Let me start off with a little bit about my best friend
Christy. We've been friends since we were 6 years old -- that's more than two decades! To think about it that way, we sometimes feel kinda old, but it really is pretty incredible to be friends with someone for almost your entire life. We went to school together for K-8th grade, but then went to different high schools and colleges and now live three hours away from each other :( Though it would be nice to live closer, we crack ourselves up on a regular basis that despite the distance we still "share a brain." We'll meet up somewhere and show up wearing nearly identical outfits. She'll recommend a recipe to me only to discover I've already made it. We're writing these posts separately, but I wouldn't be one bit surprised if we end up saying some of the same things.
We also tend to read a lot of the same books (though she reads waaaaay faster than I do -- jealous!), but not always around the same time. Since we happened to read
Divergent within days of each other, we thought we would team up and review them at the same time. It was so much fun to message each other and discuss our likes (Four!) and dislikes (all the lies!) and comment on all the crazy twists and turns with the books so fresh in both of our minds. So without further ado, I give you the first edition of our
Best Friends Book Club. Make sure to check out
her review over on
To Do: Life!
* * * * *
**WARNING** I've tried very hard to avoid spoilers, but my hinting and vague descriptions *might* give something away if you haven't read the whole series yet. You may want to proceed with caution, especially when it comes to my
Allegiant review.
Divergent
Series? yes; Divergent #1
Publisher: Katherine Tegan Books
Date: April 2011
How did I get this book? purchased
My Rating: 4 of 5 stars
GoodReads |
Author |
Publisher
I found this one a bit slow-going at first, but about halfway through it really started grabbing me and I flew through the rest, eager to find out what would happen next. So many things to love about this book:
- The concept of a society divided by different virtues which is very thought-provoking and bound to lead to conflict.
- The idea of rebelling against being just one thing for the rest of your life.
- How the characters are faced with really hard decisions and situations and have to live with the consequences.
- Tris and Four and their mix of both strength and vulnerability.
- The fact that it's not always him saving her, but she saves him sometimes, too.
- No love triangle!
* * * * *
Insurgent
Series? yes; Divergent #2
Publisher: Katherine Tegan Books
Date: May 2012
How did I get this book? purchased
My Rating: 3 of 5 stars
GoodReads |
Author |
Publisher
I dove right into this one after finishing
Divergent. I was planning to start a completely different book first, but I just couldn't resist continuing. This one took me a bit longer to read because my real-life schedule got in the way (what are these plan things that interfere with my reading time?!) I didn't like it quite as much as
Divergent, but it was a solid sequel. Tris's character was starting to irritate me because so much of the major conflict hinged on her either lying or withholding the truth. I hated how Tris and Four who seemed to be such a good match and such a good team in the first book, couldn't manage to work together most of the time -- it may be more realistic (to a point), but it was getting tiresome. I loved the ending though and it left me completely intrigued about how this trilogy will end.
* * * * *
Allegiant
Series? yes; Divergent #3
Publisher: Katherine Tegan Books
Date: October 2013
How did I get this book? purchased
My Rating: 3 of 5 stars
GoodReads |
Author |
Publisher
Well, there continued to be some issues with Tris & Four not working together, but thankfully they eventually got their shit together. I totally get why some people hate how this series ends, but I have to give Veronica Roth some major props for having the guts to write an ending she must have known a lot of fans would not be happy with. The ending
makes sense. The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that if the ending were different, it would have been totally wrong for the storyline. It does the story justice, even if it's not the happy ending we might have wanted. Cryptic enough? I hope so, because I'm not trying to give anything away just in case Christy and I are, in fact, not the last people on earth to have read this series.
In my opinion, the greatest weakness of
Allegiant is the sheer volume of new information (and alterations to information I thought I already knew) in the first half. It felt like Roth saved way to much for the final book and it honestly made me wonder if this was always intended as a series or not. To me, it felt like she was frantically cobbling together elaborate explanations for the world outside Chicago that could have been more slowly introduced throughout the earlier books. It felt like it took me
forever to "get" what the end goal was -- what the "good guys" were going to try to do to fix the problems of their society (as all #3's in dystopian trilogies tend to do...) Once I hit that stride, I couldn't put it down. For better or worse, the second half of this book was by far its greatest strength.
* * * * *
Four: The Transfer
Series? yes; Divergent #0.1, novella
Publisher: Katherine Tegan Books
Date: September 2013
How did I get this book? purchased
My Rating: 4 of 5 stars
GoodReads |
Author |
Publisher
I absolutely love Four, especially in the first book, so I was super excited to read this novella in between the main books of the series. I loved learning more about his life before Dauntless since it really helped flesh out what I already knew about his character. You definitely don't
have to read this novella, but if you like Four, I think you would enjoy it. There are three more coming out
The Initiate,
The Son, and
The Traitor, but we have to wait until July for those :( Though at that time, they will all be collected in a print edition I can add to my collection :)
* * * * *
Free Four: Tobias Tells the Divergent Knife-Throwing Scene
Series? yes; Divergent #1.5, short story
Publisher: Katherine Tegan Books
Date: August 2012
How did I get this book? purchased
My Rating: 4 of 5 stars
GoodReads |
Author |
Publisher
This was super-short and definitely worth reading for another perspective on a pivotal scene in the first book. At that point in
Divergent, we don't know a whole lot about Four, so it was nice to get inside his head a bit. Again, if you're a fan of Four, I'd recommend checking it out -- you can read it in no time flat (says the slow reader!)
_____________
Reading Challenges:
Rewind
New Author
Book to Movie
Chunkster
Prequel & Sequel: 16 points
Lucky No. 14: Blame it on the Bloggers & Chunky Brick