesn’t have. Let that be a lesson to you girlies; your tall, darkly mysterious, very-slightly-older boyfriend doesn’t actually have provocative answers to those things he’s been keeping from you. He just wants to pilfer your panties.
The problems most destructive to the novel are revealed in the final hundred pages. Right at the end of Beatrice integrating into her world and learning of corruption in the various factions, all kinds of meaningless hell brakes loose, bringing an end to minor character arcs by turning them into mindless zombies (I think it was a brain microchip that was activated…) or by killing them thus Roth can condense all faction on faction friction into a fight in the street with firearms. The only lasting thing that matters about the first three-hundred pages and bulk of the story is that Beatrice is special for being divergent and she and the handsome boy she falls in love with are able to join forces to fight overt tyranny and evil.
Veronica Roth needed to rewrite it a couple times before it got picked up, represented, published, and made into a movie. At the very least, could someone have adjusted the faction names so they're all nouns? I guess Roth didn't like the sound of Erudition and Dauntlessness, but couldn’t come up with any other obscure synonyms for intelligence and courage.