Book Cover Image:
Book Summary: Set
in a future society, of what used to be the city of Chicago, this is the story
of Beatrice Prior. In this society,
people belong to factions. Factions are
groups based on 5 specific human characteristics: honesty, selflessness, peaceful, brave and
intellectual. It is the belief of the
leaders of the society that each person belongs in one of these factions based
on who they are at the core. Teens must
take an aptitude test to determine which faction they are best suited for, and
then they announce the faction they will spend the rest of their life with
after taking this aptitude test at a choosing ceremony.
Beatrice has reached the day of her aptitude test, but her
results are inconclusive. She does not
simply belong to one faction. This means
she is Divergent. At her choosing
ceremony, she decided to leave Abnegation, the faction she has grown up in, for
Dauntless. The story follows her
adventures as she aims to become one of the Dauntless. Along the way Beatrice, now called Tris,
tries to uncover what it means to be Divergent and what the leaders of the
society plan to do with such people.
APA Reference of
Book:
Roth, V. (2011). Divergent.
New York, NY. HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
Impressions: Divergent has been one of the best
selling books for the past few years for a reason. It is extremely gripping and draws readers in
immediately. Tris is the charcter you
want to root for. Roth is able to
provide enough mystery within her story for readers to want to keep turning the
pages.
The story also reflects some deeper societal issues. This book can be simply enjoyed for the
fantasy world that it is, or readers can take it to a deeper place and think
about the message that Roth is trying to send about society and human
characteristics. It is interesting to
ponder how a society might be divided if we were to base it on core
characteristics. It also brings up the
idea that we all have strengths and weaknesses.
Upon reading you find yourself hoping you would have more than one of
these characteristics contained inside yourself.
While this book might be tying to address a deeper message
in some ways, it is also purely entertaining at the same time and takes you
into an imaginative society. This is a
place where people can get a serum that will take them to a virtual place. These serums can also control people to do
certain tasks when found in the wrong hands.
For readers this is a set outside of reality and an escape to a world
that does not really exist.
Divergent certainly
meets all the elements of a good work of science fiction. While this is perhaps a quite overdone genre
of book at this current time, it is clearly resonating with young readers. The science and technology elements are works
of Roth’s imagination and readers enjoy going to those places and seeing these
creations.
Professional
Review:
New York Times
Sunday Book Review -
Imagine
the publishing world as it might look in a dystopian universe in the distant
future. In this world, college English majors — call them “Englies” — aspire to
write only one kind of book: the dystopian young adult novel set in the distant
future. (Englies of a certain status are permitted to write about dystopias
populated by vampires.) Another subset of the population — “the Fans” —
provides a kind of slave labor, posting endlessly to dedicated blogs and
recording podcasts, providing free marketing for an unceasing succession of
aspiring best-seller trilogies.
I
couldn’t help imagining this world as I read “Divergent,” the first in a
planned trilogy of young adult novels set in a dystopian future and written by
Veronica Roth, who sold the book in a major pre-emptive bid before she even
graduated from Northwestern last year. With “Divergent,” Roth adds to a genre
that has crossed over from having a vague cultural moment to being a full-bore
trend, much of it driven by the wild success of Suzanne Collins’s “Hunger
Games” trilogy.
“Divergent”
holds its own in the genre, with brisk pacing, lavish flights of imagination
and writing that occasionally startles with fine detail. As the mother of
Beatrice, the main character, cuts her daughter’s hair, the young narrator
notices “the strands fall on the floor in a dull, blond ring.” Beatrice sees
her reflection only when her hair is cut — the second day of every third month
— because she has been born into Abnegation, one of five factions that make up
the population. Those who belong to Abnegation believe selflessness begets
world harmony; those who choose Candor see honesty as the path to the same
goal.
The
other groups are Amity, Erudite and Dauntless, and it is this last group that
calls out to Beatrice when she is given the opportunity either to stay with her
family’s group or to choose another allegiance. As part of the initiation
process for Dauntless, Tris (a nickname Beatrice adopts to reflect her new
self) must prove her mettle with adolescent feats of bravado, like jumping off
a moving train onto a rooftop. She endures simulated death traps and jacks up
her adrenaline with breathtaking leaps into the unknown.
“Divergent”
clearly has thrills, but it also movingly explores a more common adolescent
anxiety — the painful realization that coming into one’s own sometimes means
leaving family behind, both ideologically and physically. It is not a
coincidence that Tris falls in love while undergoing initiation into her new
tribe. It is precisely the moment when young people discover romance that
family life all but evaporates, at least in terms of its emotional
significance.
Terrible
things happen to the people Tris loves, yet the characters absorb these events
with disquieting ease. Here, somehow, the novel’s flights from reality distance
the reader from the emotional impact that might come in a more affecting
realistic (or even fantasy) novel.
Source: Dominus, S. (2011). In
this dystopia, teens must choose wisely [Review of the
book Divergent by V. Roth]. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/books/review/young-adult-books-divergent-by-veronica-roth.html?_r=0
Library Uses: Since I really believe one of the themes
Roth is trying to bring out in this book is the characteristics humans process,
if I were to use this in a library with older students this is where I would
want to take the lesson. I would have my
students come up with what characteristics they think are missing from the
society found in Divergent. Obviously, we do not simply fit inside
the box of these five traits and I would like to see my students think more
deeply about what that means. I would
have them come up with a presentation about why they think a society like this
might work or not work. They would then
come up with the traits they feel are missing from the society. I would have them think about what it would
mean to fit into one faction or not fit into just one as Tris did not. They would have to come up with a way to
share their thoughts using a presentation tool such as Prezi, VoiceThread, or Knovio.
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