Insurgent Review

Insurgent by Veronica Roth
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

First thing... I loved LOVED Divergent, and I have had this book since it's release afraid that it wouldn't meet up to the first. So here I am finally finishing it today months later and sadly, I am really on the fence about this. Not in the fence, not outside the fence... I'm right in the middle. Didn't love it or hate it, just ....huh.... so there it is.

I would like to say somethings about it.

First, I had to give Ms. Roth some credit. The writing was not explicit. I felt Tris was Divergent through the style of writing as you are in her head the whole time her thoughts and actions felt natural and normal. I liked that. First person - present is hard to pull off if you don't do it correctly and she dida great job at making the writing and speech natural. I was emotionally connected to her struggles, for the most part. And it is hard to write fight scenes, so kudos there.

But can I just say...

There was way too much arguing. I think the author was creating tension and drama between Tris and Tobias in order for the emotional draw at the end to have a bigger impact. So there again, I am very neutral about. Do what you have to do I guess.

This book is so unpredictable that it basically drove me kinda bonkers. Sometimes I felt as if it was rambling. But it was consistent rambling with a full scope and vision for the reader.

Here is my biggest problem - for as much as Tris was constantly evaluating human life and the consequences of her actions, the author made me not care about any of it. In the first book I started out with a clean palette and valued every character introduced. I was a little shocked at all the violence in Dauntless and the people that died. In Insurgent I couldn't care. It was a blood bath. The value of a human life was lost, which is crazy to say, since that is all Tris talked about, but there was too much dying. I was introduced to new characters and within a few pages they were dead. What happened was a became desensitized and detached to the inhumane reality these characters are going through, which was the whole point of the book. When JK Rowling killed off a character you felt it. Here someone jumps off the roof and I'm like, okay well I figured she'd go, she was too likable... NEXT!

And what I really wanted to know, of course what everyone wanted to know was what lies beyond the fence. his was something I picked up on in the first book, so it was my main draw. But, honestly, because of all the wasted time killing each other, when it FINALLY was revealed in a sense... I no longer care.

I think the point of these books is to value of human life, and if that is the point it should mean it.

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