Divergent - Review by Renae Morton

Divergent

By Veronica Roth

Review by Renae Morton

I have never been faced with a choice in choosing between loyalties; between friends family or what you wish to do, but that is what Beatrice, the main character, must do in Divergent by Veronica Roth.  What would you choose?  Go with your heart or stay loyal to your family?  I know I would have a hard choice.  Disappointing my parents by going a different route or follow their steps in life?

Beatrice ends up making her choice and surprising everyone.  Her choice was not foreseen, but it was foreshadowed in the first chapter.  Her choice goes against all that she is, but she ends up finding a way to make it all work out.  This was a start of a great book, and that is what kept me reading until the novel was finished. 

 She ends up meeting a boy called Four and falls in love.  It is a dangerous love to handle because he is a higher authority in her new city.  There are factions that she can choose from to live her life.  She ends us choosing the faction that keeps her alive but watched.  People have a hard time seeing how she is surviving by herself in her stature, small, skinny and frail. 

Caleb is Beatrice’s brother who wound up in a different faction than what she was in.  Because of this they were never supposed to see each other, but they bent the rules to try and figure out a mystery that had started.  Living in different factions only make piecing the puzzle together even harder for them.

With so many different characters working to get out of training and into the real jobs, they all fight to get there.  This creates drama within the courters that the trainees stay at, since they are co-ed.  From night fights to leaving (to be factionless is like being homeless) to suicide, you have no idea what the characters will be doing next.

Beatrice also holds more power than normal, with some extra power within her genes.  She is not like the others; she could have had three different factions to choose from.  That is dangerous for the countries leaders because they do not respond to any trickery that the leaders play on the faction populations.

I appraise this author for coming up with such a great first book in the trilogy.  Being only 23, her ideas were some that I would have expected to come out of an older writer.  She has surprised me in many ways in the detail she has expressed in this book.

The major problem that arises though is someone wanting to take over all the factions.  The only way to do so is to kill factions off one by one until surrender.  Beatrice, Four, and Caleb all are fighting to stop this from happening, but three against a few hundred controlled faction followers don’t make the job any easier.  What will happen to the DIVERGENT’s?