By Veronica Roth
Katherine Tegen Books, $9.99, 490 pages
Beatrice has been raised as a member of the Abnegation faction in a future Chicago. Now that she’s 16, she has the responsibility to choose to stay in the faction with her family for the rest of her life or switch to one of the other four factions, options that might better suit her personality. She doesn’t feel very self-sacrificing, so she’s thinking about leaving Abnegation. But if she does choose differently, she won’t see her family again, because “faction comes before blood.”
On the choosing day, Beatrice makes the hard decision to become a Dauntless: a tattooed, pierced group of fearless people who dare to do all kinds of crazy things. She renames herself Tris and is thrown right in to the initiation process, which turns out to be much more dangerous and fraught with long-term consequences than she could ever have imagined growing up Abnegation.
Tris — and the reader — worry about the dangerous secret she must keep and about what seem to be growing conflicts between the supposedly peaceful factions in her society. Divergent is a thrilling dystopian novel that will grab you and hold you on the edge of your seat until the very last page.
Reviewed by Cathy Carmode Lim
