Allegiant
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Regarding some people's confusion about why some fans disliked this book [SPOILERS]
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I agree and john greene needs to stop putting everyone into the same category. I know some are upset about the ending only but my main problem was the plot.
Loyalist is their new name. Like I said in another discussion did you hear that loud thumping on the 22nd and 23rd? It was a whole lot of people jumping off the Veronica Roth band wagon.
Memi wrote: "Loyalist is their new . Like I said in another discussion did you hear that loud thumping on the 22nd and 23rd? It was a whole lot of people jumping off the Veronica Roth band wagon."The thing is, I still love Veronica Roth. I think the first two books are fantastic, and have the most incredible character development I have seen in the Young Adult genre. Besides that, I love her personality, the way she comes off in interviews or social media. She seems cool, down to earth and adorable.
However, I can love her and the previous books, but that doesn't blind my ability to see the failures of this last book and pointing them out.
If you concentrate on the 1 star reviews, there is a lot of immaturity there...but there are also some intelligent 1 star reviews that highlight the issues with the book outside of the ending. So I agree with you but also see what he was saying is in play.
I did like the book. It took some time (I had to get over the Tris's death), but I still think the book was well written and gave the story we needed to hear. A happy ending would not do this trilogy justice. A gritty, heart-wrenching ending was needed to end this book. And we definitely got that.Unlike many fans, I think Tris's death supplied something to the story that made it whole. In her last moments we saw Tris in her purest essence. We knew her. If you read the cover it says "One choice will define you." Tris chose to sacrifice herself because that is just who she is. John Green knows all about killing off a character for the importance of a story.
The worst part for me was watching Four cope. It broke my heart, but eventually he got better. I think that as soon as we come to terms with Tris's death we can see how it was critical to the story.
I did not have any problems with the plot. The problem is that their society is so much different than ours that we can't wrap our minds around it. But the GP vs. GD is the same as racism or sexism. It happens today if you care to look.
Well, that is the ending of my mini rant and I know that I will be getting plenty of grief for it. But if you want to know more, check out my review.
The thing is that everyone always expects a happy ending. They hope against all hope that something will finally go right. Roth used this to her advantage when she gave us all of those sweet Four-Tris moments. She was building hope that love would conquer all. If there was no hope for a happy ending no one would have finished the book. Realistically there was no chance, but we always hope that something will change to make the happily ever after.
Theresa wrote: "Mary wrote: "If you concentrate on the 1 star reviews, there is a lot of immaturity there...but there are also some intelligent 1 star reviews that highlight the issues with the book outside of the..."Theresa, I agree with you that immaturity should be expected from young fans...
I did see a lot of immaturity from reviews self identifying as adults/parents...those believing the fans were "owed" a happy ending....at least one believing books are meant to cheer us up...not getting that this series is dystopian.
Mary wrote: "Theresa wrote: "Mary wrote: "If you concentrate on the 1 star reviews, there is a lot of immaturity there...but there are also some intelligent 1 star reviews that highlight the issues with the boo..."I agree with you. Books are meant to give the readers something they didn't have before. Most of the time they give happiness, but dystopians teach lessons that are hard to hear. But I think they change a person more than some story about a high school cheerleader who dates the all-star quarterback.
I am still having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that Tris died, although I think that it was inevitable, since it is a dystopia. It is just hard to for me to believe that after everything that happened to her, after her mom and dad died for her, that she just dies herself. But she accomplished so much in such a short time, so I guess it was worth it. Because of her the dystopian society actually has a chance at healing itself.
Helen wrote: "I did like the book. It took some time (I had to get over the Tris's death), but I still think the book was well written and gave the story we needed to hear. A happy ending would not do this trilo..."I agree that the trilogy needed a heart-wrenching ending, what I say is that it was not well plotted.
I know a thing or two about racism and sexism, so the problems in their society where pretty clear to me. The thing is, that separatism that we see in the society outside the fence was the same one that we saw and fought against inside the fence. So, same theme. I reckon Veronica wanted to make a point of how wrong is for people to discriminate different people, and wanted to drill that knowledge into the readers mirroring the situations making them inescapable, but it turned out pretty repetitive. She could have handled better, in some other way I think, I know she has the tools.
John Green knows all about killing off a character for the importance of a story.
Here I disagree very strongly. I think Green is a fantastic human being, but as an author is not better than Nicholas Sparks, using death as shock value, to have their readers sobbing their eyes out just because (see Looking for Alaska, where a character's death is used as a plot device for another's character, similar to what happen in Allegiant with Uriah). The same thing happened to Veronica in this book. In the previous ones, not one death seem out of place to me. All of them were required by the plot, unavoidable. Tris's was not.
Then again, as I said, the sad ending is not my main concern.
I think Trish's death is the most interesting of the book. This book was to kill her and end the trilogy.
The rest was pointless and meaningless. We knew it in insurgent that was an experiment, I dont care about the reasons of that. But anyway,we already knew it.
Carlota wrote: "The rest was pointless and meaningless. We knew it in insurgent that was an experiment, I dont care about the reasons of that. But anyway,we already knew it."The book wasn't pointless. If it was then the book would only be Tris's death. We had to know what was outside the fence, who was going to lead Chicago, and what would happen between Tris and Four. It was more than the experiment. The book was about facing the unknown and how life goes no matter what. All you can do is go with it.
Theresa wrote: "Helen wrote: "Mary wrote: "Theresa wrote: "Mary wrote: "If you concentrate on the 1 star reviews, there is a lot of immaturity there...but there are also some intelligent 1 star reviews that highli..."Re: never a chance for a happy ending....There was a chance for a meaningful happier ending in which Tris and Tobias started a new life in the new world embodying the best of all the factions...Tris making the most of her parents' sacrifices and Tobias putting both his parents behind him.
There was a chance for a sad but meaningful ending such as the one in the Matrix in which both protagonists gave up their lives in a blaze of glory for the salvation of the world. (Maybe this is a bad example of good storytelling, but you can't say the deaths were meaningless.)
What we got was Tris having a sad unattended death and Tobias not by her side at the end or fighting for her. We got Cara telling us what happened...It was unwitnessed and unsatisfying. And then in the epilogue, we are left with Tobias as an empty shell of himself and Evelyn there to hold his hand....It's just weird to me.
Helen wrote: "Carlota wrote: "The rest was pointless and meaningless. We knew it in insurgent that was an experiment, I dont care about the reasons of that. But anyway,we already knew it."The book wasn't point..."
Well, that's important but I think the book wants to convey about discrimination and our own limits preset by society and us.
Inside the fence, the divergents are discriminated, and people see them like problems and unknown.
Out of the fence, they are the genetic pure....
Mary wrote: "Theresa wrote: "Helen wrote: "Mary wrote: "Theresa wrote: "Mary wrote: "If you concentrate on the 1 star reviews, there is a lot of immaturity there...but there are also some intelligent 1 star rev..."I agree with you, especially in the last paragraph but I have to say, I was crying all the last chapters. If Tris had not died, the book would be a boredom
From and entertainment and marketing standpoint, I believe the book fully merits a 1 star rating. Perhaps somewhat higher on a technical and originality perspective.
I enjoyed the book mostly because it ended the series. Overall I liked the series. I didn't think the last book was written well or thought out. Some of the plotline seemed to just add pages to the novel. I found Tris' death anticlimactic to the say the least. I DID expect a MAJOR death it just seemed a little... hollywood. Things are fuzzy... push the green button... Im drifting... you get the point. I gave it 3 stars I do feel a little TINY bit disappointed but overall I would still recommend the series.
Veronica finally speaks out about the ending here:http://veronicarothbooks.blogspot.com...
Basically, it was a culmination of Tris finally understanding what a true sacrifice means when she didn't before. In the first book, she is willing to let Tobias shoot her because she refused to shoot him, and that wasn't a real sacrifice. In the second book, she surrenders to Jeanine to keep other Divergents from being killed like Marlene but really because she felt guilty, and that wasn't right either. But now she does it out of true necessity and love, and that made it the right kind of sacrifice.
Bullshit, Veronica.
Even if the story had been aptly written to present that theme, which it wasn't, what a HORRIBLE story to tell. So the point of Tris's journey was finding the "right" reason to surrender her life? Well, that's a fantastic tale. But even worse is the fact that she DIDN'T write the story that way anyway. Tris recklessly and sometimes impulsively offers to sacrifice herself because she thinks she's being selfless, but the lesson she learned was that she didn't actually have to be a martyr, surrendering her LIFE, to prove that she was selfless. But all along is was about finding the RIGHT time to offer herself to die? Where was that? See, here is the problem that a lot of writers have, and I include myself in this: Sometimes the story you think you're writing, the story that exists in your head, isn't the same story that ends up on the page. Veronica was clearly writing a different story in her head than how she actually wrote it on paper.
And even all of THAT would be forgiven if the "right" opportunity in this third book didn't present itself ONLY as the culmination of a completely contrived and nonsensical plot that serves only to deliver the characters to the sacrificial climax, but really does not exist in any type of logical reality.
The sad thing is, this theme, this story that she concocted in her mind only could have actually worked. A more competent author could have pulled it off, brought the "true meaning of sacrifice" themes together from beginning to end, book one to book three, and it could have been poetic and beautiful. But unfortunately Veronica did not bring it together. No one in their right mind could have even strung that logic together from the hackneyed way she wrote it. The fan reaction would not be nearly this negative if she'd written this theme in a way that people could "get" her point and understand how it was destined from the beginning, but she didn't. She didn't write it well at all. I am not opposed to the death of the main character in any story, but this one was not done well, and now that I understand her methodology behind the theme, I'm not sure I like the concept anymore, either. It's a shame. This new insight into how she viewed the story from the beginning actually makes the other books more depressing in hindsight, actually. I get that Tris needed to understand the true meaning of sacrifice, of selflessness, because that's where she's from. But it's sad that Veronica thinks that sacrifice can only be equated with death.
Tris has never questioned the importance of sacrifice until that chapter. Bravery? Yes. Selflessness? Sure. But sacrifice has never been the same as selflessness, and that's the idea that I got from the ending. That all of a sudden sacrifice was everything. But Tris has always said she was too selfish for Abnegation. Too selfish for her faction, to be selfless and to always think of others before herself. She's never been that type of person.So for her to pull a 360 and give up everything for Caleb? I would understand it a lot more if her first sacrifice wasn't something as big as this. If she put value in self-sacrifice at all before that chapter. Sacrifice for your loved ones is always an honourable thing to do. But sacrifice doesn't mean death either.
"But sacrifice has never been the same as selflessness, and that's the idea that I got from the ending. That all of a sudden sacrifice was everything"Yes, this! Selflessness and sacrifice are not the same thing, and that's why Veronica's point failed, because she thinks they are. I never understood the point of being "selfless" as being willing to give at the expense of yourself or your life; that is the definition of sacrifice, not selflessness. Selflessness is more about altruism, putting others' needs, their welfare, ahead of your own and not focusing on yourself.
I never understood the point of Abnegation to be about deprivation or losing something of yourself to give to others, although they were certainly stifling in their extreme beliefs about focusing away from one's self. Sacrifice is about depriving yourself altogether for the sake of another, taking something away from yourself -- even your life, apparently -- and giving to someone else or for the sake of someone else.
Yes, there is selflessness in sacrifice, and there can be sacrifice in selflessness, but they are not interchangeable ideas. Sacrifice is an extreme action, but is not a "trait" in itself the way selflessness (and bravery, honesty, etc.) is. And sacrificing one's life is not the ultimate act of selflessness; it is merely the ultimate act of sacrifice. Which, again, was never in fact the point of our story because, Veronica, sacrifice and selfless aren't the same thing.
Veronica's point got lost because she doesn't understand that.
Tehanu, I agree. I didn't have a strong negative reaction to Tris dying as a plot device. I had a negative reaction to the fact that a trilogy that was built up to have some kind of meaning or relevance in the first two books became a meaningless piece of jumbled entertainment. I was sad that the trilogy's original hinted purpose was dead. Tris could have lived to be 100, and that wouldn't change the disappointing, meaningless, lack of coherence in this third book. I was mistaken in thinking that Veronica Roth had a special insight into society in the tradition of Orwell and Huxley. She is just a YA writer.
I just didn't understand how book 3's plot was so completely different (and much more flawed) than the first two books. Like, genes and a purity war? It turned into a scifi and we barely see the difference that Tris dying made. Only Chicago has been changed - there was no sense of real change occurring. Her death was minimal. The multiple-POV was only used because she was going to die. It was hard to read because there is no difference in tone between Tris and Tobias. It was just confusing.
Lauren wrote: ""But sacrifice has never been the same as selflessness, and that's the idea that I got from the ending. That all of a sudden sacrifice was everything"Yes, this! Selflessness and sacrifice are no..."
After viewing her video on the MTV site (which has even more of her perspective), I think she really is confused between sacrifice and death (ie, sacrifice not being complete without death...Tris' life being over once she had experienced true sacrifice [giving up one's life for a friend]). Tris' sacrifice was actually completed by entering the death chamber and sparing Caleb, not by physically dying herself.
I think this series suffered because there were competing death and relationship (soulmate) anvils...you could really say that either potential series end was foreshadowed. The book I wanted to see was Tris and Tobias against the world and Evelyn going down, not Tris going down so Tobias could go back to his negligent mother.
What a sad ending for Tobias, huh? His girlfriend is dead, he has a boring government job and he lives with his mother.
What a sad ending for Tobias, huh? His girlfriend is dead, he has a boring government job and he lives with his mother.... That about sums up the total of what this book is, the potential of what it could have been and the tragic reality.
Lauren wrote: "Veronica finally speaks out about the ending here:http://veronicarothbooks.blogspot.com...
Basically, it was a culmination of Tris finally understanding..."
Totally with you on this post!!!
i fail to see how her death is inevitable.we are all defined by the choices we make.and choices are never limited to death.the author chose to make a martyr of Tris.it's not a necessity that dystopia should propagate misery.its always a possibility not affirmative.i believe books have the responsibility to teach right from wrong and imbibe morality.since the lines between sacrifice and selflessness is so blurred and the death being an insult rather than honor,i like to be a little indifferent.
the book was fascinating till the point of her death and after which i couldn't bear.
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To me, this people seem confused about what are the fans so upset about. Most of the fans are not upset about Tris's death, hell, most of us were expecting it. We are no dense, the trilogy was full of deaths, it was natural that the third installment would the one with the largest body count. It's not that.
The fans are upset (again, in my view) about the way Tris died, her death was not coherent with the book we were given. It was anticlimatic, product of a really stupid plan, and, simply, for shock value.
Fans could have handled and even loved, a good coherent death, a death that meant something, that solidify this messy book, but Tris's death was not that.
And, again, this is by far, not the only thing fans are upset about (the badly handled POVs, Uriah was in the story just as a plot device for Tobias, the lack of character growth, the repetition of the same plot as Insurgent, etc).
Well, those are my 2 cents. Please excuse my rusty English.