Last week I read the divergent by veronica roth. The first two courses, Divergent and Insurgent had been out for a two years(ish) and a year(ish) respectively, while the third book Allegiant was released October 22nd. The series is set in a dystopian interpretation of Chicago and fit in with my current project of reading various dystopias so I figured I couldn’t argue with the timing and decided to read all three books. The young adult series has snugly landed Veronica Roth on top of the best-seller list, but I have to suppose I wasn’t terribly impressed with the trilogy as a whole.

 

I enjoyed the first book, Divergent and thought it showed a lot of promise. There seemed to be some interesting world building, and the main character, Tris, was absorbing and engaging (and not obnoxious and whiny like a few other YA protagonists I can think of.) I was never a fan of the romance in this series. Tris becomes romantically involved with Four – also called Tobias – who she first meets because he is her tutor. Now, some people might not consider this too big of a problem as the age difference among the characters is only two years, but seeing as how most of my students (when I was a teaching assistant for introductory microbiology) were within two years of my age I have to disagree. Dating your children is problematic for a lot of reasons, and it was a big block for me to get over in the story. There were a few other minor things which bothered me in the first book, I thought the pacing was too fast and there were some issues with realism when people received physical injuries, but most high-action books/movies/video online games have issues in those segments, so I let it go.

 

Unfortunately, the things I liked about Divergent didn’t get carried through the series very well and Insurgent and Allegiant produced more and more problems as the series went on. I fully admit I am somewhat predisposed to dislike the principle of this series. This isn’t a cautionary tale like many of the classic dystopias, but if it was the Divergent series would be warning people about scientists and scientific advancement. Although the author seems to back off of this position a little bit in the third book, the majority of the bad guys in the story are scientists and most of the conflict results from various future tech, and nobody (including me) likes to believe they are inherently evil based on their profession. Additionally, anytime a piece of science is explained, it’s done poorly. The plot of Allegiant revolves around human universe and requires an explanation of genetics. Large portions of this explanation are straight up wrong, and genetics isn’t exactly complicated science either. So yeah, a “science fiction” series which is anti-science is definitely not the best thing for me to be reading, and may have biased my view.

 

That said, I think there are several fundamental problems with the series on the writing front. First, I felt the second two books were fairly sloppy and needed to go through at least one more round of search phrases. The second book in particular had a problem with visible holes in the timeline where scenes were deleted, while the third book had the face-to-face problem and could have lost 100 pages without a big impact to the plot.

 

Second, the world designing which I enjoyed in the first book was constantly being tweaked throughout the series to the point where things ceased to make sense. Retroactively applying the world described in Allegiant to Divergent creates sheer plot holes in Divergent where there weren’t any before. I felt like the author was relying too much on world building to create twists and ended up rotating herself right out of coherent world continuity.

 

Third, the percentage of the characters are not very well-developed. The main character, Tris, and several of the major villains have their motives extensively detailed, and Tris in particular fights an interesting psychological battle with a sex toy over the course of the series. But most of the minor characters are woefully underdeveloped, and large portions of the population tend to act as the plot tells them too, and not in a natural or convincing manner. The author appears to have particular issues with portraying male characters realistically, and I felt the most prominent male characters, Tobias, Marcus, Peter, and David were all forced to act against the characters established for them in order to provide resolution for the series. Also, whenever Tris finds another characters motivations baffling she tends to shrug her deltoids and say “that guys weird” and yes, it is always a guy. I know the opposite gender is confusing to most sixteen year olds, but it still made the gender dynamics in the trilogy awkward when half of the characters get motive for their actions and half of them get shrugs.

 

Those are some of my feelings on the Divergent trilogy. I liked the first book, and thought it showed promise, but the second two books really fell flat for me. I’m glad YA has seen an increased readership in previous years and hope it encourage more people to read, but the Divergent trilogy isn’t a series I would refer to other avid readers, I think it has too many problems overall.

 

One last note, and this may be a simple spoilery so if you haven’t read the series and plan to you may want to skip this last paragraph. The ending of Allegiant is meant to be sad and has ignited a lot of controversy with fans of the series. I’m not inherently opposed to what happens at the end of the book, and given the roots of dystopia as a genre, (Brave New World and 1984 are seriously depressing reads, A Clockwork Orange has revolting levels of violence, The Handmaid’s Tale is intended to inspire fear, etc) I felt it was accurate. However I felt it was poorly executed and poorly foreshadowed. Particularly David’s role made little sense to me and I felt it was very out of character for him. Although I didn’t suffer from the crippling sadness and sense of betrayal which feels to be characteristic of many hardcore Divergent fans, I wasn’t terribly impressed by it either.

 

If anyone who has read the group or wants to read the series would like to consider I’ll be happy to elaborate more on my opinions.