Okay, I admit it-I'm a bad book blogger. I went to see
Divergent before reading the book...and I'm very glad I did. The movie
Divergent is a refreshing take on the YA genre with a female protagonist who isn't afraid to kick butt and a romance that takes a backseat to the far more pressing matters of mass extermination and the threat of war. Sadly, the same cannot be said for the book
Divergent.
Tris is a girl who has grown up living in a world where everyone gets neatly sorted into groups based on their key personality traits. Unlike everyone else though, Tris is divergent which means that the test which does the sorting doesn't work on her. Instead she gets to choose her faction and spend the rest of the series wondering if she made the right choice.
It may sound like your standard YA dystopian stuff and for the most part, I guess it is. While movie Tris was pretty badass and had better things to focus on than her lovelife, book Tris sadly does not. Instead we get page upon page of her fretting about Tobi-I mean Four, the cookie cutter brooding bad boy of this series.
Don't get me wrong,
Divergent is not a bad book. It still has a fairly engaging plot (which admittedly drags a bit) and the heroine does have to make some tough choices which are a lot darker than those found in say,
Twilight. It's just a disappointment after seeing a movie which was a breath of fresh air to then go and find out that the book is more of the same. I would definitely recommend the movie but if you want to know whether you should check out the book, really I'd say it's up to you. There is nothing particularly special here but if you like dystopias then I see no reason why this one is any worse than any of the other hundreds upon the shelf. At least it spares us the grief of a love triangl-
Oh wait. There's a sequel. What are the odds we'll escape it the second time?
Overall Score:
