Divergent - Veronica Roth

Initial Rating: 7.5/10

Ahh. I don’t know how to do this the right way, and it’s not because I did not enjoy this book. I enjoyed it too much, actually, getting into that tunnel-vision, sole-focus blur of nonstop reading. I had picked it up at 1 AM hoping it would help put me to sleep which failed miserably. I read until 5 AM and then finished the book later that day. It was a thrill, and I loved it.

So why only a 7.5/10?

As much as I know it isn’t fair, though, I can’t help but compare it to two of my other favorite book series, the foremost and obvious being The Hunger Games and the second being Harry Potter. If I had read Divergent before The Hunger Games or had even heard of it beforehand, it would easily have a much higher arbitrary rating here. But, as it is, I feel like I was just getting an (albeit, much appreciated) interim fix for my Hunger Games craving.

Tris is a great character, and she is cut from the same cloth as Katniss Everdeen. As she discovers, she is both selfless and daring, caring and brutal. Whereas the selflessness of Katniss is what inherently drives her to do what she does, the motives behind all of Tris’s actions are the focus. Tris could easily be a slightly inverted, parallel dimension version of Katniss. They are both tough as nails, and it’s always refreshing for me to read the voices of such strong heroines. Both have a battle between their own interests and what’s best for others, and I liked that Tris was honest enough to admit that sometimes she would rather place herself first. Sometimes I want more out of her, though; for someone who supposedly is brave, selfless, and highly intelligent, I wish she would be able to see bigger pictures at times. This is another flaw that she shares with Suzanne Collins’ character. Tris is complex and interesting. I like her.

I do, however, wish that Tris’s parents had been more developed since they are both incredibly fascinating, as well as her brother and his choices. I did enjoy the other initiates and Tris’s interactions with them, particularly Al, in spite of his ultimate fate. And I loved Four. In him, at least, Hunger Games parallels run thin. He was an interesting love interest, and I enjoyed being able to get to know him at the same time as Tris.

While the characters and certain plot elements (trials complete with a rating system, craze-inducing mind control experiments, and, of course, violence (although not so central in this case)) resonate with Hunger Games similarities, Roth’s world and norms ring to me like Extreme Hogwarts Houses. The “Sorting Ceremony” in this case involves total personal choice, and, yes, there are five options instead of four, but the five factions with distinguishing traits and habits have almost immediate parallels. Dauntless = Gryffindor, Amity  = Hufflepuff, Abnegation = a blend of those two, Erudite = Ravenclaw focus on intelligence with Slytherin bad guy motives/ ambition, and Candor = trickier but passable as some mild blend of Ravenclaw rationale and Slytherin brutal honesty. It’s what I can imagine Hogwarts Gone Wild set in future, dystopian Chicago. It’s personality factions taken to the extreme by definition, and the conflicts that arise in Roth’s world are fitting. The insidious Erudite plans are just as cruel as President Snow’s rule in the Capital, if not more so since they are under the guise of righteousness and completely out of the blue.

All in all, yes, I loved it and will be amongst those eagerly awaiting the next two books. It was heart-pounding, heart-wrenching, and just full of heart. But the reason I loved it is because, even though it isn’t exactly predictable, it is familiar to me and a place that I could comfortably enter. Although it is old parts framed into new ideas, the new doesn’t completely overcome the old, making it impossible NOT to draw on comparisons or stand on its own as an original, independent series in my mind. So in spite of my thorough enjoyment of Divergent, I can’t give it more credit.