Allegiant (Divergent, #3) (Reread)

Fiction

Aug 7

About the book

Author: Veronica Roth
Publisher: Harper Collins Children’s

More info:
The StoryGraph | Goodreads
Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the review.

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My review

How to review a reread of a book that has become one of the most discussed YA books of all time in the decade since you first read it?

Going in, I remembered virtually nothing about Allegiant except the fact of what happens at the end (although not how it happened). But I was determined to see if I could figure out why Veronica Roth made the choices she did. I actually do think I figured it out (I will try to remember to come back and link to the essay I’m planning to write once it’s published), but if anything, it has made me even more critical of this book. Because the delta between what I think she meant to do and what she managed to execute is vast.

But even aside from the ending, this was not my favorite of the Divergent books. While I can appreciate that they had to eventually come out of the city and learn about the wider world in order for Roth to get her points about that world across, for me it felt jarring and pulled me out of the feeling I had enjoyed about the previous two books. I’m also an OTP girlie, so I have less fun when the love interests are on shaky ground as they are for much of this book.

Another thing, and one that many other people have pointed out before me, is that the plot of Allegiant feels extra forced. Many of the resistance decisions our main characters make are framed as the only possible path before them, when that just isn’t true; instead, it is the only path that actually gets Tris in the room where Roth needs her to be in the end.

Still, to read a Divergent book is to go on a fast-paced, exciting, emotional roller coaster, and Allegiant was no different. I’m very glad I reread these books, and I’m SO excited to see what Roth does in this world with a decade of additional writing experience for The Sixth Faction next month!