Four (Divergent, #0.1-0.4)

Fiction

Sep 11

About the book

Author: Veronica Roth
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books

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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Bookshop.org (print or ebook) | Libro.fm (audio)

My review

This year, inspired by an awesome experience rereading The Hunger Games trilogy and the announcement of The Sixth Faction coming in October, I reread the original Divergent trilogy. I had never read Four back in the day because a) I often skip supplemental side-stories like this and b) I figured it was just going to be a fluffy, nonessential look at some of the original trilogy’s events from Tobias’ POV. Reader, I was pleasantly surprised to be wrong!

While I do think that Four is an entirely optional supplemental reading experience, I was also happy to find that it does add true character development and additional depth to the story. The four stories in the collection follow, in this order: 1) Tobias’ aptitude test and choosing ceremony, 2) Tobias’ initiation, 3) Tobias’ early career experiences being recruited for Dauntless leadership, realizing his mother is alive, and understanding that shady things are going down, and 4) Tobias’ POV of Tris’ initiation, which includes a lot more of his own investigation into Eric and Dauntless leadership and the factionless and so on.

The book was fast-paced and worked great on audio, as all of the Divergent books have. I’m glad I took the small amount of time required to squeeze it in before The Sixth Faction hits shelves.