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3.72 AVERAGE
3.72 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
Well, that was a supreme waste of my time. What an awful novel, one which managed to be an even worse follow-up to Divergent than my extremely low expectations estimated it could be. The plot is meandering and slow, the characters unbearable melodramatic and uninteresting, and the writing is nothing short of dreadful. Honestly, I’m not sure what I expected, after despising Divergent so thoroughly, but this offering from Veronica Roth is downright impressive in how terrible it manages to be.
The first quarter of Insurgent wallows in the maudlin teen romance between Tris and Tobias, juxtaposing it with Tris’ handling of the supposedly affecting events at the end of Divergent (i.e.). All of this is written with the finesse one might expect from a soap opera’s dialogue and it leaves the characters at about the same level of likability as any overemotional teenager, which is to say not at all. But hey, this is young adult fiction and I suppose Roth is writing to appeal to the tween/teen demographic who want to read novels full of characters they can identify with. Unfortunately where Roth (and many authors like her) went wrong is the assumption that the reader wanting to identify with characters should equate to writing characters that are defined by some of the worst characteristics of teenagers, most notably a penchant for frequent melodramatic outbursts. Because of this, Roth’s writing remains mired in the literary muck of young adult fiction’s worst trends: horrible dialogue between horrible characters, sentences punctuated by overuse of exclamation points (because everything needs to be yelled to impart significance!), and an unnecessarily overcomplicated romance (with no payoff, of course) between individuals with emotional maturity of children. Hell, even Roth calls herself out on this at one point in Insurgent when a supporting character notes, “You’re always moping. We should start calling you Beatrice Prior: Queen of Tragedy.” Yeah, that’s exactly what the reader wants in a protagonist: a mopey teen whose persistently low appraisal of herself and the self-pitying whining that stems from it are both neverending and wholly insufferable.
It seems to me that Insurgent exists mostly to justify the reasoning behind Divergent’s unusual social structure (the factions) and its setting (a post-apocalyptic Chicago). It’s not clear whether the explanations given were part of the design from the beginning of the series or if they’re mostly a hurried retconning, a convenient explaining away of the first novel’s inept plot and its reasons for trendily and uselessly being placed within a post-apocalyptic setting (though there are the slightest hints in Divergent to indicate they might have been preplanned to some degree). Whatever the complete answer to this query, I am sure of the fact that this second installment was a massive failure. The answers given to the reader by this novel’s end are neither particularly revelatory or especially interesting. Yes, Ms. Roth, I’d already assumed it was a society that was created and established for a reason, but contrary to what Insurgent claims, it’s not to overcome the influence of corruption in the pre-faction society of the Divergent universe, but merely to sell books to gullible, inexperienced readers in our own universe. Truly, the conclusions come to in Insurgent are the definition of unsatisfying and the world she has taken such pains to build remains sketchy and unbelievable, like watching a high school production of a play where the prop budget is almost nonexistent. This leads to obvious issues with being able to immerse oneself in the fictional Chicago being presented here and it makes the reading experience an arduous one.
Worst of all, the prose remains just as bad as in Divergent and for this I cannot forgive Roth. A novel can rehash old tropes, reuse hero archetypes, and retell a story that’s been told too many times to count and yet still be successful if it is written well. Roth’s work is not. On the sentence level, there are so many things that are going wrong that it became painful to force myself through each new line, paragraph, page, and chapter. According to Roth, characters are frequently “almost” something, but never decisive enough or fervent enough to fully be that something: Tris is almost exploding with anger, Tris almost can’t take it, etc. Roth seems to enjoy the more formal iterations of the verb “to be” because she overuses “it is” or “they are” when “it’s” or “they’re” would flow more smoothly. This is especially noticeable when it happens in dialogue, resulting in character interactions feeling stilted and unrealistic (there’s a big difference between someone saying “It is a nice day today” and “It’s a nice day today”). Roth’s descriptions of events or things are mostly utilitarian in their wording, serving the purpose of tersely producing an image within the reader’s mind, but rarely venturing into colorful, interesting language that could pretty up her work. When she does take the leap to describe something a bit more colorfully she makes all the wrong choices, using painfully forced metaphors or similes, or merely just choosing the least interesting thing to describe in a scene (e.g. the big bad MRI machine...oooo, so scary!). Lastly, Roth still doesn’t have her details down. Guns persist in flummoxing her, particularly the way they work and how they should be described, resulting in their mostly being laughable plot props that are used to convey vague senses of danger and gravitas, but really just showcasing the author’s lack of familiarity with her material. All of these things and more combine into a writing style that might appeal to teens that have little sense of literary competence, but are not something that one should expect from a student who has made it through an intro-level creative writing class, let alone an author with a degree in that concentration.
To be plain: Insurgent is worse than Divergent and Divergent is a pretty terrible baseline to compare against. Roth may have set out trying to write the next Hunger Games series, but she simply does not have the skill to do so. Her characters are flat, the romance is awful, the plot is boring, the setting is silly, and her themes are shallow. Where The Hunger Games and its sequels explored themes like despotism, child warfare, murder, brainwashing, moral ambiguity, and even PTSD with surprising competence for a young adult series, the Divergent series attempts to do much of the same but falls flat on its face right out of the gate. Roth is a young author and kudos to her for writing such a hugely popular series with so little experience under her belt, but her work is just another example of why popularity does not necessarily equal quality. So far the Divergent series has shown itself to be the young adult fiction analogue of a pop music song: easily accessible, commercially bankable, and insanely popular. Yet, like pop music it lacks anything that might actually classify it as being legitimately good, depending more than anything else upon commercial hype and its own fabricated wave of celebrity to help it coast to a successful (aka profitable) end. Roth’s series thus far lacks originality, competence within her medium (writing), and anything even resembling literary quality. So, like that pop music song on the radio, it will be around for a short while, worming its way into the zeitgeist and your head, but it won’t stay long and will leave behind it a yearning for something more, something better. Maybe some might feel the Divergent series should be commended for eliciting that yearning in the impressionable minds of young readers, who may not have experienced much reading before this and who will treat these books as a gateway into bigger and better reads. But I am of the opinion that no one needs to read something this bad to learn how to appreciate better writing and that so far both Divergent and its even more lackluster sequel, Insurgent, aren’t worth the time or the paper they’re printed on.
And with that, I move onto the final installment in the series in the hopes that all these awful characters have the good sense to just die already so they can give me some sense of Schadenfreude at their demise and at least somewhat justify the time I’ve sunk into them.
The first quarter of Insurgent wallows in the maudlin teen romance between Tris and Tobias, juxtaposing it with Tris’ handling of the supposedly affecting events at the end of Divergent (i.e.
Spoiler
Tris killing Will, Tris’s parents both getting killed, and the destruction of the Abnegation faction at the hands of Erudite and DauntlessIt seems to me that Insurgent exists mostly to justify the reasoning behind Divergent’s unusual social structure (the factions) and its setting (a post-apocalyptic Chicago). It’s not clear whether the explanations given were part of the design from the beginning of the series or if they’re mostly a hurried retconning, a convenient explaining away of the first novel’s inept plot and its reasons for trendily and uselessly being placed within a post-apocalyptic setting (though there are the slightest hints in Divergent to indicate they might have been preplanned to some degree). Whatever the complete answer to this query, I am sure of the fact that this second installment was a massive failure. The answers given to the reader by this novel’s end are neither particularly revelatory or especially interesting. Yes, Ms. Roth, I’d already assumed it was a society that was created and established for a reason, but contrary to what Insurgent claims, it’s not to overcome the influence of corruption in the pre-faction society of the Divergent universe, but merely to sell books to gullible, inexperienced readers in our own universe. Truly, the conclusions come to in Insurgent are the definition of unsatisfying and the world she has taken such pains to build remains sketchy and unbelievable, like watching a high school production of a play where the prop budget is almost nonexistent. This leads to obvious issues with being able to immerse oneself in the fictional Chicago being presented here and it makes the reading experience an arduous one.
Worst of all, the prose remains just as bad as in Divergent and for this I cannot forgive Roth. A novel can rehash old tropes, reuse hero archetypes, and retell a story that’s been told too many times to count and yet still be successful if it is written well. Roth’s work is not. On the sentence level, there are so many things that are going wrong that it became painful to force myself through each new line, paragraph, page, and chapter. According to Roth, characters are frequently “almost” something, but never decisive enough or fervent enough to fully be that something: Tris is almost exploding with anger, Tris almost can’t take it, etc. Roth seems to enjoy the more formal iterations of the verb “to be” because she overuses “it is” or “they are” when “it’s” or “they’re” would flow more smoothly. This is especially noticeable when it happens in dialogue, resulting in character interactions feeling stilted and unrealistic (there’s a big difference between someone saying “It is a nice day today” and “It’s a nice day today”). Roth’s descriptions of events or things are mostly utilitarian in their wording, serving the purpose of tersely producing an image within the reader’s mind, but rarely venturing into colorful, interesting language that could pretty up her work. When she does take the leap to describe something a bit more colorfully she makes all the wrong choices, using painfully forced metaphors or similes, or merely just choosing the least interesting thing to describe in a scene (e.g. the big bad MRI machine...oooo, so scary!). Lastly, Roth still doesn’t have her details down. Guns persist in flummoxing her, particularly the way they work and how they should be described, resulting in their mostly being laughable plot props that are used to convey vague senses of danger and gravitas, but really just showcasing the author’s lack of familiarity with her material. All of these things and more combine into a writing style that might appeal to teens that have little sense of literary competence, but are not something that one should expect from a student who has made it through an intro-level creative writing class, let alone an author with a degree in that concentration.
To be plain: Insurgent is worse than Divergent and Divergent is a pretty terrible baseline to compare against. Roth may have set out trying to write the next Hunger Games series, but she simply does not have the skill to do so. Her characters are flat, the romance is awful, the plot is boring, the setting is silly, and her themes are shallow. Where The Hunger Games and its sequels explored themes like despotism, child warfare, murder, brainwashing, moral ambiguity, and even PTSD with surprising competence for a young adult series, the Divergent series attempts to do much of the same but falls flat on its face right out of the gate. Roth is a young author and kudos to her for writing such a hugely popular series with so little experience under her belt, but her work is just another example of why popularity does not necessarily equal quality. So far the Divergent series has shown itself to be the young adult fiction analogue of a pop music song: easily accessible, commercially bankable, and insanely popular. Yet, like pop music it lacks anything that might actually classify it as being legitimately good, depending more than anything else upon commercial hype and its own fabricated wave of celebrity to help it coast to a successful (aka profitable) end. Roth’s series thus far lacks originality, competence within her medium (writing), and anything even resembling literary quality. So, like that pop music song on the radio, it will be around for a short while, worming its way into the zeitgeist and your head, but it won’t stay long and will leave behind it a yearning for something more, something better. Maybe some might feel the Divergent series should be commended for eliciting that yearning in the impressionable minds of young readers, who may not have experienced much reading before this and who will treat these books as a gateway into bigger and better reads. But I am of the opinion that no one needs to read something this bad to learn how to appreciate better writing and that so far both Divergent and its even more lackluster sequel, Insurgent, aren’t worth the time or the paper they’re printed on.
And with that, I move onto the final installment in the series in the hopes that all these awful characters have the good sense to just die already so they can give me some sense of Schadenfreude at their demise and at least somewhat justify the time I’ve sunk into them.
adventurous
emotional
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
adventurous
dark
inspiring
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Too many relationship struggles, not enough killing people
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
medium-paced
Read this book for the first in middle school… it’s definitely middle school level reading and I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as I had back then. It is still a good book, but I think I’ve outgrown it.
Got busy, should probably return the copy I have to its owner.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Sexual content
adventurous
challenging
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes