Review Detail

I’ve read countless dystopian novels, but I find that this was probably my favourite. Divergent not only had a great plot, but is jam packed with emotion; sometimes it’s so sweet that I wanted to cry, while other times I’d feel like screaming, “Don’t you dare do that, Tris. It’s positively the most stupid idea ever!” The characters are perfectly flawed, selfish, and that’s what I love about it. Veronica Roth doesn’t just write about perfect people, instead making them painfully realistic so that the reader may not necessarily sympathize with them but treat them like normal people rather than characters in a book. It’s very liberating to read from a protagonist who would actually admit her mistakes, take it for all it’s worth, and just get on with life instead of thinking of any other thing she probably could do better in that situation. Life has no rewind button, life gives you no second chances. The character of Four was great; he was mean, pushy, a pain in the butt, but in the end it shows that he cared a whole awful lot. He doesn’t meet the typical boyfriend stereotype because he’s not the sweet guy who’d give you flowers and jewelry. (Tris would probably think they’re impractical.) He would instead compliment Tris by making her as tough as she could be, instead of a ‘shrinking violet,’ because he knows that Tris isn’t delicate and fragile. The entire idea of the book was unbelievably original; from the five factors to the simulations to the entire world that we could not begin to understand.