Home  » Books

Divergent

by Veronica Roth — 15 May 2023

Tedious and pretentious young adult novel set in an unrealistic dystopian Chicago

So at some point, apparently, humanity realized that all of society’s evils can be traced back to faults in human personality. So they decided to separate people into factions, to eradicate the undesirable traits in personality which they believed to be responsible for tearing the world apart.

Each faction has a philosophy of holding one key personality trait has paramount, and all are expected to fall strictly into one of the five factions. Of course, there are those who are “divergent”, and have more than one key trait.

The protagonist is divergent, and a teenaged girl. She does something or other to bring down the evil government, not strictly sure why she was the “chosen” one among all… but anyway, I lost interest in all the rambling detail about the faction’s initiation rites and conflicts with the higher-ups.

I eyerolled so much while reading this book that I may have permanently damaged at least some of my cranial nerves. I could not wait to complete it, but then the end was just as disappointing as the rest of the book. If this is the kind of fare that appeals to young adults today, it paints a very sad picture of our future generations.