In a post apocalyptic world, Beatrice Prior has known only a world divided by factions. Her family is part of the Abnegation faction, a selfless group that puts others before themselves and where service to others is the highest goal. But Choosing Day is coming soon and Beatrice, who is sixteen, is not so sure that she wants to choose her family’s faction, even though she knows that is what her father expects her to do.  She is drawn to Dauntless who are known for their bravery and of course there is Candor who are honest, almost to a fault, or Amity who will do almost anything in order to get along, or the Erudite who seek only knowledge. As Choosing Day approaches, Beatrice is less and less certain of her choice, until she undergoes a  testing which is supposed to help her determine where she fits. Shockingly, however her testing shows that she is suited to three different factions, making her “Divergent,” something that is considered extremely dangerous.  Luckily, her tester is sympathetic to her plight and quickly causes a computer glitch which erases the worrisome result.  And so it is that a confused Beatrice chooses Dauntless as her new faction on Choosing Day and takes a new name, Tris, in honor of starting a new life.

Once in Dauntless, Tris begins the training to be a full fledged member of the faction. The training focuses on overcoming fear and  Tris is forced to confront many of hers, but the stigma of being divergent makes her both curious and fearful about what it means and scared about the consequences of being found out.  Even as she makes friends with others in her class, she finds that she is attracted to their instructor Four, named because in the final test of being Dauntless he only had four fears to face; an almost unheard of low number. There is something about him that makes her believe in her own strength, something that she was never allowed to explore when she was in Abnegation.  As Tris and her fellow classmates continue their training, the leadership of the various factions begin to turn against each other, and soon Four, Tris and her friends are in the middle of a much larger conspiracy that could potentially change their world. 

In this extremely popular Divergent Trilogy, Roth has created an interesting post apocalyptic world, with the unique twist of enforced conformity within factions based on dominant personality traits. When Tris realizes that she is divergent Roth raises new questions about what it means to be different and what it means to survive in a world where differences are not appreciated, an important message for her young adult audience.  The characters, especially Tris and Four, are interesting and seem fully realized, but others like Tris’s brother Will are not as well defined.  This world is also quite violent, and seemingly populated with very few adults, forcing Tris and her friends to make choices that are well beyond the capacity of most 16-19 year olds resulting in severe emotional and mental repercussions for those who made them.

I feel that Roth may have incorporated too many themes in these books and were not fleshed out as well as they could have been which resulted in a lack of soulfulness which I admired and was drawn to in the Hunger Games series by Collins.  Instead, in the Divergent series, we are kept somewhat at arms length as Tris deals with her issues of being divergent or as the the other characters deal with other differences that emerge in the later books.  Additionally, it was disappointing that most of the problems were resolved with violence instigated by Tris and her friends, rather than with other alternatives or by thinking outside the box of factional conformity which could have been a positive counter balance to being divergent in this world.

A highly anticipated movie based Divergent will be released today and it will be interesting to see how the book is interpreted in that medium.

Brenda’s Rating: **1/2(2 1/2 Stars out of 5)

Recommend this book to: Sharon, Marian, Lauren and Ken

Book Study Worthy? Maybe

Read in ebook format.