Book Review - Insurgent

Insurgent by Veronica Roth
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

After finishing this novel, I'm left wondering if the author is a big fan of M. Night Shyamalan movies. I suspect she may be.

Insurgent is book two of the Divergent trilogy and picks up the action immediately where Divergent left off. This left me a little bit stumbling and grasping in the first few chapters. It'd been a while since I'd read Divergent and I had to scour my memory for what exactly had been going on in those last pages. While I'm always complaining about serial authors putting too much exposition into books, having none isn't balanced either. You'll never be able to figure this book out if you haven't read Divergent. Don't even try. You'll just pull your hair out. And if you read Divergent more than say, six months ago, you may want to re-skim the last few chapters so you don't feel quite as lost and confused as I did at first.

Insurgent takes a different path than Divergent, which I think is to blame for so many people hating it. Divergent was a rebellious, adventurous romp until the last few chapters. It was pretty standard YA dystopia and while it had it's moments of violence and tragedy, they weren't overwhelming. Insurgent, on the other hand, is extremely violent, extremely tragic, and is a war story more than anything else. Like any war, people are going to be injured, and they are going to die. There's going to be so gratuitous violence that makes you shake your head.

There's also some emotional immaturity that is going to make you shake your head. Not because the teenagers are acting like teenagers, but because they're acting like 20-somethings who act like twelve year olds. We all know those people, who can't hold a relationship together to save their lives and are constantly posting their drama on Facebook and fighting in public and you just roll your eyes. Yeah, those people. I hate dealing with those people, and I had to in order to read this book.

So, I didn't think this was terrible, and I will very likely read the third book in this series. I also didn't think it was amazing or wonderful, though I thought very highly of Divergent. It was pretty good, it kept my attention, and it was very entertaining. A solid kill-some-time read.

View all my reviews