Insurgent, Day 4 and Allegiant, Day 1

Interesting fact about yours truly: Sometimes I procrastinate.


Let me rephrase that: I procrastinate frequently.


So I actually finished Insurgent on the day I thought I was going to, but it was so late at night that I knew if I posted a post right after finishing my Allegiant, Day 1 post would end up getting posted on the same day, which I didn't want to do...... you know, maybe I shouldn't attempt to explain my weird reasons for doing things. Suffice to say that I decided that, considering the fact that Insurgent ended on a cliffhanger and I already had a copy of Allegiant, I might as well start Allegiant right away and just combine my closing thoughts from Insurgent with my opening thoughts on Allegiant.


And then I didn't start Allegiant right away. And then it was Father's Day. And then suddenly it was Monday and I realized I really needed to just get started already.


Thus, I'm late, but I am, at last here. On to my impressions.


You may remember that in my last post I mentioned another teen dystopian series I read recently called Across the Universe. That trilogy was rather irritating for several reasons, but one was this; in the first book, several important facts were established. In the second book, it was revealed that all of the most important facts established in the first book were outright lies. In the third book, it was revealed that even more of the facts established in the first two books were untrue or incomplete. I think that series might've had more elaborately planned plot twists than any other series I've ever read.


Divergent doesn't follow quite the same pattern, but it is similar in the fact that the end of Insurgent brought the revelation that the background and history of the story's society is almost entirely different from what most of the characters and all of the readers were led to believe. And I have more than one reason to assume that Allegiant has several shocking plot twists in store.


I'm not quite sure how to feel about this yet. Like I've implied, I really didn't like Across the Universe, but I can acknowledge that it was an extremely well-written and gripping series. You have to be a good writer, the kind of writer who drags readers into your vortex and refuses to let them go, in order to make plot twists work, and so, theoretically, for Allegiant's upcoming twists to fit and be realistic, the book will have to be good, or at the very least addictively readable. The twists might alternatively be completely ludicrous, in which case the whole experience will probably be rather miserable, but I doubt that'll happen.


In other exciting news, Tris and her boyfriend, Four or Tobias or whatever-you-want-to-call-him, seem to have finally worked out their issues and stopped fighting! Hooray!


Speaking of Four/Tobias/whatever (Tobias is his real name and the name Tris calls him, but Four is the nickname used by everybody else), he has now been made a co-narrator of the book. Tris will narrate a chapter or two, and then Four will take over for a while, then Tris, and so on. I haven't quite gotten used to it or decided how I feel about it. It has the same disconcerting effect as the middle of the fourth Twilight book, Breaking Dawn, when Jacob was inexplicably made the book's narrator for several chapters. Suddenly the reader sees the character who has hitherto been narrating from the outside, sees her described in ways that she never described herself, and gets a new perspective on both the new narrator's relationship with the old one and the story in general. In addition, I'm always a bit wary of female authors who try to write from the perspective of a boy. I think Stephenie Meyer failed to do it at all convincingly, but so far I feel that Veronica Roth's doing alright.


That should about cover things for the time being. I shall valiantly attempt to doff my procrastinating self and get back here to continue no later than tomorrow afternoon.


~Pearl Clayton