By Aimee Brandon Posted April 16, 2014
A teen fiction with action, love, and a sexy male hero, started as a book published in 2012 “Divergent” has been raved about and recently became a movie.
The basic plot of the first book in the trilogy, “Divergent”, takes place in a dystopian future. The city is divided into five factions Amnity, Candor, Dauntless, Abnegation, and Erudite. People live in the faction they were born into until the age of 16 when they choose whether to stay in their families’ faction or live in a different faction for life. Once they choose a new faction it is their family, “faction before blood.” Initiation begins after choosing and differs based on the faction, you have to last through initiation to stay, if you don’t you become factionless, equal to today’s homeless.
“Divergent” follows Beatrice Prior who grows up in Abnegation and becomes Tris after choosing to become Dauntless when she finds out the deadly truth about herself.
The book is mainly filled with Tris struggling to survive Dauntless initiation involving many life-risking activities. As the end of the book draws near, we find Tris trying to uncover the truth about the world outside the fence and starts to discover a mutual love for her instructor Four.
On March 21 the movie “Divergent” came out in theaters. From the point of view of someone who read the book previous to watching the movie, the movie was a fantastic adaptation of the book. There were a few mistakes that will affect future movies, but it had all the fundamentals and the important parts. Most important to the teenage girls they captured the chemistry between Tris, played by Shailene Woodley, and Four, played by Theo James. In casting the movie Theo is the Perfect Four, the book strongly defines his attractiveness and strength which the movie captures. Readers didn’t have high expectations of Shailene, though most were surprised to find she did great in portraying Tris. Other critical characters such as Jeanine Matthews, Peter, Caleb, and Christina, were also well cast.
Critics say that “Divergent” was too stereotypical in its young romance and dystopia, they think it is a simple play off of “The Hunger Games”. Though lovers of it would disagree that it’s a great story all on it’s own.
