From the Bookshelf of Book Riot's Read Harder Challenge…

Plot wise, Insurgent basically picks up right where Divergent left off. Tris, Four, and the others have escaped from Dauntless and seek momentary shelter with Amity (can I just say it still bothers me that the factions are not all named with the same part of speech? Why aren’t they all nouns?!). This clearly can’t last too long, what with Tris and Four’s predilection for starting fights. After lots of spying and numerous hints dropped, Tris decides that staying with Amity is not the best option, as the faction will pretty much give in to pressure from anyone to avoid violence (that includes giving up the Abnegation survivors to the Erudite, if they happen to come calling…which they do). She and Four head to Candor headquarters in hopes of asylum once again. This works out about as well as one might expect. Four’s father Marcus is also skulking about being mysterious, but no one really seems to want to actually take him aside and question him, or give him Veriaserum…ooops, I mean “truth serum” to make him talk. Eventually, Tris and Four meet up with some of the factionless, who are NOT actually a bunch of wayward crazy alcoholics, but a strong group of people ready to fight back against the factions. Since most of them (except Amity) are currently at war, now seems like the best time to make a go at it.

I’m just going to go ahead and ruin the end of the book here…it turns out this is all a Village-esque social experiment. The factions haven’t been around for more than perhaps 20 years? The timing is unclear, given that Roth saves the big reveal for literally the very last two pages. Apparently the world is in chaos (hmmm, where have I heard that before?) and Tris’s mother (*gasp* twist!) was part of an organization who decided to place certain individuals into “factions” in what used to be Chicago. The point was for these factions to do…basically the opposite of what they’ve just done. They were supposed to rediscover their humanity and hopefully help those left outside in the “real world” do the same. Eventually, a number of Divergents would somehow reveal themselves, which is apparently the clue for the gate separating the city from…whatever else is out there…to be opened. The Divergent, with their special brains, will lead the charge for change. Or something.

Clearly the lack of ease in explanation speaks to the problem here. This ending almost feels like a cop-out to avoid explaining how the factions lived in peace. Turns out they haven’t existed long enough. And while I love a good game-changer, this one seems too easy. It’s an extremely convenient way to explain everything and it once again feels incredibly derivative. This time it’s evoking The Maze Runner. Special people put into a special holding pattern until such time as they become useful to “the rest of us.” And also they have to suffer a lot for the sake of suffering. I’m also curious about how people’s memories function. Obviously Tris and the others in her age group are second generation, so they have actually grown up in this society and genuinely don’t know any other way of life. But clearly her mother was part of the group in charge (which explains why she knows so much about other factions…note that she never actually cops to being raised Dauntless), so do all of the adults in the first generation have memories of “the before”? Jeanine, Marcus, Johanna, Evelyn…were they all escaping from something as well? Do they remember who they used to be? If not, how were they made to forget? And I swear, if the answer is “through a serum,” I might throw book 3 across the room. I’m hoping the next book delves more into the nature of the experiment, and I’ll happily wait a long time for it, provided Roth takes the time to research and plot out an explanation that actually makes sense (I’m looking at you, The Death Cure).

I had some issues with pacing as well, which is why this will probably end up on the “spinning wheels” shelf. The story was either moving too quickly, as in “wait, how the hell did we get from point A to point B in half a page?!” or at the pace of a snail. There’s a great deal of standing around and talking…though the talking is mostly in circles. It irritates me to no end that most of what Marcus says is designed to make people ask questions and yet the only time anyone beats the snot out of him, it isn’t to make him talk, but for Four to prove a point about his manliness. Or something. When he starts off on one of his “I have Very Important Information that will Change Your World View, but I’m never going to tell you, but you really shouldn’t kill me because then you’ll never know what I’m hiding” tangents, why did no one just grab him around the neck and dangle him over the edge of something high until he started talking?! It bugs me that hints are dropped within the first couple of chapters that this society is not what it appears and it isn’t until the very last pages that we see the payoff for that foreshadowing. It makes what happens in between feel unimportant, like so much filler. Also I’m SO not invested in the Great Love Story that is Tris and Four. If they weren’t making some sort of battle plan, I pretty much skimmed their scenes. It doesn’t seem like either one of them truly trusts the other, and I think they’d both be better off having some alone time for a while.

Granted, one could say the same about Divergent, which is mostly just about Tris’s Dauntless training. Yet for some reason I enjoyed that more than this constant back-and-forth struggle for information that was clearly right under everyone’s nose the whole time, if they’d stop being so afraid of Marcus. Tris and Four’s constant location-changing also felt like a ploy to give more information about the factions rather than purposeful movement. Which, it turns out, are mostly populated by assholes. I have to wonder if the people in charge just decided to round up all of the most stubborn, obnoxious people and literally lock them into a city together to let them fight it out. I mean, the Candor are all jerks, the Erudite are straight-up evil, most of the Dauntless are traitors who joined the Erudite (making them evil by association), the Abnegation are mostly dead (lucky them), and Amity are passive to the point of cluelessness. No wonder Tris thinks she’d be better off with the factionless. It’s interesting that Tris and others note on more than one occasion that the world is not black and white, that people are not strictly good or bad, but so many groups and individuals are painted in the broadest of broad strokes. The only Erudite we meet who isn’t a moustache-twirling supervillain is Cara (Will’s sister), and even she is still kind of a jerk. If this is the caliber of people who were chosen for Inside the Fence, I’m a little scared to see what’s Outside.

To end on a more positive note, I do like Roth’s writing style, and I’m still holding out hope for the final book in the series. There has to be a way to salvage some of the nonsense that went down in this book, and I really hope book 3 provides a stunning explanation for the social experiment angle. I do kind of love the big twist…I just wish it hadn’t taken 500 pages to get to it.