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Health & Fitness

BOOK REVIEW 'Allegiant'

The Final Installment in the series that has taken teen literature by storm.

Allegiant
By: Veroinca Roth
So, today for the third and final time I take the conversation back to the Divergent Series.
The final book in the series came out nearly two weeks ago, and of course my friends and I had to go get it that same say. It came out in the middle of the week and between everything I've decided to sign myself up for in my life I have a hard time finding the time to read sometimes. Even so, I managed to finish this heartbreaker in just about a week.
As a spoiler free refresher for where we are in the series at this point, I’d suggest going back and reading my reviews on the first two books, because things are about to get weird.
 I am in no way, shape, or form planning on spoiling the end of the series, but all I will say on the subject for the moment is “WHY?” The book clearly picks up where the second one left off (remember no spoilers) and it doesn’t take long until our protagonists find themselves outside the Chicago city limits to discover for themselves what’s on the outside world. The city has been fenced off for years, so no one knows for sure.
They find themselves on a compound made out of what used to be O’Hare Airport, and the rest of the book is mostly them caught up in the dramas and tribulations of the refugees on the camp. At some points making really stupid decisions that if I were actually there may have ended up with me slapping some sense into someone.
Enough of that, the thing I really wanted to get to talking about was the ending, and oh what an ending it was.
I finished it one night, just before I went to bed. When I had finished my homework, I had about 100 pages left, and for any other avid readers out there you know when you get to that 100 page mark there’s no stopping you from finishing it. Everything was smooth sailing up until about the last 20 pages, when things hit an emotional wall. Where ever Veronica Roth decides to go in this series, there has always been a string of character death behind her. So, in the last book, it was pretty much expected she would try and go out with a bang.
What I did not expect was for her to go out with an atomic bomb. She kills off a character that caused me to not be able to sleep that night and instead sit in my room listening to John Mayer and Twitter ranting. I wish I was exaggerating. After it happened, the last pages went by in a blur and the book remained hidden under a stuffed tiger at the end of my bed for days because I couldn’t look at it. It was a very low point in my teenager-hood. No matter the emotional pain it caused me, I saw the ending of the book as completely unexpected and at the same time, character fitting. You have no idea how much I wish I could say more on the subject but that would be reaching spoiler territory.
The final installment is my favorite book in the Trilogy because it gives some explanations that seemed lacking in the first two. My major gripe since the beginning was how the human race seemed to evolve to the point when we basically have one character trait to our names and became what the English geeks would call ‘flat characters.’ Isn’t that what the original plot all stems from? Only having one main focus and putting that 'faction before blood'? The idea has always bothered me, until she explained how that all came about in this book. I appreciated the way she justified it because it all fit with the tone and ideas that the books have displayed since the first page.
One final gripe on the subject that has been here since the beginning, and never righted itself is the surplus of characters. She introduces way too many characters with these bland names that all blend together and it gets to the point when one of them will do something, or die and you’ll be reading it thinking “I’m sorry,who are you again?” Each person’s origin, relationships, and what they’re doing and have done never quite sticks in your brain and causes you to never truly create an emotional connection with them. She just goes around killing characters and I was indifferent to it because I had no idea who she just killed even was.
In short, no matter how much sleep I lost because of this ending, I’m really glad I didn’t want to throw it out of a moving train when it was done.
 Pages: 526
Read In: 1 week
Rating: 8/10
Ages: 13+ up
Four Categories: Death, Romance

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