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Divergent (Divergent, #1)

Veronica Roth

Start date: January 1, 2015

Finish date: January 31, 2015

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What Members Thought

Aug 13, 2011 Angie Taylor rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I had to read this again after seeing the movie. I loved the movie and wanted to see if I loved the book as much. I think the story transfers so nicely to the screen even with all the information left out. I think I might like the movie better than the book, or just as much. The movie made me want to read the book again, and reading the book again made me want to learn to screenplay writing. It's fun to see what information needs to stay in the movie to keep the integrity of the book, while at t ...more

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Jun 10, 2017 Nicole rated it really liked it

Shelves: june, fiction-read, may, young-adult, series-completed, ya-2017, post-apocalyptic

I found Divergent to be much more enjoyable than the Hunger Games. There are a lot of similarities between the two, but Roth executes a better novel all around in my opinion. Better written, a stronger chemistry between the characters, and a more entertaining story.

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Dec 07, 2011 J. Lynn Else rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Premise:
Chicago of the future is a closed city-state. The citizens really don't have any idea what is beyond their borders. They just know it's dangerous. Inside the city, humanity is divided into five factions based on moral imperatives.

Main reasons I dislike this book:
1) This book is called "Divergent," not "Dauntless," but this book is basically one long Dauntless initiation trial.
2) The explanation of what a Divergent actually is isn’t climactic.
3) The main character develops into a manipu Premise:
Chicago of the future is a closed city-state. The citizens really don't have any idea what is beyond their borders. They just know it's dangerous. Inside the city, humanity is divided into five factions based on moral imperatives.

Main reasons I dislike this book:
1) This book is called "Divergent," not "Dauntless," but this book is basically one long Dauntless initiation trial.
2) The explanation of what a Divergent actually is isn’t climactic.
3) The main character develops into a manipulative bully with little remorse. No intellectual growth.
4) The love story development was two teenagers staring at each other for long, boring pages at a time.
5) Many plot threads were predictable, especially “Four’s” real name.
6) This book tries too hard to be Hunger Games, with violent kids being violent towards one another to earn a spot in their new faction, without exploration into what it meant to be a unique thinker and embracing originality.

Breakdown:
The author seems to most enjoy writing pulse-raising, adrenaline-pumping fighting scenes. She has a deep imagination for inventing different tests and challenges. Something exciting happens to Beatrice/Tris every day of her trials. But that is actually the weakness of the book. About 90% of the book is dedicated to fights and exercises. The actual story starts only around page 415 of this 500-page book. Only then stakes are raised, real action begins, emotions come into play, and the plot becomes interesting. There are many pointless scenes (like zip-lining off a building), and 400-pages is a lot of prep work to build up the meat of the story. Hints at a more interesting subplot are few and far between.

The main character is a bonehead teenager. Tris grew up in a family of people who loved her and provided for her. She had friends, she was given an education, and lived a stable home. Once she enters the new faction though, she becomes kinda heartless and self-absorbed. There was no emotional gap bridging either. Was she a closet sociopath all along? At first, she seemed like a teenager looking to do what was right and facing adversity with courage, but she quickly morphed into someone who finds joy in hurting her fellow initiates. Then, when Tris is told to ask her brother about the testing serum by her loving mother, which sounds like an interesting plot thread, it takes 1/3 of the book for her to actually go visit her brother! This book moves too slow and does not keep up the pace with the underlying conspiracy of the Erudite faction that is the meat of the book. In one scene, Tris notices that the city gates are locked from the outside (to keep people in?, she guesses), yet this point is dropped almost immediately. Tris is too staring at “Four,” which is a super boring way to build up a romance. Someone take some initiative! Tris is from a society which believes in suppressing individual need, and I get that it’s going to take her time to get used to concepts like holding hands and reading romantic signals.

I'm not a fan of reading about kids beating each other to a pulp. The justification for the amount of violence involved I found inadequate. The plot needed focus and a little more fighting the system. It was not thought-provoking. It did not grab my heart. Its bullying pure and simple, and I hate reading about kids being bullies.

Tris is simply not a likeable main character. Her motivations are never consistent. And while she grows in some ways, in other ways she becomes more immature and frustrating to read about. When the only way you’ve learned to feel powerful is by holding a gun (and this becomes the solution to most of her problems in the final simulation) that’s extremely disappointing. Nothing else she learned makes her feel strong, perhaps about sacrifice or the like? She tried it a few times, but she folds quickly under pressure in other sections of the book. Plus she does not form true friendships in the book but acts a part out to get people to react the way she wants. Most disappointing was when Al, the only kid who seems to care about leaving his home, cried at night. Tris immediately concluded that since he was homesick and expressed emotion that he was weak and pathetic, and she was annoyed with him! Her annoyance with him was a longer section in the book than her reaction to the death of her parents. Plus, there are so many vague little references to God and religion, and Tris' belief that "it's only natural" to think of God when you're dying is never justified. Why even include it if its not going to advance the plotline or character development.

There are too many questions left, and there is too much improbability. Who runs the trains? Why would anyone care if Tris is divergent if going into the faction is a personal choice (during a “choosing” ceremony)? Is the food synthetic or fresh (it seems to be both)? What happened to everything outside of Chicago? How did society develop factions in the first place (is there a new constitution that was written, was there a war)? Shouldn’t Amity be the ruling factor since they’re devoted to keeping peace? Why does Tris shoot her friend in the head when he’s under mind control and only shoots Eric (the baddie) in the leg who is not under the mind control? A kid is stabbed in the eye, and there is no DNA testing to determine who was holding the knife for prosecution (I guess attempted murder is okay) yet they can create a mind-control serum? The plot has a lot of holes that Roth does not fill. The cans and cannot dos of the society are not clear. You’d think there’d be a bit more of a fear factor involved to keep people in line. Some mantra that says something along the lines of “because humanity did this, that terrible thing happened, so do not ever do this again or you and your family will be punished.” I’m hoping the next book will focus more on how the community came to be. Otherwise, I just wasted money on these books. Next time, I’ll sign up to be 15th on the list to rent the book from the public library instead of impatiently buying them. A book like this can wait. ...more

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Apr 24, 2011 Lakisha rated it liked it · review of another edition

I read the book after I saw the movie so it gave me a chance to compare the two. There were several changes that they made to the film that were not necessarily in the book. There were also some things in the book that I would have loved to seen in the movie because I feel it would have made myself, as a viewer (and future reader of the first book), more invested.

But getting back to the book, I have to say that the characters felt "real." The societal themes such as conformity, finding a place t ...more

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Jul 08, 2012 Heather rated it liked it · review of another edition

Oh, I just don't know about this book. The world-building was virtually nonexistent, it spent ridiculously too much time on training so that the whole action-y point of the story at the end felt like a bit of a rushed letdown, and the central romance was totally telegraphed and not in any way organic or original...and yet I enjoyed the hell out of it and can't wait to pick up the second one from the library. Yeah. I don't know what to do with that either. ...more

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Jul 22, 2013 Ahtims rated it did not like it

Shelves: ebooks, borrowed, abandoned, scifi-utopia-dystopia

Gave it up after 40 odd pages. I know it is dystopian, still it is unfathomable. I couldn't relate to the book or its characters. Good, 3 books off my TBR list (Divergent plus 2 sequels) ...more

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