Anyways, onto semi-coherency. I want to say a bunch about this book and I'm really sorry there's nothing about Divergent but I'm a bad person and I'm not going to burden you with a half-written review. So we're just going to jump in.
(links are hard and I haven't got a good summary. Scroll past Divergent and Insurgent is there.)
I dunno where to start with this book, really. It's not often that a book makes me read more than like a hundred and fifty pages a day and I haven't actually read a book very fast since Raven Boys but dang. Divergent took me three days (while on vacation) and Insurgent about four (also while on vacation/upon getting home) and I just read a hundred pages by a pen light so that probably says something about the quality of these books I hate reading by penlight unless it's a horror novel.
What's been really cool about reading Veronica Roth's books is that I've found a new writing style to adore and draw inspiration from and that really excites me. I really really love her style and how she phrases things -- since it's all first person present tense there's so much potential to really be inside your MC's head: you're literally in the moment with them. And it's a hard POV to master (I think) but if you can do it right then it's absolutely fantastic, and I think Roth pulled it off fantastically. Tris has a beautiful voice and everything, even the things that aren't strictly-speaking Tris are, at the same time, being told to us by Tris. The words she uses, the way she phrases things, I absolutely believe that all of it is Tris. That's really cool.
Speaking of Tris, I really do love her as a character, for the most part. She's really, really deep and absurdly human and it's really fantastic, and it gives me a chance to both love and hate some things about her. (I love being able to do that, it gives me a happy feeling.)
What I really love about Tris is, character voice aside, her morality and the way she looks at the world. (not her worldview, just the way she perceives things.) She clearly has a moral compass and a direction to what she thinks is right and wrong, and what she thinks certain things mean, and I love it because it's so uniquely Tris. So often, I think, authors try to shove a box onto a character, a hero especially, and label it morality and it will be precisely what morality should be (with, of course, the exceptions that authors love to use for flaws and conflict) and not what morality actually is. Every person on the planet has a different north for their moral compass, and well, so should fictional characters. And that's definitely something Tris has and it's a great level of humanity to give her and I love it it makes her seem so real.
On the flipside, however, there are quite a few (I don't want to say numerous but I don't want to say a couple, it's somewhere in between) times throughout Insurgent especially that you kind of get the feeling the author is...purposely trying to say something? It's not quite wrong or out of character it's just...misplaced and kind of see-through. Like a bad metaphor. (in my opinion a metaphor is bad when you can tell it's a metaphor before the end of it) And it kind of got to me and upset me. Like, Tris has a thing going for one of the side characters - Johanna - about the scar that Johanna has, and how, somehow, she's beautiful with it.
Tris herself is no stunner, she doesn't talk about attractiveness in that sense unless it's related to Johanna's scar, and then right at the end of the book she says like she was managing to be beautiful not in spite of the scar, but with it and it's just...well duh, Tris, she's a strong, capable, amazing woman who stands for what she believes in and isn't afraid of people, but she's not in your face about it. Of course she's beautiful. And it didn't tie in very well to the other similes used in the context, and idk, it just felt very shallow to me.
In other words, I hate when you can tell that the other is showing you something. If you need to, tell it to me straight.
That being said, Roth has an amazing way of portraying an describing and talking about people. Just people in general, the human species. There's some wonderful stuff about people (not humanity, not society, humans) in Insurgent and that makes me SO HAPPY because it's my favorite thing in the world and I just love people and I love when an author can capture their essence and yes that was very fantastic. All of the people in these books are very much people.
And since they are all such fantastic people, another thing I absolutely love with both of these books is Tris's friendships with the other characters she meets. The best part of it, for me, was that it wasn't ever a clearly defined circle of friends that she has. All of the people that she becomes friends with are just...friends. They're friends and they're human beings interacting with each other like humans do and it was all really fantastic to read about and to watch grow and come to life. I really love reading about friendships that aren't clear-cut or absolutely stated. They're just...people. Being people.
(Can you tell I like people?)
To be more specific, I'm going to be typical and fangirl for a minute about how much I absolutely love Tobias. I loved him from the very start of Divergent and I love him still. I...I get this feeling off of him that if I were to dig my hands into his soul it would be warm and feel like velvet and smell of blueberries, that it would be so deep I could get half my body in it and still not touch the bottom. That his mind is a fantastically horrible place to be stuck in and that he's bursting with all this human like energy and he wants to touch things and feel them and know what to do with them, that he likes to deal with things while they're there in his hands and that still he's not ever quite sure what he's doing. He's your typical tall-dark-troubled-and-handsome character that you'll find everywhere but he's also a person and I just -
Veronica Roth, if I ever meet you, thank you for writing such good people.
(also Tobias has the best personality and quiddity end of story)
Ah, I seem to have gotten off track. Let's pick back up with something generic and say that the plot and the pacing were beautiful. The ending threw me for approximately three loops all within the space of as many pages and that is awesome right there. Hat off to you, author lady. Just all the way through I got this sense that the author knew what she was doing with this project, that she knew what was going to happen next and exactly how to get there (totally unfair how good she is at scene transitions, FYI) and you weren't going to encounter anything unexpected in the bad way, because there wasn't any of it.
Also every (on-screen, character-known-to-reader) death managed to be meaningful and make me hurt inside, and that, listeners, is awesome, because lots of people die and I still wasn't desensitized to it.
Going back to plot and beginning on my two major cons: it was all kind of mood-whiplash-y at times. Like you knew what was happening, but all of a sudden you were getting a different emotion out of it than you had been, and it throws you for a loop for a minute. Not good. But also not unbearable, so long as you don't see it as Tris being dramatic.
Other thing I really, really did not like was the Amity-shaming.
WE INTERRUPT YOUR BROADCAST TO BRING YOU A DISCLAIMER
I don't read books to get anything out of them except the journey. The following is not a 'meaning' or whatever con it is a I-did-not-like-this-thing-about-this-WORK-OF-FICTION-and-the-handling-of-this-CONFLICT-TOPIC-(STORYTELLING VERSION)-within-this-book
Continue, listeners.
I feel like in part, it was Tris as a person with her views on things, but I just...the whole book kept putting Amity down and putting Amity down and making it seem like Amity was in the wrong.
That Amity was doing something BAD.
BAD, I ask you.
It really irked me because...we didn't even know very much about Amity, and neither did Tris. How can they be presented as doing something wrong, when really, all it is is that:
a.) Tris doesn't like them, nor does she get along with Johanna
b.) They're a smaller, quieter, peaceful faction that people dont' take much notice of because Amity wants it that way
c.) they're standing up for what they believe in
Amity may have honored past connections with Erudite, yeah, they may have decided not to help Dauntless/factionless, but know what else they didn't do? Attack the good guys, they didn't compromise people or betray them. On the morality side of things, Amity did absolutely nothing wrong! So why should they be portrayed as such? I don't understand. Half the underlying theme (theme, not moral) of the book was equality and here we go putting Amity down because they don't get involved.
(that was all pretty much directed at the time they spent in the Amity compound and when Marcus and Tris and the gang went back there to ask for help from the Erudite refugees, FYI. That and just Tris's general attitude towards them.)
Well, listeners, I think that's that for Insurgent. Definitely something I'd recommend reading. Awesome, awesome book. Can't wait for the next one. I'd give it four and a half out of five stars, for sure. (mostly because that Amity thing just ticked me off)
And up next is I'm not sure! =D stay tuned, listeners. Do not. Go near. The dog park.
