First “Harry Potter,” then the “Hunger Games”—now, “Divergent” is the next rising force in popular literature, with its movie coming out on March 20 of 2014. The characters in the book live in a dystopia, a perfect world gone wrong.
In this broken society are five factions: Abnegation for the selfless, Amity for the joyful, Candor for the honest, Dauntless for the brave and Erudite for the intelligent. The beliefs of each faction are ruthlessly strict, and leaving one for another is treated as betrayal. Being a Divergent means you cannot be limited to one way of thinking, and it is dangerous because faction leaders want to have complete control over their citizens. The main character, Beatrice, is Divergent.
Author Veronica Roth jumps straight into the action, almost startling the reader with the sudden introduction of romance, which builds up much too quickly for my liking. The novel starts when Beatrice is about to enter a simulation for a test that will tell her which faction best suits her. However, the decision belongs to her.
Main characters in this genre often seem to always manage to escape tricky stiuations, and Beatrice is no different. She escapes death multiple times, and is not caught as a Divergent. She transfers out of Abnegation for Dauntless, which just so happens to become part of a plan to start a war between factions. Will each division remain as always while this war rages? That’s for the next book “Insurgent” to answer.
Roth’s writing is simple, and becomes boring very quickly if you’re not interested in the current plotline. The events were interesting enough for me, but the sentence structure is short and similar, which becomes repetitive early on. I feel like her style is geared more toward children or young readers because of its simplicity. However, several themes and situations in the books are clearly meant for young adult readers.
The level of complexity Roth aims for in her writing just doesn’t work out at times, and her plot is generic and cliché to me. Some scenes were so sappy that they gave me a good laugh. Often, meaningful moments I was excited to read were swept aside in two sentences to pave the way for romantic scenes.
Granted, “Divergent” is Roth’s debut book, so generic, cliché events are to be expected. So much content is packed into the course of the novel, requiring readers to pay attention if they want to remember all the bits and turning points. If you enjoy action with a chunk of romance, then “Divergent”might be a book you want to look into. For me, it just went by so fast, and ended off so suddenly after most of the book consisted of Beatrice’s “maybe I do belong here” that it made no lasting impression.