Divergent by Veronica Roth book review

Can you imagine a world where your place is already predetermined? Where you must fit your personality into one of five factions? Not to mention if you choose the wrong faction, you have a chance at failing initiation and becoming factionless. There is no worse fate than becoming factionless. So what happens if you are born into a faction that does not match your personality? You have the option of either living a lie or transferring factions. The latter means that you will have no more contact with your family - "Faction before blood."

So what do you do?

Beatrice Prior faces this question, along with many others, in Divergent. She is born Abnegation - the selfless. Her problem is not that she is not selfless, it is that she is not selfless enough. Her heart longs for another faction: Dauntless, the brave. Even before her aptitude test -the test that tells which faction you are most compatible with- she catches herself watching the Dauntless from afar, wishing for their freedom. Their freedom to run and laugh and play - things that are frowned upon in her society, seeing as how they are all self-oriented actions. Even this small action proves that she is not cut out for Abnegation. But how can she stand to leave her family?

Then her time comes to take the test.

Her test results are inconclusive.

She has equal aptitude for both Dauntless and Abnegation, and another faction, Erudite, the intelligent. Her result is Divergent, and, according to her test administrator, Divergent is a very dangerous thing to be.

Beatrice knows that she cannot live a forced lifestyle in Abnegation, and she will not choose Erudite, who are spreading awful reports about her blood faction. So she chooses Dauntless. But nothing could have prepared her for the initiation process: learning to fight, to survive, fighting for a position in her faction against all the other initiates - Dauntless is only accepting ten new members, and there are twenty initiates, eleven of which are from Dauntless. Beatrice, now known as Tris, is the smallest and most vulnerable of all the initiates. Will she end up factionless after all?

Set in a dystopian future in Chicago, Divergent poses one of the most asked questions in history: "Where do I fit in?" and even asks us the harder question "What happens when I don't fit in anywhere?" I give Veronica Roth's debut novel a five out of five stars. I only had three favorite book series until I read Divergent, and then I expanded my list to four. It definitely fits in with the other dystopian novels of our time, Matched (Ally Condie) and The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins). Its sequel, Insurgent, does not disappoint and I cannot wait for the third installment and conclusion of this truly amazing series.