Divergent by Veronica Roth
My Rating: 4/5 Stars
I have to say I was rather impressed with the concept of DIVERGENT. It would have been easy for Veronica Roth to turn this novel into a HUNGER GAMES knockoff. I mean, why not? Suzanne Collins had plenty of success, and those dystopian aficionados are hungry for more. So just give them what they want and be done with it. But Ms. Roth took the dystopian world and made it her own. She created a world that I was totally sucked into, and I was left flipping pages like some movie junkie with a never-ending stream of red envelopes.
Aside from the world she created, though, the characters felt as real to me as peanut butter and chocolate at the top of an ice cream sundae. Tris was a character that every woman could root for, and Four proved just as interesting for the men as Tris did for the women. Their relationship didn’t feel forced, or out of place. It grew naturally from the two characters, and that’s another tribute to the author and her writing abilities.
Beyond the characters and this alternate reality, this novel tackles issues like tyranny, unjust rule, and the corruptness that comes with the selfish possession of power. In other words, it’s easy to grab the pages and consume them like cotton candy at the state fair, but it’s also possible to get more out of it than just a skim across the surface. If you let it, DIVERGENT forces you to think about themes important to the author well after the pages have been consumed.
So if you’re looking for another worthy book to add to your dystopian collection, you probably don’t need to look any further.