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A review by bookph1le
Insurgent by Veronica Roth
2.0
I can't help but feel like, for all the Erudite factor into this book, the end result was very illogical. Full review to come once I've marinated on this book a bit.
Full review:
Oh, Insurgent. How you've disappointed me. While I didn't much care for Dauntless in the first book, I did like how it examined the idea of a society divided into factions based on a person's nature. It was an intriguing concept and it really allowed for a lot of room for Roth to explore and make some insightful commentary on human nature. Which she did do. Four's stance on the Dauntless made me want to cheer. He was clearly someone who got it, and the ending of Divergent made me eager to find out what would happen when the insight spread. Alas, it did not spread. Spoilers to follow.
First off, I just want to rant about Dauntless. Though I thought all of the factions in this book exhibited very questionable judgement, Dauntless fails on all counts. I can buy that some of them were loyal to Eric and thought the Erudite plan was nifty. Fine. But, people, they used mind control on you! I simply cannot buy the idea that more of the Dauntless wouldn't have defected, especially since it seems to me that this kind of control should be contrary to their very nature. Yet, no matter what happens to them throughout the course of Insurgent, the Dauntless insist on being impractical to the point of lacking a sense of self-preservation. This really drove me straight up the wall. They came across as exactly what Four/Tobias more or less said they were: a bunch of adrenaline junkies who can't manage to squeeze two brain cells together in order to have a rational thought. And Tris is really no exception.
As for Tris, I really liked her and really sympathized with her in Divergent. I could understand wanting to break free of a constrictive role, wanting to embrace a more exciting way of life. In this book, she simply seems to have a death wish. For all the Tris is supposed to be Divergent, she is blindly Dauntless for the vast majority of this book. She never really stops to question her actions and decide if the choices she's making are really good ones. What's more, she keeps things from Tobias and then gets angry when he has a problem with it. I get that you're afraid he'll judge you and cast you aside, I get that you're angry that he's keeping things from you, but how can you expect him to be up front when you refuse to be honest? I'm not excusing Tobias's actions, because I really thought he treated Tris like an infant for a good portion of the book, but it's like she expected him to adhere to a higher standard than she adhered to herself. That's not cool. Why, then, is she surprised when he won't really listen to what she has to say, and when he questions her judgement?
The whole nature of their relationship in this book was annoying to me. What do these two people like about one another? The attraction was clear and made sense in Divergent, here it doesn't. It almost feels like they're together because that's where they plot left them, not because they really want to be together. This is not an equitable relationship: neither party is honest with the other and they both adamantly refuse to talk through their problems. As much as I liked Tobias in Divergent, I didn't much like him here, though I was more sympathetic to him than I was to Tris. By the end of the book, Tris just seemed like a self-destructing idiot.
I also really disliked the characterizations of the other factions. Amity's passivity is totally inexplicable, as is Candor's. We're talking about a situation where two factions teamed up and slaughtered all but a handful of people from another faction and Candor and Amity don't see any reason to be concerned? I get that Roth was maybe making a statement about human nature here and, while I do get people tend to sink into denial rather than face danger, people also have a sense of self-preservation that is remarkably lacking here. The other thing I could not get past was the question of what good is Candor? The other factions all had a purpose, but Candor seemed completely superfluous, which ruined me belief in the world Roth has created.
Lastly, I was extremely uncomfortable with the treatment of the factionless, and I hope this is something that's going to be further developed in the last book. It made me shake my head to think that the factions couldn't grasp the fact that the people they exploited and condemned to a life of mere subsistence might choose to rise up against them. Gee, how unexpected!
All in all, this book felt like so much filler. I had the sense that I was on a world tour of the Divergent/Insurgent universe, and that didn't do the book any favors. Tris and Tobias bounce from one place to another with no real purpose, and it isn't until the end of the book that a key plot point is revealed. I do want to finish the series because of that plot point, but it was too late in Insurgent for it to save the book for me. Honestly, I suspect that, when all is said and done, Insurgent could be cut out completely and the real meat of the story could be told solely in Divergent and the third book.
Full review:
Oh, Insurgent. How you've disappointed me. While I didn't much care for Dauntless in the first book, I did like how it examined the idea of a society divided into factions based on a person's nature. It was an intriguing concept and it really allowed for a lot of room for Roth to explore and make some insightful commentary on human nature. Which she did do. Four's stance on the Dauntless made me want to cheer. He was clearly someone who got it, and the ending of Divergent made me eager to find out what would happen when the insight spread. Alas, it did not spread. Spoilers to follow.
First off, I just want to rant about Dauntless. Though I thought all of the factions in this book exhibited very questionable judgement, Dauntless fails on all counts. I can buy that some of them were loyal to Eric and thought the Erudite plan was nifty. Fine. But, people, they used mind control on you! I simply cannot buy the idea that more of the Dauntless wouldn't have defected, especially since it seems to me that this kind of control should be contrary to their very nature. Yet, no matter what happens to them throughout the course of Insurgent, the Dauntless insist on being impractical to the point of lacking a sense of self-preservation. This really drove me straight up the wall. They came across as exactly what Four/Tobias more or less said they were: a bunch of adrenaline junkies who can't manage to squeeze two brain cells together in order to have a rational thought. And Tris is really no exception.
As for Tris, I really liked her and really sympathized with her in Divergent. I could understand wanting to break free of a constrictive role, wanting to embrace a more exciting way of life. In this book, she simply seems to have a death wish. For all the Tris is supposed to be Divergent, she is blindly Dauntless for the vast majority of this book. She never really stops to question her actions and decide if the choices she's making are really good ones. What's more, she keeps things from Tobias and then gets angry when he has a problem with it. I get that you're afraid he'll judge you and cast you aside, I get that you're angry that he's keeping things from you, but how can you expect him to be up front when you refuse to be honest? I'm not excusing Tobias's actions, because I really thought he treated Tris like an infant for a good portion of the book, but it's like she expected him to adhere to a higher standard than she adhered to herself. That's not cool. Why, then, is she surprised when he won't really listen to what she has to say, and when he questions her judgement?
The whole nature of their relationship in this book was annoying to me. What do these two people like about one another? The attraction was clear and made sense in Divergent, here it doesn't. It almost feels like they're together because that's where they plot left them, not because they really want to be together. This is not an equitable relationship: neither party is honest with the other and they both adamantly refuse to talk through their problems. As much as I liked Tobias in Divergent, I didn't much like him here, though I was more sympathetic to him than I was to Tris. By the end of the book, Tris just seemed like a self-destructing idiot.
I also really disliked the characterizations of the other factions. Amity's passivity is totally inexplicable, as is Candor's. We're talking about a situation where two factions teamed up and slaughtered all but a handful of people from another faction and Candor and Amity don't see any reason to be concerned? I get that Roth was maybe making a statement about human nature here and, while I do get people tend to sink into denial rather than face danger, people also have a sense of self-preservation that is remarkably lacking here. The other thing I could not get past was the question of what good is Candor? The other factions all had a purpose, but Candor seemed completely superfluous, which ruined me belief in the world Roth has created.
Lastly, I was extremely uncomfortable with the treatment of the factionless, and I hope this is something that's going to be further developed in the last book. It made me shake my head to think that the factions couldn't grasp the fact that the people they exploited and condemned to a life of mere subsistence might choose to rise up against them. Gee, how unexpected!
All in all, this book felt like so much filler. I had the sense that I was on a world tour of the Divergent/Insurgent universe, and that didn't do the book any favors. Tris and Tobias bounce from one place to another with no real purpose, and it isn't until the end of the book that a key plot point is revealed. I do want to finish the series because of that plot point, but it was too late in Insurgent for it to save the book for me. Honestly, I suspect that, when all is said and done, Insurgent could be cut out completely and the real meat of the story could be told solely in Divergent and the third book.