Tris, her brother, and the other students all go to take their test after lunch.  …How old is her brother?  Why are they taking this test at the same time?

My gaze drifts from Susan to the Dauntless tables across the room. They are laughing and shouting and playing cards. At another set of tables, the Erudite chatter over books and newspapers, in constant pursuit of knowledge.

A group of Amity girls in yellow and red sit in a circle on the cafeteria floor, playing some kind of hand-slapping game involving a rhyming song. Every few minutes I hear a chorus of laughter from them as someone is eliminated and has to sit in the center of the circle. At the table next to them, Candor boys make wide gestures with their hands. They appear to be arguing about something, but it must not be serious, because some of them are still smiling.

I can only assume this is supposed to show off the traits of the different factions but…um, do non-Erudite people never read?  Do non-Amity people never play social games?  Do non-Candor people never have debates?  These are all very basic parts of the human experience, things that we all need in order to be mentally healthy and functional.  If you take these things away from 4/5ths of the population, you’re going to hamstring your society because most of the people are going to be severely fucked in the head.  It’s one thing to say this or that faction is best at something, or values something, or is responsible for some section of industry, okay.  But to illustrate their traits using these very basic examples?  It’s just weird.

At the Abnegation table, we sit quietly and wait. Faction customs dictate even idle behavior and supersede individual preference.

o.O  Really?  How are all Abnegation people not walking around in a constant state of bat-shit fucking insane?

I’m serious, that level of selflessness is not healthy.  You raise kids to think and act like that, and they will lose their minds.

And besides that, if they’re so big on ‘do nothing for yourself’ then why not just vote on an activity as a group and do that?  Better than just sitting there, hating life.

Her brother goes to take his test first, and he comes back all sweaty and pale.  We still don’t know why.  These tests are just for educational purposes; they don’t actually decide anything.  That’s all the information we’ve been given.  We don’t know what kind of weight they have or what kind of consequences or anything.

I am not allowed to ask him about his results, and he is not allowed to tell me.

So…apparently there isn’t even any social pressure involved?

Then it’s Tris’s turn for her test.  She goes in and finds a Dauntless woman is her proctor.  There’s a chair in the middle of the room with ‘a machine’ next to it.  What kind of a machine?  Fuck your curiosity, reader, it’s ‘a machine.’  Then Tris asks the woman about her tattoo.

“Never met a curious Abnegation before,” she says, raising her eyebrows at me.

Whaaaaaaaaaaa?  Curiosity about the world around us is built into the human experience.  It’s how we learn things like “is this edible” and “if I do that, will it hurt?”  Yes, some people have more of it than others, but “hey, why is there a giant bird on your neck” is fairly basic.  And asking questions to mask fear as some stranger puts electrodes on your forehead is even more basic.

So, after hooking her up to ‘a machine’ by sticking electrodes to her head, the woman gives her something to drink that makes her…um, hallucinate?  She finds herself in an empty room and has to go through a series of very strange tasks, like dealing with an angry dog that tries to attack a kid and lying to someone about whether or not she knows a guy.

I feel like I do know him, though I don’t remember how. And at the same time, I feel like it would be a bad idea to tell the man that.

Is that feeling part of the hallucination, or is it part of the general bullshit of ‘magical authorial knowledge’ that heroines in bad books sometimes get?  Eh, let’s save a bit of sanity and pretend it’s part of the hallucination.

Anyway, she doesn’t tell who the guy is, even when the person questioning her says the knowledge will save him.  And apparently that’s it, because then she wakes up.  Her proctor looks all confused and leaves the room.

Tris is worried that they’ll tell her she’s not fit for any faction and she’ll have to live factionless.  But…she’s allowed to pick, which means she can go into a faction she’s not suited to anyway, so if she’s not suited to any particular one…so what?

it is to live divorced from society, separated from the most important thing in life: community.

And the factionless can’t make their own community because…?

They tell her that her test is inconclusive and she could go either Abnegation, Dauntless, or Erudite.  Which is rather stupid, because the test was hardly intensive.  They say that each possible action would either confirm or eliminate a faction, but wow that’s moronic.  It takes something as complex as the human psyche and reduces it to a simple series of binary tests.  Pick the knife, you’re in Dauntless.  Don’t pick the knife, you’re not.  What?

Honestly, Tris’s test wasn’t that impressive.  She did actions that are pretty basic and entirely believable and within normal human experience.  Her first thing was to either pick a knife or a hunk of cheese, and she refused to do so because she didn’t know what was going on.  Totally normal, right?  Except here.  Then she didn’t fight the dog because she didn’t have a knife, so she kind of froze up and submitted to the dog so that it wouldn’t attack her.  Also normal, right?  No, here it’s supposedly “highly intelligent.”  And so on and so forth. 

So…are the rest of the kids really so simple that they fit neatly into one box or another?  And all of them are, to the point where Tris’s results are confounding?  Because that’s indicative of some really big problems in society.  That’s, like, lobotomizing the population, or some sort of backsliding in evolution, or something. 

The tell her that she’s Divergent, and that’s really rare, and that she shouldn’t tell anyone this result because it’s ‘dangerous.’  Why is it dangerous?  Well, we’re back to ‘because fuck logic, that’s why.’

I can’t bear to think about the Choosing Ceremony tomorrow.

It’s my choice now, no matter what the test says.

When has it not been your choice?

She walks home and thinks some about her city as she goes.

Most of the new buildings are next to the marsh, which used to be a lake a long time ago.

So, this is set in Chicago.  ‘A lake’ would most likely be Lake Michigan, which is frikkin huge.  And she doesn’t say that the marsh now surrounds the lake, she says it is the lake.  Marshes tend to be really shallow.  So where the fuck did all the water from Lake Michigan go?

This is where the factionless live. Because they failed to complete initiation into whatever faction they chose, they live in poverty, doing the work no one else wants to do. They are janitors and construction workers and garbage collectors; they make fabric and operate trains and drive buses. In return for their work they get food and clothing, but, as my mother says, not enough of either.

o.O  Wait, so, all of your labor force is underfed and homeless and restricted to squalor?  Why the fuck would you do that?  Book, do you not realize that civilization basically depends on its blue collar workers?  Those construction works and garbage collectors are what keep us all from collapsing, and they actually tend to be highly paid.  They are the backbone on which everything else is built. 

Which means that if you piss them off and they decide to say “fuck you, I’m going to live in the marsh and eat cattails” or whatever, then the rest of you are uniformly screwed.  If you piss off your ‘factionless’ then your city crumbles.  And if you kill off your ‘factionless’ because you neglected to feed them properly, then your city crumbles.  And if you piss them off enough, they’ll just stab you in the forehead with a hammer and take shit over.

They’d probably do a better job at running things anyway.

Really, how did these people end up subjugated in the first place?  How did this system come about?  Who said “hey, let’s give all of our absolutely vital jobs to the people that we’re going to marginalize and keep in poverty”?  Because this is not a natural system.  This is not something that would just evolve.  This is someone intentionally saying “no, fuck those guys because reasons.”  In a natural system, the people who haul away the garbage get paid well, because otherwise your garbage doesn’t get hauled, and no one wants that.

Oh my god, the stupid this book just sank to is physically hurting me.

Hey, speaking of the factionless, Tris comes across one of them begging for food.  She tries to give him some, and he grabs her arm and acts all creepy and aggressive.  But all he does is tell her to ‘chose wisely’ tomorrow and let her go.  Um…what just happened?  Why did he do that?  Why did he let her go?  What’s going on?  I’m so confused by this book’s randomness.  I half expect that crazy homeless man to start yelling “beware the Ides of March.”  But that would require the author to know what the Ides of March is, so probably not going to happen.