Divergent - Veronica Roth (2011)

This book was lent to me by Mac soon after she read it and the only reason that has been keeping me from reading this for so long is that she needed it back for her assignment. I hate her for keeping it from me for so long. The movie rights were optioned before the book was even released and I really hope they do the story justice.

I loved this book, I found the world interesting and the story refreshingly different from most dystopian novels I've read. I really loved the character Four, he was very gentle, humble and kind, yet brave and courageous at the same time, I really want him to be real just so I could marry him myself. I also found it fun to imagine which faction I would choose if I was in this situation and it was surprisingly hard to choose.

Tris lives in a world where the population is split into five factions each of which honour a different value and strive to achieve it. There is: Candor, which values honesty, Amity, which values peace, Erudite, which values knowledge, Abnegation, which values selflessness, and Dauntless, which values bravery. When Tris takes her aptitude test to see which faction she would do best in, she learns that she is a divergent someone that belongs in many factions, not just one. Tris then betrays her family, who are Abnegation, and moves to Dauntless, in which she makes many new friends and falls in love with Four, a training leader who also moved into Dauntless from Abnegation, a rare occurence. The night after initiation all the Dauntless members, who had been injected with a serum that can control their behaviour, form an army to destroy Abnegation as they are being controlled by an Erudite leader who wants to be in power. However, as Tris is a divergent, she is not controlled by the serum, neither is Four as he is also a Divergent, so Jeanine, the Erudite leader gives Four a serum she was developing that will work on Divergents. Tris' mum and dad then sacrifice themselves for her to get to the control room to stop the serum affecting people, however first she must pass Four, who was guarding the control room. She manages to do this without killing him and together they stop the serum and take the data that contained the serum's control code.