I recently came across a list of "21 books to read which are expected to be released as movies" in 2015. The first name which caught my interest was Insurgent of Divergent Series. As it talked about a dystopian world, so I downloaded the books on kindle and thus I started reading the series.The complete book series is quite addictive and you can't stop reading the book series till you have completed all of the books.
As I have been a huge fan of Hunger Games, so I couldn't stop comparing the series in my mind till I was about half way through the first book. Later on, I realized that the Divergent Series by Veronica Roth are quite amazing in their own right and I started appreciating the book and its concept.
The basic concept of the book is around how human beings end up dividing ourselves in some factions or divisions on the basis of certain characteristics and then end up fighting with each other on the basis of belonging to different factions.
It looks like the author has understood the human nature so well, and how it relates to Human History. We can observe how, different people divide themselves in different sects in our own real world and how revolutions keep on overthrowing different regimes and governments.
So, the book is from a teenage girl's perspective written in first person, just like in Hunger Games. The heroine here is named Beatrice or Tris as she calls herself. She belongs to one of the factions called abnegation, which is about being selfless and helping others.
Beatrice thinks that she is more of a wild spirit and thus decided to choose another faction called "Dauntless" which is about courage and freedom. In Dauntless she undergoes extreme physical and mental training and falls in love with her mentor named "Tobias" or "Four". She is also very good at fighting fear simulations, and the underlying reason is that she is a divergent person or the one who doesn't belong to one faction.
In the third book abnegation, it's found that the whole society is based in chicago and is being maintained by modern human society as a societal experiment of genetically damaged people who have been kept in factions and are expected to heal over the time.
Thus, the divergent are actually genetically healed people and the whole dystopian society is constantly being monitored by the modern society.
Tris and Tobias find that this modern society is also divided into genetically pure and genetically damaged society and the genetically damaged are being treated badly by genetically pure, although there is no logical reason for doing so.
Tris ends up laying down her life to put in an action a memory serum which will make government officials forget all about the divisions between genetically pure and genetically damaged people.
The ending was something which I really didn't like as I was hoping the brave heroine to keep on living. Tobias is devastated on finding Tris dead and is in mourning till the end of the book. The world is on a re-buliding spree after the selfless sacrifice of Tris.
The author has also written the first book "Divergent" from the perspective of Tobias called "Four", which is just the way Stephanie Meyer had written "Twilight" from the perspective of Edward in "Rising Sun". I really liked reading the same events from another perspective and I think it's a great way to write one story from two angles.
The world building in terms of a new "alternate reality" has been done really well.
I hope you will also really the book series "Divergent". Do read it for the interesting out of this world setting and the brave heroine "Tris".
