Set in a dystopian future version of Chicago, Divergent takes place in a world where everyone is divided into five factions based on their main personSet in a dystopian future version of Chicago, Divergent takes place in a world where everyone is divided into five factions based on their main personality trait: Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Erudite (the intelligent), Amity (the kind), and Candor (the honest). When you turn sixteen, you take an “aptitude test” (a virtual reality simulation) that tells you what your strongest trait is, and then you pick the faction you want to join. Tris, the main character, takes her test only to find out that she is Divergent – that is, the test does not work on her the way it was designed to. She is aware that the test isn’t real and is able to manipulate the simulation the way lucid dreamers can manipulate their dreams. Without the guidance of the test, which faction will she choose – Abnegation, the faction of her family? Or Dauntless, the faction she secretly longs to join? Will she be able to live with her choice? And will she be able to hide the fact that she is Divergent, which is a dangerous thing to be?
I really enjoyed this book. It’s a fun, action-packed thrill ride of a story that catches you up in the action and sweeps you along relentlessly to the end. I also was very relieved to find that there wasn’t a love triangle! There was a romance subplot, but no love triangle, thank goodness! I am sick and tired of YA love triangles. Also, despite all the action and political intrigue, the main focus of this novel was internal – this book is Tris’s story, it’s her coming-of-age, it’s the narrative of how she learned to truly be herself and how she grew into her own person.
This book suffers from some weaknesses that are fairly common to the YA genre – a very simple, straightforward prose style, occasionally clunky dialogue, and first-person narration (which I personally don’t mind, but many people I know can’t stand). YMMV, though.
The main caution I have for Divergent is the violence. This book is filled with fight scenes, some quite tame, others unexpected and intense (at one point, one character (view spoiler)[sneaks up on another character while he’s asleep and stabs him in the eye with a butter knife, for instance) (hide spoiler)]. However, if you were able to handle the violence in the Hunger Games, you should be able to handle the violence in Divergent. ...more
Well, that was just fun. This was a delightfully weird book, full of antics and shenanigans, but with some pretty sophisticated commentary on colonialWell, that was just fun. This was a delightfully weird book, full of antics and shenanigans, but with some pretty sophisticated commentary on colonialism and the history of the USA's treatment of Native Americans slipped in there, too. It's told in the first person from the point of view of Gratuity Tucci (her friends call her Tip) through the medium of a school essay on the theme of (as the title says) "the true meaning of Smekday" (which used to be called Christmas before the Boov renamed it in honor of the anniversary of their invasion of Earth).
Tip is an amazing character; she may be only eleven years old, but she is smart, determined, and resourceful, and I really enjoyed getting to know her. She takes charge of the narrative right from the beginning and doesn't let go, bringing the reader along on her road trip across the country to find her mother. We travel from Pennsylvania to Florida to New Mexico to Arizona with Tip and her cat Pig, meeting all kinds of interesting people and aliens along the way. Early on in the story, Tip meets and starts traveling with a Boov who goes by the name of J.Lo. J.Lo is funny and sweet, a completely irrepressible character. In fact, he occasionally takes over the story -- literally! -- in short segments of illustrated pages, graphic novel style.
In short, this book was a delight and you should go read it!...more
This book was a sequel to Scout's Progress, one of my all-time favorites in this series. Mouse and Dragon, while excellent, wasn't quite as good. The This book was a sequel to Scout's Progress, one of my all-time favorites in this series. Mouse and Dragon, while excellent, wasn't quite as good. The book was fantastic up until Daav and Aelliana became officially lifemated. It was a lovely look at their relationship as they grew closer and Aelliana healed emotionally from her family's abuse and blossomed into a fully self-confident woman. However, I really wish the book had ended there.
After the lifemating, though, the book became fragmented. It was no longer a coherent narrative and a story that could stand on its own merits. Instead, the plot almost disappeared. It become more of a string of connected scenes from Daav and Aelliana's life together, (view spoiler)[Aelliana's death, and Daav's balance. (hide spoiler)]. It makes sense as part of a series, as a way to connect this book to the other books in the Liadan universe. But, as a story, it was disappointing. It would have made much more sense to take the story of (view spoiler)[Aelliana's death and Daav's decision to leave Liad to seek balance for her murder (hide spoiler)] and make it into its own novel, a third book in this series. Maybe then the ending would have felt more resolved and not so rushed.
...It's sounding like I disliked it. I didn't dislike it; I loved it! I just wish it had either been much longer, so the ending could have been less fragmentary and rushed, or shorter, so it could have ended at the conclusion of the romance arc....more
This was a lovely, sweet novel and an excellent installment in the Liaden Universe. I really enjoyed seeing Clan Korval settling in on Surebleak and tThis was a lovely, sweet novel and an excellent installment in the Liaden Universe. I really enjoyed seeing Clan Korval settling in on Surebleak and the small changes to Surebleak as it adapts to them and to Pat Rin's plans. That said, neither Pat Rin, Val Con, or Miri were major characters in this book; they had small cameos only. The story alternated between three main characters, Syl Vor, Nova's son, Rys, a former agent of the Department of the Interior who is suffering from amnesia and has no memory of his time as an agent, and Kezzi, a young girl who is Syl Vor's age, a child of the Bezel. I really enjoyed getting to know these new characters, and the worldbuilding for the Bezel, a new addition to this series, was, as always with Lee and Miller, fantastic.
I did not give this book five stars because the ending was too rushed for my tastes. The climax and resolution blew in like a whirlwind and rushed past just as fast, leaving me scratching my head and wondering what had just happened. Lee and Miller have always tended to have very quick endings, but the pace of the rest of this book was so soft and gentle, the contrast with the furious speed of the ending was too much....more
Somehow, I have gotten through life as an English major, book geek, and a science-fiction nerd without ever having read this book. I vaguely remember Somehow, I have gotten through life as an English major, book geek, and a science-fiction nerd without ever having read this book. I vaguely remember picking it up in high-school and not getting very far with it. It was an interesting premise, but far too depressing for my tastes at the time.
Fast-forward 15 years later. I just bought a copy the other day to register at BookCrossing for their Banned Books Month release challenge. The ALA celebrates Banned Books Week in September, so one BXer challenged us to wild release books that had at one point or another been banned in this country during the entire month. Fahrenheit 451 fits the bill -- an irony that is not lost on anyone, I trust. (Everyone knows Fahrenheit 451 is about the evils of censorship and banning books, right? The title refers to the temperature at which paper burns.)
I didn't intend to start reading it. I really didn't. Somehow it seduced me into it. I glanced at the first page and before I knew it, it was 1:00 in the morning and I was halfway through with the thing. It's really good! No wonder it's a modern classic. Montag's inner emotional and moral journey from a character who burns books gleefully and with a smile on his face to someone who is willing to risk his career, his marriage, his house, and eventually his life for the sake of books is extremely compelling. That this man, product of a culture that devalues reading and values easy, thoughtless entertainments designed to deaden the mind and prevent serious thought, could come to find literature so essential that he would kill for it...! Something about that really spoke to me.
It raises the question: why? What is it about books, about poetry, about literature that is so essential to us? There is no doubt in my mind that it is essential, if not for all individuals (although I find it hard to imagine life without books, I know there are some people who don't read for pleasure, bizarre as that seems to me), then for society. Why should that be? Books don't contain any hard-and-fast answers to all of life's questions. They might contain great philosophical Truths, but only subjectively so -- there will always be someone who will argue and disagree with whatever someone else says. In fact, as Captain Beatty, the evil fire chief, points out, no two books agree with each other. What one says, another contradicts. So what, then, is their allure? What is it that made Mildred's silly friend start to weep when Montag read the poem "Dover Beach" aloud to her? Where does the power of literature come from?
I think the reason that books are so important to our lives and to the health of our society -- of any society -- is not because they give us answers, but because they make us ask the questions. Books -- good books, the books that stay with you for years after you read them, the books that change your view of the world or your way of thinking -- aren't easy. They aren't facile. They aren't about surface; they're about depth. They are, quite literally, thought-provoking. They require complexity of thought. They require effort on the part of the reader. You get out of a book what you put into the reading of it, and therefore books satisfy in a way that other types of entertainment do not.
And they aren't mass-produced. They are individual, unique, gloriously singular. They are each an island, much-needed refuges from an increasingly homogeneous culture.
I'm glad I read Fahrenheit 451, even if the ending was rather bleak. It challenged me and made me think, stimulated me intellectually. We could all do with a bit of intellectual stimulation now and then; it makes life much more fulfilling....more
This is an excellent novel, action-packed, exciting, and deftly-plotted, with fascinating, complex characters and some interesting science-fictional iThis is an excellent novel, action-packed, exciting, and deftly-plotted, with fascinating, complex characters and some interesting science-fictional ideas. I also enjoyed reading about Luna's culture; I thought the marriage customs were particularly interesting.
One thing I noticed right off was the way the Loonies use language differently than people from earth do. In fact, it threw me at first -- I couldn't figure out what was going on or why the language was so rough and unpolished and choppy. Eventually, though, I found the rhythm of it and settled in just fine -- I didn't even notice it after a while. It makes sense; Luna started off as a penal colony and has since developed completely separate from Earth and relatively unmolested. Of course they would have their own dialect and speech patterns! To my mind, their language seems to be as efficient as possible. They trimmed away any unnecessary deadwood -- they don't use articles, for example, and very few personal pronouns, and they seem to prefer to use fragments to complete sentences. Only the essentials remain, much the same as the original colonists/prisoners had to start their lives over with only the bare essentials and sometimes not even that.
This book was written about forty years ago, and it has stood the test of time quite well, but there are some aspects of it that do seem rather dated. For example, the idea behind the character of Mike -- the computer that is connected to everything and has "woken up" or become alive -- is one that is very familiar to modern readers, one that we accept easily. Apparently, we accept it much more easily than Heinlen expected his readers in 1965 to accept it, because he spends more time explaining it than he really needs to. When Mannie, the narrator, tells Wyoh about Mike and introduces them via a telephone conversation, she is shocked that Mike already knows what she looks like. He looked up her medical records and found a picture of her immediately after being introduced to her. To modern readers familiar with the internet, this is an obvious step and hardly shocking; we expect it, and Wyoh's shock and apparent need to have every detail and implication of Mike's "life" spelled out for her makes her seem a little bit stupid to us. If we don't remember that Heinlen is using Wyoh to explain things to his 1965 audience that his 2005 audience intuitively understands, then we'll get a little frustrated with Wyoh's denseness.
All in all, though, this is a novel about politics -- a very complex, deep, intellectual and sophisticated look at politics, government, revolution and war. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress has a very definite world-view and political philosophy, some of which I agreed with, and some of which I really, really didn't. My agreement (or lack thereof) with the politics espoused in this book didn't seem to have much bearing on my enjoyment of it. This is a book that requires the reader to think. And that, I think, is why I loved it so much....more
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