My favourite read of 2014, across all the genres I read - crime, SF and YA - and the only one to get a 5 star rating on Good Reads was
... Divergent by Veronica Roth.
I absolutely adored this book and yet it took the film coming out to nudge me to read it. I watched the DVD and didn't want it to end. I immediately read the
Free Four knife-throwing scene then hunted out my copy of
Divergent the book. Though there are some differences I think the film captured the book very well and the casting was good (more on this in a moment). Of course once I'd finished
Divergent I had to immediately read
Insurgent and similarly then
Allegiant and finally
Four.
Tris alone narrates the first two books however
Allegiant is split between Tris and Four and unfortunately this didn't work for me at all. The voices were similar and Four becomes a weaker character and this is where Theo James as Four will have a lot of work to do to carry it off. In the Divergent film he (is and) seems older and wiser than Tris and yet the roles become reversed in
Allegiant.
For me the series went from 5 (Divergent) to 4 (Insurgent) to 3 (Allegiant) stars - nonetheless I'm glad to have read it and wonder what Ms Roth will write next.
Oh, I agree totally! I read these three in 2014 as well (same thing as you - we watched the film, and I had to read them, right then and there. Luckily, with two teenage girls in the house, we owned them already). First was great, second was good, third was good but lacked something the others had. But still! Didn't like this series quite as much as Hunger Games or as Kristin Cashore's Graceling series, but still thought it well imagined and plotted. Highly readable.
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