Divergent Enough?

Divergent
by Veronica Roth

Jan & Diane's pick

Summary:

Beatrice is a 16-year-old in a post-apocalyptic society formed in what used to be Chicago. To keep the peace, the society is divided into 5 factions based on personality traits: Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Erudite, and Dauntless. Beatrice and her brother come from Abnegation and must choose, along with all the other adolescents, which faction they will join for the rest of their lives. There is an aptitude test which indicates the suitable choice. Beatrice's results, however, are inconclusive--she is Divergent, a group targeted as traitors to the system.

Unsatisfied with Abnegation, Beatrice joins the Dauntless faction, changing her name to Tris, and participating in a dangerous and rigorous initiation. There she meets Four--an instructor with whom she strikes up a romance. Tris and Four uncover an Erudite plan to control the Dauntless with a hallucinatory serum and use them to overthrow (via massacre) the ruling Abnegation faction. The serum fails to control the two of them because they are Divergent. Together, they manage to stop the program and escape with other survivors of Abnegation.

Diane's Response: 

I'm giving this book 2 stars. I suppose I could give it a 3 when thinking of all the things I've given 3's to, but the hype around this book inevitably increased my disappointment. I was entertained by the movie which improves the story's continuity in a couple of ways. The story, which draws heavily on Card's Ender's Game and Lowry's The Giver still manages to miss the cultural immediacy and complexity of both those dystopian YA classics. As a YA novel with a "strong female protagonist," its narrator falls a bit flatter than Katniss in the Hunger Games, but at least we are spared the nauseating love triangle trope.

Perhaps the most concerning thing about the story is not the amateur writing (There are about 10 too many descriptions of "attractive eyes") but the theme projecting from the antagonistic Erudite faction--the idea that a prioritization of knowledge and logic leads to greed, manipulation, and violence. It seems that, if anything, our society needs to stop fearing knowledge and learning. The faction idea helps keep everything neat and organized for Roth's story, but it comes at the expense of emotional depth, societal complexity, and thematic relevance.