In Beatrice’s city the population is divided into five factions, each of which has committed itself to honouring, no, living according to the human quality it holds in highest esteem. Knowledge, truth, friendship, bravery and selflessness, these ideals and the factions’ commitment to them have been identified as the best way to avoid the violence and wars that have plagued the city in the past.
Raised in Abnegation, the faction that strives for selflessness, sixteen-year-old Beatrice Prior has struggled all her life to live according to its ideals. Her father has worked tirelessly as a member of the city government to address the needs of all residents, her mother has championed the factionless, those poor wretches who survive in near destitution without the support or care of a faction, and her brother Caleb has demonstrated his ability to put the needs of others before his own through a thousand small acts of kindness. However, in her heart of hearts, Beatrice rebels against the utter denial of self that Abnegation demands. She believes she simply isn’t good enough.
Beatrice is nervous entering the room for the aptitude test, the screening process designed to help her decide, now that she has turned sixteen, which faction most closely reflects her values. She undergoes the simulation exercises, which veer from frightening to strangely calm to disturbing. When the test is over, the tester informs Beatrice that her results are inconclusive. Her reactions during the simulation indicate an equally strong aptitude for the three factions, Abnegation, Erudite and Dauntless. She is, the tester warns her, Divergent. For her own safety, the testers urges, Beatrice must never ensure that no one ever knows.
At the Choosing Ceremony on the following day, she watches with rising anxiety as one sixteen-year-old after another selects their faction. The vast majority of them opt for the faction in which they grew up. Just before Beatrice’s name is called, her brother Caleb chooses. To her shock, he picks Erudite. When it is her turn, Beatrice slices her palm with the ceremonial knife and lets her blood drip into the bowl of the Dauntless faction. The Choosing Ceremony over, she follows the other Dauntless initiates as they race from the hall and leap onto a moving train headed for the headquarters of her new faction.
From the leap off the train onto the roof of a seven-story building followed by a jump off the same building into a net, to exhausting hours of fighting, knife throwing and target practice, the weeks of the Dauntless initiation process are almost unimaginably difficult, particularly for Beatrice and the handful of other initiates from other factions. While Four, their taciturn instructor works them hard and constantly pushes them toward the next challenge, Beatrice, or Tris, finds herself increasingly addicted to the adrenaline rush that comes with a new task and the sheer elation that she feels when she accomplishes it.
Tris struggles, however, with the fact that she is smaller than the other initiates and saddled, by her own estimation, with a body that is still more that of a child than a young woman. She also struggles to overcome personal modesty and discomfort with physical touch, both legacies of her Abnegation upbringing. Her fellow initiates take to calling her Stiff, some less affectionately than others, though she does make friends with Christina and Will and Al.
More difficult to cope with is the knowledge that, of the nineteen Dauntless initiates, only ten will be accepted into the faction, those who score highest during the three-stage initiation process. During every exercise, Tris and her fellow initiates constantly vie for position, and constantly watch the others for signs of underhandedness. She comes to expect that kind of behaviour from Peter, a nasty bully, and his minions Drew and Molly but, sadly, it also comes at times from those Tris counts as her friends. She also grows very leery about Eric, the youngest of the five Dauntless leaders, and a man who demonstrates a cold-hearted viciousness and brutality that has her wondering how a faction dedicated to the protection of the innocent could tolerate him and promote him to a position of leadership.
As the initiation process enter the second stage, each initiate is summoned to undergo a virtual simulation exercise designed to test their ability to master fear. Though Tris finds herself almost overwhelmed with terror during the ordeal and feels that it goes on forever, she learns afterward that she has overcome the virtual challenges more rapidly than the other initiates. Worryingly, that fact, put together with her at-times expected responses in moments of stress, bring Tris to the attention of faction leaders. A secret ally as well as Four, her instructor, both warn her not to stick out so much. It seems bad things happen to those whose behaviour is unconventional. When she overheads some Dauntless leaders talking, Tris realizes that Eric, in particular, has been assigned to root out initiate who might be Divergent.
Even as Tris tries to survive the cut, hide her Divergent nature, and become a member of the Dauntless faction, other trouble is brewing. From listening to her parents’ dinner table conversation at home, Tris knows the Erudite faction is becoming increasingly vocal about their opposition to Abnegation’s control over local government. Those who established the faction system believed that their selfless natures made Abnegation’s adherents most likely to govern fairly but now the Erudite are accusing Tris’ old faction of deliberately withholding food and other necessities from those in other factions. When the stories start to slip into the initiates’ dormitory, carried there by Peter and his nasty friends, Tris tries at first to defend Abnegation. Eventually she realizes she cannot win against the growing wave of insinuations and outright lies, and the effect they are having on those around her.
On Visiting Day, her mother comes to visit Tris, and, to the girl’s joy and relief, doesn’t blame her for choosing a faction other than Abnegation. Her father, she is told, is being selfish and has elected not to visit either of his children. When Tris asks her mother if she will visit Caleb too, she learns that the Erudite have banned Abnegation from their headquarters. Before she leaves, Tris’ mother asks her to go to see Caleb and tell him to research the stimulation serum. She won’t explain to her daughter what the request is about.
Tris gets the opportunity to slip away from Dauntless headquarters and goes in search of her brother. The two siblings take a walk during which Tris notes that Caleb is looking drawn and worried, and wonders if he regrets his choice of faction. She also passes along their mother’s message but, before she can leave the Erudite facilities, she is stopped and taken before the faction leader, a woman named Jeanine, who has led the accusations against Abnegation. Jeanine is clearly suspicious of Tris’ reasons for visiting her brother. She also seems to know a great deal about problems with her aptitude test, and anomalous readings during her simulation exercises. Tris lies and tells the Erudite leader she has thrown up during every simulation as the result of a physical reaction to the serum.
Her own faction isn’t much happier when she returns to Dauntless headquarters, escorted by two Erudite officials. Only a made-up story about a kiss rebuffed by Four that caused her to feel angry and embarrassed lets Tris off the hook with Eric. Though false, the tale does reflect Tris’ increasingly strong and confusing feelings for the enigmatic Dauntless trainer.
Despite everything, Tris finds herself in first place at the end of the initiation process, which guarantees her membership in Dauntless and her choice of jobs. However the celebrations haven’t finished before Tris and Four and the entire Dauntless faction are caught up in a nightmare of epic proportions. Injected with a new serum that is supposed to aid in their retrieval should they go missing, the members of the faction are transformed instead into automations whose expertise in fighting and killing are put to use by Dauntless leaders conspiring with those from Erudite.
Being Divergent, the serum doesn’t work on Tris and she watches in mounting horror as her friends arm themselves with weapons and go out to hunt down and kill those who belong to Abnegation. Determined to save her parents from slaughter and deactivate the program that is controlling the members of her faction, Tris will have to be braver and smarter and more selfless than she could ever have imagined possible.
Written by Veronica Roth, Divergent is the fast-paced and thought-provoking story of a girl who turns her back on her strict and simple upbringing to find herself caught up in a new life that is as dangerous and violent as it is exhilarating, of her growing feelings for the young man who becomes her trainer, and the secret that could destroy them both. An enthralling book that will grab readers from Grade 7.
FernFolio Editor
↧
Divergent by Veronica Roth
↧