Allegiant.

Veronica Roth.

Sometimes I get a little bit snobby about books. I think I need to always be reading classics like Dickens and Steinbeck in order to be a well-read person. Young adult/teen fiction is juvenile and it's some sort of weakness or failing as a reader to say that I enjoyed a book in that genre.

So when I started reading the Divergent books, my plan was to just never acknowledge them. Hope that people didn't really notice them in my list; draw their attention to Walden, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Tess of the d'Urbervilles instead.

But I have something to say about them. So I'm going to.

Who the hell cares that I read a YA fiction trilogy and liked it?

My only benchmark for YA fiction in the last five years or so is the Hunger Games Trilogy. I also read those. I'm pretty sure I liked the Divergent books better. 

Anyways, on to the book.

I think I read the series slightly out of order. I was reading them from the library and Four was available before Allegiant. Since Four was just sort of an origin story for Tobias, I didn't think it would matter if I read it before or after Allegiant. It didn't. But it did introduce me to Tobias' voice and perspective before Allegiant. Which may have had an effect on how I read the last book.

I should also say that before Allegiant I had the ending a little bit spoiled for me. Someone told me that they were pretty sure Tris died. So I was expecting that.

In reading Four, I learned that Veronica Roth initially starting writing the Divergent series from the perspective of Tobias. It didn't work out how she wanted, so she wrote it from the perspective of Tris instead but kept Tobias as a main character. 

All this together somehow made me oblivious to the real reason she wrote Allegiant from the perspective of both Tobias and Tris. She sort of switched between them throughout the book. I was thinking things like, "well, she's obviously likes the character of Tobias and is interested in showing a bit of his mind" and, "she wanted to shake things up." When actually, she needed some one else's voice in the story so that she could finish telling it after Tris died. I felt a bit silly that I didn't think of that before the end of the book.

I am an advocate for unexpected endings. I appreciate when an author, or a screenwriter or whatever, does something you don't expect. I feel like so many stories are so predictable. I love it when something I couldn't predict happens. I don't always love it when it is happening, but I will almost always look back on it and appreciate it. 

This sort of falls in this category. I mean, Tris dies less that 100 pages from the end of the book. Not that groundbreaking. But she does kill off the main character and the continues the story in another character's voice. That's uncommon. And I like it.

It was also weirdly devastating to have the main voice of the story just disappear. You are so used to her mind and the story from her perspective and then she gets shot and it just ends. 

It almost makes you feel like you didn't get closure on the story. 

This series is like the Hunger Games in that you get to the end and they try to sort of make it happy, or at least positive or better in some way. But too many people have died and everyone left is just a broken, grieving mess. It kind of puts a shadow over the whole story in your mind. 

That is all I have to say.