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

My problems with this book, in no particular order:

I’m not convinced we needed Four’s perspective (unfortunately, I accidentally spoiled myself, so I know why Roth decided to include him, but it feels like a cheap plot to have a “shocking” death). His chapters read...almost like fan-fiction? There was a weird quality to the writing that I couldn’t place, and that’s the best way I can describe it. Like someone read Divergent 57 times and decided to imagine Four’s voice -- if I had to hear one more time about how small and delicate (but fierce!) Tris is, I was going to hurl. It also bugged me that the aftermath of Tris’s sacrifice is all but glossed over in favor of - what I found to be - the cheap emotional payoff of him ziplining her ashes. Yes, she dies and that’s awful, but it bugs me that Roth lets her characters literally refer to Chicago as “a kind of paradise” thanks to the wonder of the forgetfulness serum. Ugh.

While we’re on the subject, I think the biggest problem were the damn serums. Too many serums, and too much power in said serums. Absolute power corrupts, and all that, but actual absolute power pretty much just bores. There’s no fun in having a half-dozen different kinds of “serums” that magically do whatever you need them to do. And the explanation for why those serums are apparently necessary, while it started out sounding okay, came off as illogical. So basically, we’re given to understand that the whole Chicago experiment (and others like it) was created because people dabbled so far into genetic modifications that they actually damaged the genes of several generations? And there was some sort of Purity War, which really only reminded me of the Pure series and how superior it is (more on that in a minute). So my initial reaction to the Powers That Be having rounded up all the assholes and shoved them into Chicago was actually somewhat correct: being Divergent means that your genes are pure, healed, and the majority of the people in the factions were divided as such because of their specific genetic damage. Amity are peaceful but passive, Abnegation eschew all power (which is why they have it), Candor lack filtering software and tell the black-and-white absolute truth under any circumstance, Erudite are ruthless in their pursuit of knowledge (I find it interesting that their serum just causes outright death), and Dauntless are brave, but foolish in their risk-taking. I’m unclear if each serum was actually developed by the faction that uses it, or if the serums were (originally) meant to somehow “cure” the genetic damage of each faction. The Amity serum brings peace, the Dauntless serum causes fear, Erudite death, Candor makes you tell the truth, and Abnegation’s deals with memory loss.

Here’s where my eye started twitching. On the surface, having all these serums is one thing, but the fact that they basically cover any possible facet of life, and (with the exception of the truth serum, which only Tris appears even partially immune to) they work exactly the way the characters need them to, with almost no side effects (unless side effects are necessary). I remember some kind of memory wipe being a plot point in Fuse, and I think at that time I compared the procedure to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and the procedure in that film was, at the time, describe as “shooting a cannonball at a mosquito”. You’d lose the memory(ies) in question, but there’d be a lot of collateral damage too. Partridge, in Fuse, undergoes a procedure to make him forget he was ever outside the Dome, so he never met Pressia, or had a relationship with Lyda, never joined any kind of resistance. And the procedure (note that it’s an actual surgical procedure, not a magic shot) works at first, but Partridge starts to have hazy memories and dreams that seem to indicate he does, on some level, remember what happened outside the Dome. That, to me, felt logical enough, because Baggott didn’t allow her scientists to have ultimate and unrestrained power. Yet here, apparently the Abnegation serum is used to simply “reset” the various city experiments once they stop working. People are more malleable in the first few days after receiving the injection, which is when someone (who exactly does this is never said) steps in to reprogram them, or fill their heads with propaganda. And apparently the serum just “works” so that it doesn’t make you forget how to breathe and walk, and do math. As Four even says at one point, the serum erases “memories, not facts.” The hell? The human brain is outrageously complex, and really, what’s the actual difference between a fact and a memory? Wouldn’t erasing, say, my memories of attending high school Algebra class also erase my ability to use Algebra? How does the serum just magically target what it’s plot-convenient to target and not turn people into vegetables?

I have to call bullshit on all of it. I know we’re supposed to be terrified of the power the scientists wield, but there’s really nothing scary about unrestrained power, because there’s no suspense in it. If the power is truly unrestrained, then it’s going to crush whoever comes up against it, no contest. I feel like this a theme in dystopia lately -- the mysterious “they” in power have all of the power, and can do anything they want. And while this is apparently meant to be horrifying, again, it’s rather dull. What’s scarier is a scenario like the MaddAddam trilogy, where Crake only thought he had ultimate power, but what he had were some freaky science experiments and a raging God complex. Yet these people apparently do have ultimate power. For real. Snore.

I also had an issue with the writing style this time around. One of the other apparent trends in YA right now is the multiple narrator trope -- Reached does it, Requiem does it...I feel like there are others I’m forgetting. I enjoyed it in Requiem (that’s pretty much the only thing I enjoyed about Requiem, in fact!), and it was an improvement in Reached. But Allegiant suffers from the same issues as Crossed -- there’s no purpose in having multiple narrators if both narrators sound exactly the same. And there’s absolutely no distinction between Tris and Four’s voices -- minus the fact that, yes, they have different memories (Four mopes again, some more, about his awful parents), they sound exactly the same. I guess I’m in the minority in that I just don’t find Four to be all that fascinating. He’s a character who was interesting enough when he was just the Mysterious Loner Dude (tm. Forever Young Adult), but ultimately there’s no there there. Dig deeper into Four’s “mysterious” facade, and there’s angst. Below that? More angst. Below that. Oh yes, even more angsty angst! Some characters are better left mysterious.

And as I’ve mentioned before, my other problem is that I’m simply not invested in The Great Love Story. I didn’t care who Katniss chose in The Hunger Games (but kudos to Collins for not making us suffer through chapters from Gale’s perspective or some horseshit), I didn’t care who Lena ended up with, I only wanted Cassia to choose Ky because they deserved each other’s tedium. The love triangle trope, even when done well, is not something I find interesting (I mean, I enjoy The Vampire Diaries as a TV show, but not because I’m on the edge of my seat hoping Elena will choose Damon). In the beginning, this was a nifty new twist on Dystopia, and I really loved Roth’s writing style in spite of some issues with the premise. It’s descended into quasi dystopian love triangle multinarrated Hell, and the writing style has changed dramatically to boot. Like I said in an update, the whole novel felt rushed -- almost like someone was standing over Roth’s laptop with a bullwhip, yelling “Write faster! Write faster! People will lose interest and stop spending money if they have to wait too long!” I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve harped on this issue in the past, but suffice to say, I hate that we as a culture apparently have such short attention spans, and are incapable of actually waiting for anything. I waited four years for MaddAddam, and I enjoyed it because it wasn’t just some churned out nonsense of an ending for the sake of an ending. I hate this push for faster turnarounds on sequels. The minute people finish one book in a series, it’s like they all immediately start clamoring for the next, and reading some of the early “reviews” of Allegiant before it was even published, it’s almost like people are personally affronted that the author dares to make them wait more than a month for the next volume. Yes, I was bummed when I got an Amazon notification that my pre-ordered copy of Lair of Dreams had its release date pushed back from May to August, but I trust that Libba Bray knows what she’s doing, and since she’s somewhat more established, she probably has more leeway to take her time. This book just feels rushed, and once you start taking apart the internal logic, it’s basically held together with chewing gum and paperclips (possibly silly string). I said in my review of Insurgent that I would gladly wait a long time for the final book in this series if it meant a superior ending. What I got was rushed, haphazard, and a disappointing finale to what started out as an incredibly promising series.