The Blogging of a Book Addict

This should not come as a shock to anyone, but I did not like this book as much as Divergent. I say it shouldn't be a shock because Insurgent is the second book in a trilogy, and the second book is almost never as good as the first one. Still, I don't want to seem as though I didn't enjoy Insurgent, because I did, but there were a few problems I had with it that I need to address.

Firstly, what the hell happened to Tris? If you happen to have seen my review of Divergent, you see that I have an entire paragraph on how Tris refuses to fold and crumble into a million pieces, even when things get insanely difficult and it seems almost impossible for her to keep going on. Insurgent not only threw all that away, it took it and shattered it into a million billion pieces, and that makes me so ridiculously angry. Tris went from being a strong, confident, unbreakable heroine into someone who is so smothered by grief and guilt and angst that she can barely see straight, let alone fight in a war that's threatening to tear apart everything she has ever known. She is weak and broken and almost unbearable in parts. And even though I understand some emotion after the hell she went through at the end of Divergent, there is a limit to what I am willing to accept. Also, the flippancy with which she treated her life made me downright angry. Suicide is not a game, it's not a viable escape route, and it's not something that should be treated the way it's treated in Insurgent, by a fictional character or by that character's author. Finally, in Insurgent Tris became a liar. And while she may have always been secretive, and good at keeping things from others for her own safety and protection, her blatant disregard for honesty rubs me the wrong way, to say the least.

Secondly, I could lie and say I liked the way Roth went out of her way to create a realistic and honest portrait of a developing relationship between Tobias and Tris, but I'm not going to lie (my faction quiz tells me I'm Candor, maybe that has something to do with it). I was disappointed and annoyed by the way Tris and Tobias treated each other throughout Insurgent. This is more personal preference than genuine critique, but the lying and secrets and manipulation and general coldness that they both displayed because of their own messed up emotional situations just got under my skin.

Finally, one of my favorite things about Divergent was that it moved insanely quickly, and I never felt bored with the storyline. In Insurgent, I was ridiculously bored for huge parts of the book. Even though there was a lot of moving around, it felt like nothing really happened until the last few chapters, and honestly it just felt unrealistic that a war that started at the end of Divergent in a bloody and brutal attack would basically have a giant pause button pressed on it for 450 pages.

All of the above said, Insurgent was a fine middle installment in a trilogy, and I'm still invested in the world and the characters. I'm excited to read Allegiant, but honestly I'm just hoping I won't be disappointed.