Review: Allegiant by Veronica Roth

In all honesty, I wasn’t that excited about picking up this book – the conclusion to Veronica Roth’s bestselling Divergent series. Not a lot happened in it’s predecessor: Insurgent, despite the fact that it was stretched out across a lot of pages – which put me off quite a bit. Watching the film was actually a lot more enjoyable for me, which is unusual because I am literally always a supporter of ‘the book is better than the film’. But in this case, it was the opposite. It was all the best bits of the book packed into a 2 hr film. It was fast-paced, enjoyable and most ultimately – understandable!

So watching that recently, compelled me to pick up the final book, and I am in two minds about it.

One thing I did notice about it, which irritated me slightly, was the repetitiveness of Veronica Roth’s descriptions and the repetition of general events, really. The beginning all felt a bit de ja vu to me, like I’ve read it all before in the other books – the unrest, the shooting, Tris and Four’s unsettled relationship… But I think that when you get to the third and final book in a trilogy like this, you’re either reading it because you really like the books and how they are written, etc – or you just want to see what the conclusion turns out to be! And admittedly, the latter is the most relevant to me.

What I was really impressed with, however, was the scientific aspects of a book. It must have been a challenge for Veronica Roth to get these fictional facts accurate and fit them into the existing books, appropriately. I really liked the explanations and it was described so realistically. It really sounded like it could have been a real war. The purity war…

I also loved the fact that the roles of the people who belonged to factions and the Divergent in the first two books were reversed in this page-turning conclusion and the reader was told that it was the Divergent who were the special ones, the important people who are essential to the human race. What I really like about this book is that there is a really deep moral to it, or at least there is from my perspective of the book. That in general life, it is great to be different from everyone else. The Divergent stand out as being different, and some people don’t like them for it, but they were essential to the experiment.

All in all, I was surprised how much I actually enjoyed this book. It was a very satisfying ending to a reasonably good series. The only thing that lets it down for me, is the second book.