A review by chrystalo
Insurgent by Veronica Roth

3.0

Ok, here's the deal. This is not a bad book. It's just a book that didn't really decide what it wanted to be until the cliffhanger ending, which was designed as a tool to make people read the final book. The main problem that I had with this book is that there was very little rise and fall to the action. There is, instead, all action, which after a while kind of gets tedious. There is no natural creation of tension. It doesn't give you time to actually process what is happening. It's hard to make the same jumps that Tris ends up making, and I felt like I ended up having to give her too much credit for figuring out the way this was all going when she didn't even have the time to process it. And to be frank, all this action came at the expense of character development. In the parts of the book, Tris tries to tell Four/Tobias that he knows her. He knows her character. But she acts so outside of this "character" so many times that it's not at all surprising that everyone is confused! I don't know the person that Tris is by the end of it, Tris sure as hell doesn't either, and Tobias is lucky that he guesses correctly. I don't know - maybe this is my "old" showing, but the overall sense I got out of this book is that shit keeps hitting the fan over and over again, without any breaks in between, and for some, if that means action, ok then. For me, it all ended up falling a little flat, and was much less impactful than I'm sure the author was intending.