Tuesday 20 January 2015

The Divergent Trilogy by Veronica Roth - Review




Good Reads Synopsis
In Beatrice Prior's dystopian Chicago world, 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.

My Thoughts
I’m going to try and make this review as spoiler free as possible, but I’m reviewing the whole trilogy, so I will be discussing what I did and didn’t like about the second and third books as well. I’ll try not to ruin any of the story for you.

Overall, I really enjoyed the whole series, I’ve read a lot of reviews where people hated it or they didn’t like the last book, but I honestly loved it all the way through.

Divergent and Insurgent were really fast paced and easy to get into, I couldn’t put them down! I read half of Divergent in one sitting without even realising I’d read so much. There is always something going on, forcing you to continue reading and there are so many twists and shocks. In the first two books there isn’t a dull chapter. Allegiant, however, was a bit more predictable and there wasn’t as much going on. I really hated that it split the first person point of view between Tris and Tobias. I love a good book with split POV but I thought it was quite badly written. A lot of Tobias’s chapters were quite boring, and the writing style didn’t change so I would forget that I was reading a Tobias chapter and think I was still reading from Tris’s point of view. This could have been done a lot better and I really disagree with having such a change in the last book of a trilogy.

I found it difficult to understand the society in the first few chapters of Divergent. The different factions aren’t really explained clearly and it took me a while to understand what was going on with them all. After the first 100 pages or so it all started to make sense. I loved that in Insurgent we learn more about all of the factions, not just the ones that are most important to the story. I felt like other similar dystopian novels fail on this part, in the Hunger Games there isn’t really a lot of explanation or depth into all of the different districts, but here it feels more like an actual society.

Most of the characters were well developed, I didn’t think there were many “2D” characters that had no meaning or point to them. I loved Tris, I thought she was easily relatable to and I didn’t hate her as much as I’ve hated other YA dystopian characters. She deviated from the typical “strong” female lead and she was shown to have some problems that aren’t seen to be “feminist”. I really liked this; I get tired of seeing the same character in every book.

I’d give the whole series 4.5/5, my favourite book was unquestionably Divergent, it was a strong first novel of a series which really grabbed my attention so I had to read the rest of the books. My least favourite was Allegiant, it wasn’t as interesting as the other two and the split point of view ruined it a bit for me.  I’d definitely recommend this book if you’re thinking of reading it, especially if you love YA dystopian series.





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