Insurgent

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Insurgent (Divergent Trilogy, Book 2)
Veronica Roth

Yep, it’s another one of those reviews wherein my thoughts are incondensable.  You know the drill.

Publisher’s Blurb:

One choice can transform you—or it can destroy you. But every choice has consequences, and as unrest surges in the factions all around her, Tris Prior must continue trying to save those she loves—and herself—while grappling with haunting questions of grief and forgiveness, identity and loyalty, politics and love.

Tris’s initiation day should have been marked by celebration and victory with her chosen faction; instead, the day ended with unspeakable horrors. War now looms as conflict between the factions and their ideologies grows. And in times of war, sides must be chosen, secrets will emerge, and choices will become even more irrevocable—and even more powerful. Transformed by her own decisions but also by haunting grief and guilt, radical new discoveries, and shifting relationships, Tris must fully embrace her Divergence, even if she does not know what she may lose by doing so.

It’s comforting to know that Roth picks up a few moments after she leaves off.  Why, you might ask?   It’s because I’ve finished this book and now have to wait until sometime next year to learn what happens next and it helps me to wait to know that I’ll hopefully get to pick up where I left off.  It’s also pretty awesome given the amount of completely fraked up stuff that had happened right before the end of Divergent.  This story picks up with Tris suffering from what I can only imagine to be a particularly soul rending combination of grief for her lost parents, guilt for what happened to Will and PTSD for bloody well everything else.

Image via Goodreads

For a good portion of the book, Tris is going through a process that isn’t necessarily pleasant to experience in life, nevertheless read about in fiction.  There are periods when she isn’t exactly likable.  I read an interview that Roth did with Shelf Awareness that gave me a bit of perspective on this aspect of the book when I was about 80% of the way through it.  Within the book, however, Roth did an amazing job of not falling prey to the Josh Problem.  The Josh Problem became a term at here at the Platypus, when I read The Magician, by Michael Scott.  While it was clear that one of the main characters, Josh, was likely going through something emotionally, he came off as being pathologically whiny and appeared to be drowning in angst.  The Josh Problem is now used to describe characters that have gone too far into the unlikable realm, having been reduced to the worst available qualities of the prevalent stereotype under which they fall.  Another prominent example would be Quentin from The Magicians by Lev Grossman.  (Total coincidence on the titles being so similar.)  I think one of the reasons why Tris never truly falls off of the cliff into Joshdom is that you already know her from Book 1.  You know she’s this incredibly brave, strong, intelligent woman wrapped up into a tiny body and you want her to come back from whatever she’s dealing with.  You want for her to process everything so that she can get back to normal as soon as possible.  Roth skates over the thin ice with seeming ease.  Tris might be unlikable for a portion of this book, but she’s not that way for 100% of it and there’s still plenty of drama to keep your eyes glued to the page.

As to the action, I’m really impressed with where the story ended.  I won’t give anything away, but I will say this: I’m not a reader that goes of my way to figure out the mystery.  Hell yeah, there’s a section of my brain working at it in the back of my mind the whole time, but it’s not like I’m sitting at lunch staring at my salad trying to figure out what it could possibly be.  That being said, I love it when I think I have everything figured out and the author rips the rug out from underneath me.  I want them to surprise me.  It’s part of the reason I read so much.

In the end, this book is a heart-stopping tale of action, grief, love, and betrayal.  You will not be able to put it down.  Go to the bathroom first.  You’ve been warned.

4.5 ink bottles.
Character Believability:  5 Buffys
Character Investibility:  4 Doctors
Pace/Tension/Urgency:  4 Dresdens
Worldbuilding:  4.5 Snyders
Language:  5 Feegles
Mystery:  4.5 Sherlocks

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

Book Trailer:

Divergent

Image via Goodreads

Divergent (Divergent #1)
Veronica Roth

I’m not sure how this book could have been out for the better part of a year before I got to it.  A friend has been telling me that I need to read this for a while now, but now that I’ve read it, I kind of wish she had smacked me upside the head and called me an idiot for delaying.  I absorbed this book.  Once the story sunk its tenterhooks into me (so, like, page 2ish), it was nearly impossible to put down.  I was actually a little put out when I had to stop and eat half way through.  Seriously.  I want to use all of my trite descriptions for this book, but it somehow feels like it wouldn’t sufficiently communicate the level to which I enjoyed it.  Compelling and vivid seem bland.  This story feels more like riding a roller coaster over open flames, sharp rocks, jagged steel, and giant icy waves; all while being strapped in by a few pieces of flimsy string.  There’s adrenaline soaked action, but the story and the characters are remarkably well written.  The pages disappeared to the points where I was completely surprised when I came across the final page and more than a little upset about it.  I can’t lie, I’m kind of glad that I drug my feet about picking up this book for so long because while some people had to wait a whole year, I only had to wait a few days.

Publisher’s Blurb:

In Beatrice Prior’s dystopian Chicago, society is divided into five factions, each dedicated to the cultivation of a particular virtue—Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent). On an appointed day of every year, all sixteen-year-olds must select the faction to which they will devote the rest of their lives. For Beatrice, the decision is between staying with her family and being who she really is—she can’t have both. So she makes a choice that surprises everyone, including herself.

During the highly competitive initiation that follows, Beatrice renames herself Tris and struggles to determine who her friends really are—and where, exactly, a romance with a sometimes fascinating, sometimes infuriating boy fits into the life she’s chosen. But Tris also has a secret, one she’s kept hidden from everyone because she’s been warned it can mean death. And as she discovers a growing conflict that threatens to unravel her seemingly perfect society, she also learns that her secret might help her save those she loves . . . or it might destroy her.

The primary reason this story is so incredibly compelling is the characters. Roth writes them above and beyond believable.  They’re real and if you have real characters who can walk around and tell you where your story needs to go, then you have a book that’s worthy of the bestsellers list.  The secrets her characters walk around with are delicious to discover and they add such dimension to the story.  Though she didn’t just apply this attention and care to her characters alone, no, she also created a world in vividly real color that is so easy to see in my mind’s eye it felt like watching a movie.

I have to say, though, that the biggest reason I loved this story as much as I did was Tris. It’s rare in literature for a woman to be written as such a total and complete bad ass.  Over and over, Roth re-enforces that the one thing Tris is above all else is steely.  When embarrassed by a prank, she kicks the crap out of one of the prankers in the next scheduled fight and then doesn’t feel bad about it.  Why is this awesome?  In our world currently drowning in the blowback to second wave feminism it’s not usually okay for women to stand up and defend themselves, even verbally.  If we do, we’re called all sorts of things, from bitch to whore.  Tris seems immune to that and it’s incredibly refreshing to find that there’s at least another person on the planet that wants to see strong women who can stand up and not melt down into puddles of glop at the first sign of embarrassment.  This story is about more than just proving a girl can throw a punch without crying about it, but in some ways, it was that aspect that had my eyes glued to the pages so much.  I can’t help it, I was raised on Buffy.

As a side note to that, it’s incredibly enheartening to find that young girls are being given these very strong examples to look to whether it be Katniss Everdeen or Tris Prior.  Both of these girls stand up and fight when they have to and yet somehow never really sacrifice who they are on a deeper core level.  After the waifishly lovesick Bella Swan, it’s kind of awesome to see girls looking up to people who have a backbone.

In the end, there aren’t words small enough to summarize this story.  It’s huge and dangerous and incredibly entertaining.  It feels more like reading 150 pages than 487.

5 ink bottles.
Character Believability: 5 Buffys
Character Investibility:  5 Doctors
Pace/Urgency/Tension:  5 Dresdens
Worldbuilding: 4 Snyders
Language:  4.5 Feegles
Mystery:  4 Sherlocks

Book Links:  Goodreads, Publisher

Book Trailer:

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