Mini Review: Allegiant (Divergent #3) by Veronica Roth
Title: AllegiantAuthor: Veronica Roth
Series: Divergent #3
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books, an imprint of HarperCollins
Publication Date: October 22, 2013
Pages: 526
Format/Source: Hardback/Purchased
One choice will define you.
What if your whole world was a lie?
What if a single revelation—like a single choice—changed everything?
What if love and loyalty made you do things you never expected?
The faction-based society that Tris Prior once believed in is shattered—fractured by violence and power struggles and scarred by loss and betrayal. So when offered a chance to explore the world past the limits she’s known, Tris is ready. Perhaps beyond the fence, she and Tobias will find a simple new life together, free from complicated lies, tangled loyalties, and painful memories.
But Tris’s new reality is even more alarming than the one she left behind. Old discoveries are quickly rendered meaningless. Explosive new truths change the hearts of those she loves. And once again, Tris must battle to comprehend the complexities of human nature—and of herself—while facing impossible choices about courage, allegiance, sacrifice, and love.
Told from a riveting dual perspective, Allegiant, by #1 New York Times best-selling author Veronica Roth, brings the Divergent series to a powerful conclusion while revealing the secrets of the dystopian world that has captivated millions of readers in Divergent and Insurgent. (Cover and synopsis from Goodreads.)
As always, with my mini reviews I don’t want to go too much into detail, so I’m just going to list some of my notes.
- I don’t really mind dual P.O.V.s, but with this one I often forgot whose point of view the chapter I was reading was from, and had to go back and look at the beginning of the chapter. Tris and Tobias’s voices kind of got blurred and weren’t very distinct.
- The end of Insurgent reminded me of The Maze Runner series by James Dashner and this book also reminded me of that series, and, at times, of the Uglies series by Scott Westerfeld and For Darkness Shows the Stars by Diana Peterfreund.
- The whole genetic aspect to this story kind of seemed anti-climactic to me. Spoiler: The Divergent are just normal??? I get the whole background storyline to this world and why they made the experiment cities, but it seemed kind of lack-luster to me.
- I liked seeing Tris’s mom’s diary, and reading about her backstory.
- Tobias is still not my book boyfriend. He was in Divergent, and then he did a few things in Insurgent that made me mad (Spoiler: killing Eric with no remorse, beating up his dad), and in this book he didn’t really make up for those things, plus he was a total hypocrite at one point (Spoiler: When he got mad at Tris for wanting to use the memory serum on the researchers at the Bureau because it was just the same thing that they were doing, wanting to use it on the people of Chicago. Hello! Hypocrite! You beat up your father the same way that he beat up you!). I wish he had made up for those things, but oh, well. He’ll just never be a book boyfriend of mine again.
- Christina had some sense in this one! Finally some redemption! (She drove me a bit nuts in Insurgent, if I recall correctly.)
- Tris acted uncharacteristically in a lot of this book. Spoiler: I get the fact that Tris had to have these doubts about her feelings towards her brother so that her sacrifice at the end was a big deal, but it made me mad that she was so angry at her brother throughout this book. Yes, he betrayed her. But Tris is just not the kind of person to not care if he dies, and she feels like that at some points. Also, she kept whining about the fact that he left her “for the Erudite” during the choosing ceremony, but she left him for Dauntless AT THE SAME TIME!
- I feel a few different ways about the ending. Spoiler: I’m not glad that Tris died, but I think it made sense for her character–she would totally sacrifice herself for others. Also, I think it’s realistic for major characters to die in these types of books. So many dystopian/post-apocalyptic/whatever books have these main characters who are in the line of fire all the time and they never die. I think it’s more realistic if some major people die. On the other hand, I’m kind of back-and-forth about Tobias. I think it would have been a more bad ass ending for Tris to die AND for Tobias to take the memory serum, and for the Bureau to keep on doing what it does, and for him to start over in a memory-wiped Chicago. But that kind of takes away from the hope in the story, and I feel that hope is the one thing that brings most YA books together. So in that way, I’m glad that Chicago was turned into a new kind of progressive city, and that in time the rest of the country would turn out to be more like it. But I’m glad that things weren’t all flowers and unicorns in the end–life isn’t like that and societies take time to change.
My review of Insurgent (Divergent #2) by Veronica Roth
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Brandi Kosiner
November 7, 2013 at 5:57 pmI am also torn on the ending but agree fitting for the genre
Jessie Marie
November 13, 2013 at 10:21 pmI just finished reading Allegiant moments ago and immediately had to come read your review so I could highlight all the good stuff. And I'm so torn up about stuff. I'm glad I'm not the only one. I'm also glad that I'm not the only one who got totally befuddled by the dual POVs here. I get the why but I still feel like their voices weren't unique enough.