Tag Archives: reading

7 Things I love about Divergent:

1. The parents matter. They affect the plot, the story, the characters, and yet Tris is still her own person. Just the way it should be.
2. Tris is a product of her family. She has a father who knows how to think, a mother who is divergent and dauntless, a brother who knows how to strategize and do the necessary, even if it hurts someone he cares about. She fits. Her family is a part of her, and when she goes to save the day, they're a part of it.
3. Four. Let me count the ways... I could go on about him forever.
4. The writing. It's vivid. It sucks you in. I read those first 100 free pages and promptly plunked down $11 bucks to finish reading the book that night on my computer. The longer sample, by the way, the more likely I am to buy the book. Just saying.
5. The intimacy. Yes, that. The Four/Tris relationship was built up properly. It wasn't about sex or physical attraction, though that was present. Mildly. It was about really falling deeper and deeper in fascination with each other and their minds and then wanting to express that physically. Intimacy is not sex.
6. The ideas. Tris is really more philosophical than you'd think at first glance. She not only thinks things through, but also rationalizes, analyzes, considers. She peers at her own self and tries to figure out what makes her tick. This, despite being raised Abnegation. In fact, I think that's why she does it. She thought that if she could figure out herself, she could change herself and become selfless at last. Uh... No.
7. The secondary characters. They have their own lives, loves, hopes, dreams, tragedies. They don't make Tris the center of their world or even share the center of their world with Tris. You can feel the world behind the tantalizing sketches and know how much pain they will experience, even without Tris noticing.

I can hardly wait for more. 14 days, y'all.

So someone said something on Tumblr re: Four/Tris that I flat disagree with. They couldn't forgive Four for telling Tris she's not pretty.

Pretty.

Oddly enough, that made my blood boil.

Why is it you can write an ugly male character and have someone fall in love with him and that's great? Why is it that a girl has to be pretty or beautiful to be considered attractive or desirable? Why is it that this double standard is perpetuated by women?

Tris is not pretty. It is well-established by the book. Yet, she's capable and self-aware and confident and dauntless and desirable. She's got an honest lover who tells her the truth, that it's who she is that attracts him and not how she looks, who wants to find out how much it takes to break her, for crying out loud, to scare her just to see her wake up.

So, Tris isn't pretty and no one cares. Good.

So there are only a handful of books I truly love, and for some reason, Divergent is one of them. Made me think about why.

1. It's a book that does not flinch, but does not flaunt. For some reason, a lot of fiction nowadays glories in its atrocities. It's graphic, it's violent, it gorges our senses and desensitizes us to the horror it's portraying. There's a word for this: gratuitous. A scene is far more chilling for what it doesn't say, rather than what it does. I want to understand clearly and readily the depths of what is going on, even if that understanding is truly terrible, but I don't want to be stuck with images in my mind I can never unsee. I don't want to be traumatized by a book. Fear is not healthy. Fear is not a tool to wield on oneself.
2. It's a book with iceberg worldbuilding. The book is internally consistent and evokes far more detail than it had time or willingness to explore. I want to live in a setting when I'm reading a book, and Divergent does that for me.
3. It's a book with powerful characters. Not only do I love them, they make sense. They are painted as whole beings on the page, even the small roles, such as Tris' mother whose name is only mentioned once. There is nuance and depth and room to grasp the character without much telling involved. Four's main appeal I think is that when he lets Tris in, he lets us in. We never see the world through his eyes, so he is as much a mystery to us as another person could ever be. What we see of him, he chooses to show us.
4. It's a book that does not characterize harshness, cruelty, or killing as noble, good, or desirable, though the last is occasionally necessary and probably will become more so. Tris calls her own descent into cruelty a weakness. I want a book that calls good 'good' and evil 'evil.' It is rare that I read a new book any more that does.