rosekk 's review for:

The Fates Divide by Veronica Roth

3.0

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I enjoyed it, and was initially going to give it 4 stars, but docked a star because there are faults with it that, while easy to ignore when reading the book for the first time, I think will taint how I look back on it. First of all, the good stuff: I like that the scope of the story expanded from the romeo and juliet sort of affair going on in the third one. I liked seeing more from Cisi's point of view, and I liked the way what her character was doing could be morally questionable, but reading form her point of view blinded you to that. The new planets introduced in the book where interesting. My criticisms, and the reason I couldn't give the story four stars, are thus: some of the decisions/behaviour of Cyra and Akos are just stupid, and not in a 'humans aren't perfect and can be irrational' sort of way, but in a 'this simply doesn't make sense in the context of the situation and what we know about the characters', but it drove the plot on so it had to happen... it felt a bit clumsy in those parts. Some characters didn't feel very distinct, even if they were quite central to the story. Although I liked the political side of things, it didn't have much depth. Finally, the ending was rather anti-climatic. This is possibly because Lazmet, although built up prior to his actual appearance in the story to be quite horrific, never seemed quite as bad as everyone else had insisted he was. He was re-introduced a little bit late into the book to feel as though his death could easily conclude everything - after all, this war was brewing before everyone knew he was still alive, so why was it put to bed so quickly once he was dead? Parts of the plot rested on these big ideological differences and prejudices between races, so it seemed a bit shallow to have that reduced down to 'everything will be fine if we kill this one guy'.