If you liked Hunger Games but thought it needed more rules, you’re going to love Divergent!
The debut novel from Veronica Roth, Divergent imagines a future after a great war. The only way to restore peace is to divide humanity up into 5 Death Frats named after SAT words. People join them by having only one personality trait: brave people join Dauntless where they jump off trains and punch each other. Smart people join Erudite where they wear glasses. Amish people join Abnegation where they don’t eat hamburgers. And the other two are basically Hufflepuff.
In the EXTREMELY RARE situation where somebody has two personality traits (I have glasses and don’t eat hamburgers!) they are “divergent” (a Latin word meaning “too cool for school”). Eventually the smart people use the brave people to kill the Amish people and only a teenage girl with two different interests can save them all. With her boyfriend.
Expect a million more books about distopian futures where kids kill each other, because Hunger Games sold faster than a grey tunic in an Abnigation camp.
When this series first came out I put it into conversation with Harry Potter in the sense that both worlds create houses/clans that epitomize particular attributes. Where Harry Potter subtly put forth the idea that the most successful young wizards were ones who could have ostensibly belonged to multiple houses, Divergent makes this concept explicit. One thing to note, however, that makes Divergent different is that its clans are formed as a reaction to attributes that are blamed for the downfall of society. What this means, in effect, is that people in this society spend their time creating their identity in opposition to a particular trait and that this is not quite the same as actively striving to cultivate a quality in yourself because you value the trait for what it is–you value it if for what is not. This theme then overlaps a bit with the trend in utopic/dystopic thinking and how the idealized world is often described in terms of removing suffering/dissatisfaction (which only ever then devolves into a dystopia as the things fall apart) and how this is not the same of actively putting forth an alternate version of how the world could actually be better. Put another way, one of the major themes of Divergent can be illuminated by understanding the difference between “freedom from” and “freedom to.”
I might actually have to read this for it’s badness.
Also check out our Amazon review which got a lot of attention: http://www.amazon.com/revie…
33:45 Brilliant!