Book Review - Divergent

Loved it! Divergent by Veronica Roth is another young adult dystopian novel. Not as good as Hunger Games, but enough for me to tell everyone I know they have to read this.

It's not perfect. The writing and worldbuilding. The characters and the pace are perfect though.

So here's the idea. There was some kind of world war (it was never explained what happened). Now there's no communications or computer access. There's technology, but really only the government has access to it. Not really sure why.

It takes place in Chicago with a fence around the city. The fence is locked from the outside, kinda resembling a prison. Again, not sure why.

The city is broken into 5 neighborhoods - the factions of society. There's Abnegation, who are the government leaders. They believe the end of the world was caused by selfishness, and they dedicated their lives to serving others.

There's Dauntless, who believe the end of the world was caused by cowardice.

The Amity faction believes it was our warlike nature, and dedicate themselves to peace, friendship, forgiveness, and agreement.

Candor believes it was dishonesty.

Erudite thinks the end of the world was caused by ignorance.

The factions live separately from each other, except when you reach 16. You are then put through a simulation, where, depending on your choices in the simulation, will be asked to choose which faction you'll spend the rest of your life.

Each faction has an initiation process. Fail that process, and you become one of the roaming factionless in the city. This is every imitates' nightmare.

The only thing being worse is being Divergent. Which means you don't fall into one of the 5 boxes and will be put to death if the gov leaders discover it. Our protagonist is Divergent, btw.

You can see from the very beginning where this is going. Five separate factions, generally believing the same thing, but with very different ideas on how to achieve it? Where in the history of the human race did segregation ever work?? Imagine today if all liberals lived on the east side of the city and all conservatives took the west.

Then you have a large population of people living outside society. Hmm. I wonder what will happen.

Still, it was a superior read. I loved reading all the crazy initiation trials. And there was a romance too! It had a lot of good thoughts about society too. Like how being selfless was the hardest form of bravery. And what's the point of being smart if you had no morals or compassion? It doesn't work to exist on the extreme end of things; you have to value in others what you lack in yourself.

It was a great book, I loved the protagonist. Definitely worth your time and money.