All Beatrice has ever known is the simple selfless existence of her faction, Abnegation. Now at sixteen though, it is time for her to take the aptitude test that all of them must take and ultimately choose which faction she will live with forever: Abnegation (the selfless). Erudite (the intelligent), Candor (the honest), Amity (the peaceful), or Dauntless (the brave). But her life is turned dangerously upside down with the confusing results her test reveals, and the faction she chooses becomes more important that ever. She must hide herself, though no one will tell her why. This is easier said than done when she find herself thrown into a highly dangerous and competitive initiation for the faction she chose. As she figures out more and more both about herself and her new faction, the safe and controlled world she has always known and understood begins to unravel around her and a daunting threat rises over the horizon, coming down on them all.
Taking place in a futuristic dystopian Chicago, Divergent is a novel that is hard to stop reading. I read it in a 15 hours, taking a break to sleep in between. Dystopian YA novels have been a popular theme lately, and I don't think I even need to elaborate for you to know which I'm speaking of. This genre is one I have especially loved to read. For some reason though it took me a long time to finally decide to pick this one up, despite all the good things I had been hearing about it for months. Even now after reading it, I'm not sure what it was that made this one so enthralling. But there it is. The books revolves around a seemingly simple theme but one that is delved into and given a complexity I didn't expect. The world that Tris becomes a part of is a strange twilit one, where so much happens and it never seems to slow down.
Interestingly, I didn't form very strong attachments to the characters. The plot was great, and I really wanted to know what was going to happen next with everyone (hence the obsessive reading speed), but this wasn't one of those stories that has pulled my emotional heartstrings...yet. I know there are still two more books in the series, so I guess I will have to see how that progresses.
I also don't know what to make of the character Four. I don't feel like I really understand his character yet. There feels like there are some contradictions to his personality that I haven't worked out yet. Tris does seem to question it as well, calling him out on his back and forth behavior, but it isn't really gone into. Hopefully that will be explored more later.
One insignificant qualm I had was the lack of description with getting tattoos in the story. There was no end to describing the physical pain Tris went through, so I feel like leaving out how it felt to get tattoos, at the very least for the first one, is a little bit of a plot hole. Getting a tattoo is a very intense and interesting experience, one that can also be emotional. Tris gets three, and I feel like that is significant enough to give some description too
All in all though, I very much look forward to reading the next book and would definitely recommend this as a great read.
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