Allegiant
***Warning, this post contains spoilers!!!***
This post is a part of the YA book club blog-hop hosted by Tracey Neithercott. It is intended for people who have already read Allegiant by Veronica Roth. If you have not read Allegiant, I'm going to warn you again. This post contains major spoilers!
This is the third book the Divergent trilogy, and it's hard to talk about it without talking about the other two books as well. To start, I want to say that I liked Divergent a lot. It's probably my favorite dystopian YA.That being said, I wasn't very thrilled with the beginning of this book. And by beginning, I mean first 60%.
The world in Divergent is very complex and interesting. Allegiant takes place outside of the city. Tris, Four, and their friends escape and find members of the US Government, about 200 years in the future. It turns out the faction system and the city of Chicago in general is a complex social experiment that has been monitored by scientists for 8 generations.
That is interesting, sort of. But it's an epilogue, not a novel. I felt like I was reading a pointless story where absolutely nothing happened simply because someone decided this had to be a trilogy and all the action happened in the first two books.
Then the action actually happened, and my opinion changed. Because I didn't particularly like the first half of the book, the end didn't make me completely love it. But I was very happy with how it ended. Again, if you haven't read this book yet, be warned, major spoilers ahead.
Tris dies. The hero/heroine of a story never dies. First person narration makes it pretty much impossible for a POV character to die. As a reader, you can't know how a story is going to end, but you can always assume the main character will live. Except in this book, that didn't happen.
And I'm really glad. Tris needed to die, to save her city, and her brother, and all the people she loves. The fact that Tris is a POV character capable of dying is what made me like this series so much from the beginning.
The duel narration is the reason this ending was possible. Four narrated 1/2 the chapters the entire time. And then after Tris died, he narrated them all. Now that I've read the ending, I understand why the duel narration was necessary. But it was also one of the things I disliked most about the first half of the book. The voices of Tris and Four were EXACTLY THE SAME. The only clue as to who was talking was the name at the start of each chapter. There were a lot of times while reading this book when I though Tris was narrating only to have her walk into the room and I'd have to go back and reread the last page to re-imagine everything through Four's eyes. Or visa versa.
I like the world building in this series a lot. And I like the characters, and the premise. But the lack of distinction between the voices of the two POV characters made me dislike the writing. Which is another reason why I came very close to giving up on this story half way through (even though I sincerely enjoyed the early books in the trilogy).
I'm glad that I read the end. I'm glad that Tris dies. But I'm still not sure if killing off the POV character can justify bad writing and a no-stakes first half of the story. But maybe I'm being overly critical.
What did you think of Allegiant?
This post is a part of the YA book club blog-hop hosted by Tracey Neithercott. It is intended for people who have already read Allegiant by Veronica Roth. If you have not read Allegiant, I'm going to warn you again. This post contains major spoilers!
This is the third book the Divergent trilogy, and it's hard to talk about it without talking about the other two books as well. To start, I want to say that I liked Divergent a lot. It's probably my favorite dystopian YA.That being said, I wasn't very thrilled with the beginning of this book. And by beginning, I mean first 60%.
The world in Divergent is very complex and interesting. Allegiant takes place outside of the city. Tris, Four, and their friends escape and find members of the US Government, about 200 years in the future. It turns out the faction system and the city of Chicago in general is a complex social experiment that has been monitored by scientists for 8 generations.
That is interesting, sort of. But it's an epilogue, not a novel. I felt like I was reading a pointless story where absolutely nothing happened simply because someone decided this had to be a trilogy and all the action happened in the first two books.
Then the action actually happened, and my opinion changed. Because I didn't particularly like the first half of the book, the end didn't make me completely love it. But I was very happy with how it ended. Again, if you haven't read this book yet, be warned, major spoilers ahead.
Tris dies. The hero/heroine of a story never dies. First person narration makes it pretty much impossible for a POV character to die. As a reader, you can't know how a story is going to end, but you can always assume the main character will live. Except in this book, that didn't happen.
And I'm really glad. Tris needed to die, to save her city, and her brother, and all the people she loves. The fact that Tris is a POV character capable of dying is what made me like this series so much from the beginning.
The duel narration is the reason this ending was possible. Four narrated 1/2 the chapters the entire time. And then after Tris died, he narrated them all. Now that I've read the ending, I understand why the duel narration was necessary. But it was also one of the things I disliked most about the first half of the book. The voices of Tris and Four were EXACTLY THE SAME. The only clue as to who was talking was the name at the start of each chapter. There were a lot of times while reading this book when I though Tris was narrating only to have her walk into the room and I'd have to go back and reread the last page to re-imagine everything through Four's eyes. Or visa versa.
I like the world building in this series a lot. And I like the characters, and the premise. But the lack of distinction between the voices of the two POV characters made me dislike the writing. Which is another reason why I came very close to giving up on this story half way through (even though I sincerely enjoyed the early books in the trilogy).
I'm glad that I read the end. I'm glad that Tris dies. But I'm still not sure if killing off the POV character can justify bad writing and a no-stakes first half of the story. But maybe I'm being overly critical.
What did you think of Allegiant?
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