February 15, 2014 - Book Review: Divergent

After finishing Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Tipping Point, I felt I was owed a popcorn fiction break.  So I started a book that's been on the shelf at Sam's Club for almost forever.  It was on a cheap Kindle sale a few months ago, but it's been waiting.

The book is called Divergent, and the author is Veronica Roth.  It's post-apocalyptic YA fiction, but no vampires.  The world is similar to The Hunger Games and Uglies series, and like them, the protagonist is an exceptional 16 year-old girl.  There's a lot of that these days - girls as action heroes. Boys play major roles, but girls star.  It's a good counterpoint to Harry Potter, and I think that girls as protagonists engender stronger male co-stars than vice versa.  Hermione is a huge part of Harry's success, but she somehow takes  a back seat.  I get the impression that maybe Harry could have accomplished his mission without her.  In most of these girl-centered series, the girl can't accomplish the mission without a strong male.

Another interesting point about the genre is that the intended audience for these series is girls.  A generation ago, when I was a YA fiction reader, most protagonists were boys or men, and they existed generally in a female-less brotherhood (Terry Brooks, Ted Sturgeon, Arthur C Clarke, Ben Bova, Ken Follett, even Tom Clancy).  Sometimes a bunch of adventurers, sometimes scientists, but women and girls were only in the story as a distraction.  Books aimed at girls are more human, more complete.  Terrible generalization, I know, but true in my experience.

In my own experience, I got a little tired of the male-dominated stuff I was reading in 6th grade, and I devoured L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables series.  I loved this books.  They were the first books I had ever read where the people were characters instead of caricatures.  Apologies to Asimov, Tolkien, Lloyd Alexander, et al, but your characters were only archetypes.  I knew that I was not an archetype.  I was a mixed bag.

In full disclosure, I kinda did it to show how macho I was: "Look at me!  I'm not scared of a girl book!"  Glad I did.  It was a great time.  I tried Luisa May Alcott next, and slogged through Little Women.  Not as transcendent for me.  I suppose I'd feel the same about Jane Austin, but I haven't tried.  A little trepidation at play.

Sigh.  We still have a long way to go in the gender gap.

Back to the book - something very bad has happened to humanity in the not-so-distant future.  There is an enclave of people living in the environs of a ruined Chicago.  There is a large fence around the compound, and the people are broken up into 5 (or 6) factions.  Each faction takes a specific human trait to its extreme.  Honesty, selflessness, courage, seeking of knowledge, and friendship.  The last group are people who don't belong to a faction - they do menial labor.  If you want a good job, you have to have a faction.

When a young person turns 16, they choose a faction.  If they choose their family's faction, then they can go through an initiation period, and then they become adults and can live at home or elsewhere.  Unemployment seems to not be an issue for those with factions.  If the young person chooses a faction different from their family, they are essentially disowned by the family, and start a completely new life in their chosen faction.

But not everyone makes it through initiation.  This book is almost all about Tris' initiation into her new faction, the Dauntless (courageous).  There's a little larger-scale politics going on as well, and the last 10% or so takes the plot on a major turn.

I like the main characters in general.  They seem pretty human.  I am tired at this point of stories of "the chosen one".  I never have a doubt that Tris is some kind of chosen one, although the author goes through great pains to paint her as the unlikeliest of heroes.  The author also spends some time and capital to do what seems like foreshadowing, and then crushes it.  Tris' father at one point does something unexpected, and when she questions it, he says something like, "There are a lot of things you don't know about me."  He dies a few pages later.  WHAT?

The book has lots of action, a little romance, lots of interpersonal conflict (a butter knife in the eye of a character stands out, as does a sexual assault).  I suspect the following: that the factions are some kind of experiment.  There is a larger human population out there, but there is no media (computers with intranet, no TV or radios or internet) to tell us so.  The fence that surrounds Chicago exists to keep the faction people in, and not some nameless (and unidentified) enemy out.  Having no information about the outside world makes me unable to speculate further.  I suppose I'll learn more after I read the 2nd book.

That's it for today.  We had a huge dump of snow this week, but I didn't write about it.   Very proud of myself.   Now I must accomplish some things for tomorrow.