In a city divided into factions according to different ideologies, Beatrice Prior feels out of place in her family and the world around her. At school she is made fun of because she is from Abnegation, a faction which values selflessness, and other peers call her a 'Stiff'. But Beatrice doesn't feel selfless, especially when she compares herself to her brother, Caleb, who constantly exhibits the qualities Abnegation parents want their children to have.
One day, a special test tells Beatrice that she is Divergent, meaning that she has aptitude for three different factions-Abnegation, Erudite and Dauntless-, something very rare and, as she is told, 'dangerous'. When she decides to leave Abnegation and join Dauntless, Beatrice, now called Tris, learns more about what she is, what she truly believes in and what kind of life she wants to lead.
What I especially love about this book is that it focuses on what it's like to be 'different'; in this case, Divergent. Tris shows what it is like for her to feel and be different from everyone else, while being judged according to both her old faction and her 'special' aptitudes, skills which secretly come from her Divergence and place her in a different category from her fellow initiates, though they hardly realize it. The author, Veronica Roth, portrays being Divergent, or being different, as something good, which gives the book a really nice feel.
Another thing I love is the portrayal of fear. As part of her initiation in the faction of Dauntless, Tris must go through a series of realistic simulations in which she must face her own fears. During her first few simulations, Tris calms herself down by telling herself that it is only an illusion, which allows her to get through the simulations much faster than the other initiates. The idea that our fears are illusions is actually a fascinating, spiritual idea, supported in books such as The Alchemist. -"There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure."During initiation, Tris must get past her fears in order to become an official member of Dauntless, which prompts me to ask a question:
Don't we need to get over our fears in order to get to where we really want to be in life?
Divergent is fast-paced, entertaining, deep and meaningful. It will have you hooked from page one until the very end, making it an unforgettable novel which is worth reading again and again.
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Divergent Review by Courtney Justus is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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