One Choice Will Define You…Or Make You Fall Asleep From Boredom

Allegiant is the last novel in the Divergent young adult trilogy.  I picked up the series after a friend told me it was similar to The Hunger Games.  Yes, the series are quite similar.  Both trilogies are set in America’s near future, after a war of some sort.  Both feature heavy handed governments and arbitrarily divided citizens.  And of course, both feature a young teen heroine who is just a little bit different or “special” than everyone else.  I really enjoyed the first book in Divergent series. It was a cool new take on post apocalyptic North America after some unexplained great disaster. The characters and premise were interesting, plus there was competition to belong, violence, and most importantly, whiny teen romance.

The second book was simply okay, which sometimes happens in a trilogy.

The third book was terrible.  If I was not participating in Cannonball Read 6, there is no way I would have finished this book.

So why did I hate this book so much?  Mainly because the author changed her style of narration.  The first two books in the series only have one narrator, the main heroine named Tris.  Allegiant is written from the point of view of Tris and another character named Four.  Since this was a major departure from the first two installments,  I spent the entire time trying to remember who was narrating each chapter which got quite confusing.  Now that I am blessedly done with book, I understand why Veronica Roth wrote it this way. However, the chapters were incredibly short and jumped back and forth between two characters, which made it impossible to understand.  Normally I don’t mind when narrators switch up in a book (like A Song of Ice and Fire) but this was just all over the place.

Another gripe: I finished the first two books only three months ago.  However, most of the characters were so uninteresting that I had to constantly look up these secondary characters while reading Allegiant.   The plot was so boring and stale that I had no interest in a character’s fate.

It’s too bad, really. The series had such a strong start that turned into drivel.  And now I need to switch it up and read something other than young adult novels!