Just Finished Reading: Allegiant by Veronica Roth (FP: 2013) [526pp]

They had to leave. It wasn’t as if Evelyn was giving them much of a choice. With the city locked down and the factions being broken up what was there to stay for? Plus there was the ‘message’ that asked for their help. That couldn’t be ignored but that meant leaving the city, which meant defying Evelyn. Tobias would help, of course, at least Tris expected him to help – despite being Evelyn’s son. So they planned and they escaped – although not without more loss and more tragedy. They were now in uncharted territory – literally. No one from the city had ever been out this far. They had no idea what to expect. But what they really didn’t expect, what didn’t even get on the (very short) list of possibilities was to be met – and called by name. Within a matter of days everything they knew, everything they suspected and everything they had speculated upon had been blown sky-high. Their very existence, their very history and the history of the Factions, had not only been called into question but the very foundations of their world had been shown to be a set of fabrications to hide the fact of what was really going on. Their lives up to that point had been an experiment, a method of fixing a problem generations in the making, they were nothing more than lab rats – important lab rats, but still. It was a lot to process but they had the time to think things out – or so they thought. But bigger forces were at work here. The government, or what remained of it after the ‘Purity Wars’, had deemed their experiment a failure and was going to shut everything down – leaving behind no one who knew anything about it…..

I enjoyed both the first two movies in this series as well as the first two books they closely followed. Like the rest of the world I was greatly disappointed with the third film. It bombed so badly that the second part never made it to the big screen. It was SO poorly received that even the talked about mini-TV series to round everything off also never got made. So you can imagine the level of trepidation as I picked up this book and started reading. I read ‘Divergent’ in early 2015 (and Insurgent in 2017) so it’s only taken me a mere 6 years to finish the trilogy but I’m finally here. Overall I thought the book was better than the movie – but as the movie was REALLY bad this isn’t exactly saying much. Despite its 500+ pages not exactly a lot happens. There’s much mopping and soul searching and teen angst between Tobias and Tris – in other words more of the same but MORE of the same. The larger background to the first two books is kind of explained but the whole ‘Purity War’ thing really didn’t make a lot of sense. Essentially it was supposedly about a widespread programme of genetic ‘enhancements’ that went wrong which produced the ‘genetically damaged’ GD whilst the ‘unenhanced’ still regarded themselves as ‘genetically pure’ (GP) [laughable in itself!]. Conflict ensued and the world went to rats….. There are SO many problems with this scenario I hardly know where to start. The experiment – in the city of Chicago – was an attempt to heal the GD population through the Faction system in the hope of producing GP people, AKA ‘Divergent’. I’m not sure if the author’s subconscious had a hand in writing this book but there’s a conversation between too characters where one clearly says to the other that the whole GD-GP Purity War idea makes ZERO sense….. and he was RIGHT on the money. About the best thing you can say for the third book in the trilogy was that at least the author TRIED to pull everything together at the end. If, like me a week before I started this, you have read the first two books and wondered if the series was worth finishing ‘just cuz’…. I’d save time and skip it. It won’t add anything to your enjoyment of the series and might just leave a bad taste in your mouth. Not recommended.