Divergent (Divergent, #1) (Reread)
About the book
Author: Veronica Roth
Publisher: HarperCollins (new collector’s edition)
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
I don’t usually review rereads, but I read Divergent so long ago (I was a freshman in college when it came out) that it was before I was writing reviews at all. Plus, I had forgotten almost everything about this book anyway. But mostly, I’m here because I’ve embarked on this reread as an intentional project: ahead of The Sixth Faction’s release this fall, I’m revisiting the trilogy that people loved and then hated so much that they bullied Veronica Roth off the internet for years. As a much more mature, skillful reader, I’m coming back to this trilogy determined to decide whether the unpopular decisions Roth made might just have been the right ones for the story she was trying to tell.
Anyway, on to the book. The main thing that struck me on this reread was how good Roth is and was, even back in 2011, at building suspense. I knew what was going to happen in the choosing ceremony, for example, and I was still on the edge of my seat. The plot is propulsive and the book reads really fast; it’s impossible not to devour it. It was the perfect book for my busy brain during a very busy summer month.
It does, of course, fall prey to the shortcomings of this kind of popular YA dystopian fiction that was exploding back then. Most annoying to me is that Katniss and Tris both seem to have attended the same school of selective situational awareness, displaying genius levels of perceptive reasoning on one page and acting like completely blind idiots on the next. It’s so obviously done for plot convenience reasons, and honestly I feel like Collins and Roth could both have done better. (In fact, I know they could today, especially Roth because I just read Seek the Traitor’s Son and it is SO FREAKING GOOD. The dystopian shift into adult + 15 years of writing books has absolutely paid off for her.)
So far, so good though. Excited to move on to my Insurgent reread!
Content and trigger warnings
Violence, murder, death
Gun violence
Sexual assault
Death of a parent
Child abuse
