Veronica Roth Sucks!

[JMH]

Just finished the last book in the Divergent Series... and it sucks.  Its not just how bad the ending is (which I won't spoil) but the thing reads like a jigsaw puzzle put together with the wrong peices  that were forced together.  Its repetive and there is no real character development.  The main character remains as impulsive as ever, her boyfreind get just as mad at her as he always has.  You would execpt the charcters to have matured a little by the last book but if anything they are more childish than ever.

 

The plot is horrible.  It starts off alright but then goes down hill from there.  You would expect such a series to reach some sort of ultimate climax but there is no real build up and the whole thing feels rushed.  It is as if she couldn't make up her mind which direction she wanted to go with one chapter going in one direction only to drop the storyline completely and go in a different direction the very next chapter. 

 

The ending is the worse I've ever read in a trilogy.  It is as if Roth was intentionally trying to get her readers angry with her for no other reason to than to upset them.  It ends in a way that neither advances the story and character development or show off her skill as a writer.  It is as if someone dared her to do something and implusively goes through with it at the very last moment in a very sloppy manner.  If she wanted to end the story the way she did she should have written the story so it would make sense but as I said, the whole plot is a mess.  I do not know why her publisher even agreed to print such trash because if you read the Amazon reviews she has greatly damanged her career. She had already sold the movie rights to the series but I can't see any studio wanting to use the storyline of the third book to do a movie trilogy.  Many people don't mind tragic endings... I can live with them, but there has to be some point to them.  There is no point to how this book ends.

 

 If the writing had been in anyways good and the ending not so meaningless I wouldn't have minded.  The whole pointlessness of it and the half ass way she went about it makes Allegient unacceptable.  If you've read the first two books of the Divergent series STOP there.  Stopping with the second book will leave you with a far more satisfying and enjoyable ending then what you will end up getting with the last book.

 

 

You have been warned.

 

 

If you are looking for something similar and I consider actually better I recommend the "Pure" series by Julianna Baggott.  It also takes place in a dysotpia setting but with better character development, better writing, and has a firm progressing storyline that the writer sticks to.  The first two books are out; "Pure"and "Fuse".  I just hope the third book doesn't end up as trashy as the end of Roth's trilogy.

Edited October 28, 2013 by JMH

[methodwriter85]

    I haven't read the book yet, but god, the people in charge of turning the trilogy into a major franchise had to be PISSED.

[MJ85]

I haven't read the book yet, but god, the people in charge of turning the trilogy into a major franchise had to be PISSED.

Thus the flaw in trying to turn EVERY trilogy into a major franchise?

[methodwriter85]

    Well, the flaw in turning an incomplete trilogy into a franchise.

[CassieQ]

Well, this is disappointing.  I guess I'll make my sister read it first and get her take on it  

[Krista]

I didn't really either of the first two books, but read them anyway. The way the second one ended, I was confused as it seemed completely disjointed. I agree with you that there isn't any real and true character development. They are what they were from Book 1 Page 1. Bombshell after bombshell didn't change them in some fundamental way that lasted.... 

 

Not a Roth fan.

[MJ85]

One other thing...

 

\Its not just how bad the ending is (which I won't spoil)...

 

Many people don't mind tragic endings... I can live with them, but there has to be some point to them.  There is no point to how this book ends.

 

[methodwriter85]

   Veronica Roth Responds (SPOILERS)

 

    I think as much as you want to heap scorn on her, keep in mind that Veronica Roth is only 25 years old, and this is her first major book series. And I'm going to point to what she says here:

 

Just because I try to do something with my writing doesn’t necessarily mean that I do it well, so there is also room to say “Okay, I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t think that what you were trying to do worked.”

I’ve said before that this ending was always a part of the plan, but one thing I want to make clear is that I didn’t choose it to shock anyone, or to upset anyone, or because I’m ruthless with my characters—no, no, no. I may have been ruthless with other characters, in the past, but not with her, never with her. And I wasn’t thinking about any readers when I wrote this book; I was thinking about the story, because trying to meet the expectations of so many readers would be paralyzing. There’s no way to please everyone, because that mythical book with the ending that every single person wants can’t exist—you want different things, each one of you. The only thing I can do, in light of that fact, is write an honest story as best I can.

   

     You have to room to say, "I got what you'e trying to do, but it didn't quite work and here's why", but to be completely dismissive and act as if she at the ripe ol' age of 25 has completely wrecked her career because of how she wrote the third book doesn't sit well with me.

 

     Authors grow, change, and evolve. That Veronica Roth has managed to create characters that we care about and root for is half the battle. And the fact that you did like- even love the first books does say that she has some talent there, and talent can grow if it's nurtured right.

[JMH]

 Includes some Spoilers

 

I never suggested she had wrecked her career. What I did say is that whatever studio she had sold the options to the movie rights to will probably never made into a trilogy, which happens all the time for a whole slew of reasons.  In her case however the issue is not the result of budget limits or the lack of interest but by how much damage the third book did to the series as a whole. I do not mean how bad a movie based on the third book would end up being but because the toxic effect of the third book has destroyed the credibility of the entire series

 

  I've always known this is her first series.  I also have a good idea what she orginally intended for Triss to be.  She was to be this uberhuman like figure who makes the ultimate Christ like sacrifice.  It was her way of going about it that I felt was so horrible and down right immature.  Believe me, I've run into the problem of writing myself into a corner more than a few times in the past when that happens however I tend to start over rather than try to "jump the shark" to work my way around it,.  Unlike her I also  don't have millions of fans to worry about to disappoint

 

I hope she has learned from the experience.  She did a very very very poor job with the third book but the weakness in her writing and her complete lack of showing character development was already becoming an issue with the second.  To use an analogy it was if she was writing a TV sticom like Seinfeld where the characters remain exactly the same throughout each episode.  With the first book that was okay, you were just getting introduced to the characters.  In the second book when the same characters keep on getting into the same fights or making the same mistake over and over again it starts to get on your nerves.  That the third book ends with the characters still acting int he same childish way as they had since the beginning as if they haven't learned anything is either due to a lack of ideas  or just plain bad writing.

 

I do not know if it was due to meeting a deadline or that is what she thought was the best she could do. As I've said many times before I had no problem with what happens to each of the characters by the end of the book.  Many people have complained about the shocking ending.  While she says that was never her intention to shock or upset people, let alone how protective she was of the main character I beleive that is a complete and total lie.  The only way what she claims could be true is if she wrote the last couple of chapters before writing anything else and in order to meet the required word count filled up the rest of the book with random little mini stories that do nothing towards advancing the plot to its conclusion just to cut and paste the last chapters at the very end. That's how it reads, a bunch of pointless one chapter plots with an ending coming from so far left field that it is shocking because it takes what one assumed to be the main message about the need to trust those you care about to  suddenly change it at the last moment to make it all about the ultimate self-sacrifice in a way that leaves the message of trust of never having meant to be taken seriously in the first place.  It's made worse by how Triss decides to make that sacrifice, which she shows no desire to make in the book, but out of a knee jerk last minute impulsiveness  which makes her actions a noble sacrifice but rather the act of a reckless  immaturity teenager  that renders the nobility of the sacrifice she makes just as meaningless. That is why it is so shocking and why I at least take issue with it.To use another analogy the ending has the flow and logic of a bunch of random MacGyver epsiodos that suddenly ends with with everyone dying in  9/11 with about as good a transition if someone in editing had spliced the two flims together. It not the ending itself which lacks any value, it is how illogical it is given the characters she created.

 

I beleive she knew what she was doing and wanted it to be as shocking as possible.  She was trying to present herself as the bold daring writer who would not let anything get in the way of the story she wanted to tell.  It just a shame that in this case it was the story itself that stood in the way of the ending she wanted.

 

While somethings I see her having a chance to improve such as plot development on others such as her disassocitation between the story in her head and the one she ends up writing have more to do with personaility and her view of herself as a writer.  You can't teach a writer how to show respect for their readers. A writer can write whatever they want but that does not mean one can demand that the readers respect and appriecate a series or a write that they feel betrayed by and expect to remain a top sellig author.

 

You also can't teach someone how to view the world which they are trying to create.  The world and characters she creates are more akin to a still photograph, they can be quite beautiful and artistic  as a single picture but it takes more than one to create an art show to tell a complete story. 

 

Starting a trilogy is a daunting task, espeically if it is your first major work.  For her own sake I think it would be best to focus her efforts on single book novals. Right now  multibook series are in vouge and in great demand by publishers but I do not think she should go straight from the Divergent Series into starting another multibook one.  She just doesn't have the ability at this moment to be very good at it.  Single book novels are harder to get published these days but it would allow her to focus putting everything into that single book which unlike her trillogy the larger world and time period she was trying to create proved to be too much for her to substain or truely develop.