Divergent

I read this on recommendation from a friend. It was the first of his three recommendations, so at least now I know not to read the other two. I recommended him [b:Too Like the Lightning|26114545|Too Like the Lightning (Terra Ignota, #1)|Ada Palmer|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1443106959s/26114545.jpg|46061374] in exchange, as it is also set some hundred years in the future, people also organize into non-geographic factions, and it is also written in a first person perspective. I expect he will be as freaked out by my recommendation as I was by his!

My concern with Divergent even as he recommended it was that I expected it to be typical young adult "high school=universe" stuff. I mean I have read a few Harry Potters and Hunger Games, and it is not necessarily bad, but not something I am drawn to. He reassured me it was nothing like that.

But it is totally like that. An extremely unlikely world setup where you have to make your most important choice at 16. A violent crazy dystopia where 16-year-olds anyway act like they do today. Wikipedia tells me the book also concludes with teens from the class taking all critical roles in the crisis, including the main character saving the world.

I stopped reading about 120 pages in. Not because of the young adult cliches. Not even because of the super-weak world building. I quit because of the parts where Divergent deviates from the cliche. Surprisingly for a young adult novel, Divergent advocates for a very unusual set of values. Shooting guns makes you brave. Torturing children builds their characters. Brave people let their friends get tortured. Refusing to beat up children shows a weakness of character. Only cowards avoid risking their lives for no reason twice a day. Doing manual labor or driving a bus is worse than death. Later on the book apparently reveals that knowledge turns you evil too.

I do not mind a novel with a first-person character with a peculiar moral code. To be perfectly honest, Mycroft Canner is not exactly innocent either. It can serve all sorts of interesting purposes. I am somewhat bored even of first-person characters that have a cliche moral code. But it does not seem like it serves any purpose here. I think the author's judgements just leak through. It seems I prefer authors with relatively cliche morals.

There is also a super strong romantic plot. Strong in the sense that these two (teacher and 16-year-old student) lock eyes in every scene and get closer to each other by about an inch per page. The plot is so strange to me. There are two teachers who are kind of jerks: "Four" and Eric. The heroine immediately falls for "Four", but hates Eric. I was genuinely confused by what caused this. "Four" I think has piercings in his eyebrows while Eric has them in his ear. That could be an explanation.

Other reviews mention how little research is demonstrated in this book. Heck, I wonder if Roth has even seen a person jump off a moving train.



(Sorry for the repost. I accidentally deleted my review. I was just trying to remove this book from my to-read shelf...)

I guess the best thing I can say about Divergent is that it's not quite as dumb as I thought it would be. In conclusion, not everyone is only Brave, Smart, Kind, Selfless OR Honest, it's just that everyone agrees that only one of those choices is the highest priority, except for Mary Sue Tris (and Her mother, her boyfriend and a bunch of other random people) who wants to be selfless and brave. Also, these are very narrowly defined, so if you want to be Selfless, you have to be so selfless that you don't even look at yourself in a mirror or wear anything other than gray and if you want to be brave you have to engage in physical combat, live in a compound built of precarious ledges, jump on to moving trains and get tattoos. There is no other way to be brave. Also, apparently society fractured this way to prevent violence and murder never exists anymore because...reasons.

So, yes, super dumb premise. I did like the idea of people self-segregating into value-based societies that are more important than vertical relationships, though. It was kind of fun to explore and I wish it had been filled out a little more to discuss in parallel the way that the internet and class distinction is segregating people by political belief in actual real life.

Also, the book was readable and fast-paced, even though kind of nothing happened. But I won't be moving on to the next book (unless I also find that for $2 at the used bookstore): I found none of the characters to be more than caricatures and I don't have a lot of faith that the world building isn't going to sucl.

A futuristic, post-apocalyptic Chicago is where the dystopian world of Divergent is set; where everyone is divided into five factions. At 16 you are required to take an aptitude test; this will determine which faction you are best suited for. Abnegation are selfless, Amity are peaceful, Candour are honest, Dauntless are brave and Erudite are intelligent. Following the aptitude test comes the Choosing Day (terrible name) where you are required to pick which faction you wish to belong to based on your score and personal preference. For some, like Celeb Prior this means giving up his family and moving from Abnegation to Erudite.

The novel, Divergent follows Beatrice Prior (later known as Tris) who is one of those rare people who have to hide the fact that the aptitude test was inconclusive. In this world she is known as divergent and would be considered an outcast and a danger to society if this was to come out. Tris’ test shows she has an aptitude towards three factions; Dauntless, Erudite and Abnegation. She picks Dauntless where she is trained up to be courageous and reckless, tools she believes maybe useful if her test scores ever come out.

I read this novel as a social critique; the idea of cliques and groups taken to the extreme. You know what I’m talking about; society likes to create rivals, in sports teams, smart phones, gaming consoles, etc., but more importantly when it comes to DC verse Marvel comic’s social-political stands. In this world the Abnegation are the governing body, since they are the selfless they are tasked with looking after everyone. However the Erudite are conspiring to take control, and a step that they believe will advance the world both socially and technologically.

This makes the novel sound more complex that it actually is; in reality I found that Veronica Roth liked to wave the symbolism in the readers face forcing them to take notice. It is like a child who is proud at what she has produced; jumping up and down and explaining everything detail over and over again in the hopes that we will think she is brilliant. The symbolism is prominent in the story, she didn’t need to try and draw extra attention to it. Most readers are smart enough to figure it out and those who don’t are only interested in the plot.

Take the title of the novel and the factions, if you look at abnegation, amity, candour, dauntless, erudite and divergent in the dictionary you pretty much how the entire book worked out already. However Roth reminded us again and again what each word meant. Reminds me of that old writing tip ‘show, don’t tell’. While this is not always true, I feel within the context of Divergent, it would have been a better solution.

There are a lot of interesting themes within the novel and I really wish Roth had let people discover them on their own; I don’t like having everything pointed out to me. The whole concept of social structures and classes would have given a literary theorist in the school of Marxism a lot to work with. There are other themes including courage verse recklessness, power, choices, secrets and even guilt that made the novel bearable.

While the novel has a protagonist fighting against a totalitarian state, the book is full of Christian themes and concepts. At times you can see Abnegation being depicted as weird/cult-like faction in the back drop of a controlling society but then they come through as righteous and merciful. There is a Christian misconception that stems from the Age of Enlightenment, which seems relevant in some radical churches that still believe that intellectualism is a dangerous thing. This comes across in the novel as well as some other Christian ideals. Veronica Roth states she is a Christian but has also claimed that Divergent is not a religious novel. She even believes that most Christians would consider the novel to be profane. It is unclear if Roth is an advocate for intellectualism or warning the reader of its dangers.

Yet another issue I found with Divergent was the characters and world building felt a little flat; I think Roth spent too much time explaining everything that the plot and the setting suffered. I didn’t care what happened to any of the characters; in fact thought they were all two dimensional, which is possibly the case with most of the characters. The idea of each faction just acting like a giant cookie cutter, forcing everyone to fit into that mould is clear. The divergents (I’m not going to name them) should have been richer, more fleshed out characters. The dystopian world borrows heavily from 1984 and The Hunger Games although it sometimes forgets this and reverts back to a more generic present day world. Then realising the book has gotten off track reverts to borrow again from previous dystopian novels.

Finally I would like to focus a little on the feminist qualities of Divergent, since reading The Fictional Woman this seems to be an area of focus for me. The concept of a woman trying to figure out her place in the world is a positive step for equality; however Divergent also reverts to two old archetypes that need to stop. I’m talking about the idea of a wise intelligent older woman being depicted as a witch or evil character and the female heroine needs to have a female enemy. Divergent does tackle the idea of what happens to a woman when she becomes more successful than the men she is competing against, and while it is not pretty it is a very real issue that needs to be looked at more often.

I would have liked this novel a lot more if the message was subtle and ambiguous; I just feel like everything got over done. As a reader I like to look for the messages but if the author hits me over the head with it and then proceeds to explain everything I lose interest. Dystopian fiction has a unique ability to tackle social issues and just because a book is aimed for a young adult audience doesn’t mean they need to be everything explained to them. I have to wonder how many YA lovers read the book for the themes rather than the plot. I suspect the majority of them read for the story and they probably prefer not to be stepped through themes either. If Veronica Roth left the themes in place and focused on the plot, this may have been a better book.

This review originally appeared on my blog; literary-exploration.com/2014/06/29/divergent-by-veronica-roth/

actual vote: 4.5 stars

per far quadrare tutte le mie domande, mi sono spoilerata Allegiant. quando sono in modalità "devo-sapere" ho bisogno di risposte e nessuno può fermarmi, a meno che il libro non sia ancora stato pubblicato.
risolti i miei dubbi, è stato un libro bellissimo e assolutamente consigliato. forse è un distopico un po' violento per essere uno YA e per fortuna l'inizio della storia d'amore non ha occupato la trama principale riducendolo a una storia d'amore teen. per me la fase del primo innamoramento è passata, quindi la lettura mi risulterebbe un po'patetica.
se non considero gli spoiler che ho letto, però, al libro manca qualcosina. avrei voluto saperne di più del contesto, di come si arriva alla suddivisione in fazioni.. magari il tutto spiegato in un prologo.
a parte questo, non vedo di leggere Insurgent e le storie brevi su Quattro, perché questo primo libro mi ha risucchiato, mi ha letteralmente drogato :)

Espero que el hecho de que se trate de una distopía no te eche para atrás a la hora de elegir este libro como posible lectura, porque si empiezas a leerlo, con total seguridad, no podrás parar hasta que llegues a la última página.
Verónica Roth nos presenta un Chicago tan diferente, tan sumido en una organización férrea que puede incluso llegar a sorprender su funcionamiento y la existencia de 5 facciones tan diferenciadas entre sí. La premisa de "la facción antes que la sangre" es llevada a cabo de forma tan extrema algunas veces que te preguntas si los personajes algunas veces han perdido su cordura o si lo que te enseñan marca de una forma tan acentuada tu forma de ser hasta llegar a ser una mera imagen de lo que otros ya fueron con anterioridad.
Tris, nuestra protagonista, comienza un viaje no solo de discernimiento, sino de autoconocimiento y reconozco que más de una vez tuve miedo de que algo le pasase por el hecho de ser Divergente.
La entrada de Cuatro en el juego, como un ángel guardián que cae bajo el hechizo de Beatrice es el punto perfecto para darle a la novela el amor necesario, que en ningún momento entorpece el desarrollo de la misma.
Sin duda, es un libro que merece ser leído, sobretodo ahora que la adaptación cinematográfica se encuentra tan cerca de ser entrenada.
Yo ya he decidido a quién le soy fiel. ¿Y tú?
http://www.letrasenlasnubes.blogspot.com.es/