Skip straight to Visiting Day now.  So…yup, we just passed right over that whole ‘end of part one of training’ thing.  It was supposed to be ‘yesterday’ and, oh yeah, they were supposed to eliminate four people.  Did the author just forget that detail, or is the timeline screwy, or was ruthlessly cutting four people to go live in poverty just not important enough to be mentioned?  Or did the knife throwing and Tris’s fight with Molly happen on the same day, thus today is the last day of Phase One?  Uhg, time is so poorly handled in this book.

As they all get ready to go out and find their families, Eric comes in to remind them that faction loyalty comes before familial loyalty, so if anyone shows up, they better act like cold, heartless cads.  Jeeze, maybe the reason families don’t visit transfer kids is because it’s rather painful to be so thoroughly rejected by your child.

She goes out to the Pit, where all the Dauntless-born initiates are meeting up with their Dauntless families again, but Tris stands off to the side all sad-face.  Peter’s family came to visit him, and she wonders if they know ‘what kind of person’ he is.  Um, probably.  They raised him.  They’ve had more interaction with him than you have.  Do they know he’s a bully?  Maybe, maybe not.  But they still know him better than the chick that’s had all of three conversations with him.

Um, come to think of it, Tris decided he was pure evil the moment Christina told her that.  She’d had no interactions with the boy before that, hadn’t even mentioned him.  So before they ever exchanged a single social act, Tris hated the kid.  I’m starting to think Peter is just a bitter kid, hated by everyone but his cronies (who are also mocked for things they can’t help, like appearance and voice) and so they lash out at those who have hurt them.  In that case, it makes sense they’d pick on Tris, since she came into things with animosity. 

Now, that doesn’t make Peter right, but it doesn’t make him pure evil, either.  I’ve had lots of fights with people that came about simply because I didn’t like that person, and they picked up on my dislike and responded in kind.  In such a case, we were both wrong.  Me, for being hostile.  Them, for punching me in the back of the head.  (Seriously, not even my face, the back of the head.  Grr.)

Oh, and also Al’s missing.  Maybe they did cut people, just quietly.  So…what, was Tris just so utterly confident about her ranking that worrying about the first round of cuts didn’t even enter her mind?

Then Christina’s family shows up, then Tris’s mom.  Huh.  So…of the three characters who have been pointed out, all of their families showed up.  Why all the drama about how transfer families never visit?

Tris’s mom says her dad won’t come because he’s being butthurt and selfish.  Then she says she can’t visit Caleb, because Abnegation are prohibited from entering Erudite HQ.

I don’t get it.  Why Abnegation specifically?  Is it because they know that they’re manipulative little fuckers and just don’t like them?  They say it’s because of tensions between the factions, but why does Erudite hate Abnegation so much?  I want to say it’s because Abnegation is full of idiots and schemers who turn a blind eye to child abuse, but the book doesn’t seem to want me to notice that, so what’s the book’s excuse?

Though he’s not an initiate anymore, most of the Dauntless use this day to come together with their families.

Um…are full-members not allowed to go wherever they want on their off-time?  Is there some sort of prohibition against going home for dinner once in a while?  What if you work with your parent?  Are you not allowed to exchange chit chat with them?

Anyway, Four is there, and Tris’s mom goes up to talk to him, since Tris pointed him out as one of her instructors.  Tris figures out that Four isn’t Dauntless-born.  Four and Mom exchange pointless pleasantries about how Tris is doing well in schoo- I mean, training.  Mom points out that he looks familiar AAAAAND now the randomly brought up side story about child abuse becomes awkward foreshadowing instead of just plain old awkward conversing.

 Or maybe he believes the articles the Erudite release about us—them, I remind myself.

You mean, the true reports?  Yeah, how dare he believe those.

Al’s family is looking for him.  Yup, he got cut and no one noticed.  While I can believe that, I can’t believe that no one was worried about this happening, either to a friend or to themselves.  How did they totally skip over all this instead of obsess over it?

Will’s family is here, too.  So, wow, that angst from before is looking thinner and thinner.

Will’s sister acts antagonistic to Tris’s mother, saying or organization hoards food that’s supposed to be donated to the factionless.  Tris gets hotheaded, but her mom pulls her away.

Then Mom gets all creepy and secretive, knowing her way around the building and all about Dauntless training stuff, but not saying why.  She wants Tris to stay around the middle of the rankings.  She also knows about Divergent and says a lot of Abnegation kids end up that way, so yeah, Tris is normal not special.  It’s everyone else in the world that’s fucked up from being dropping on their heads, or whatever’s going on.  She wants Tris to visit Caleb after her initiation is over and get him to research something called a simulation serum.  She continues to refuse to explain anything about this.

Then, as her mother runs off for no reason at all, Tris figures out that her mother was born Dauntless.  Um…dun dun dun?

You know, this is some great mystery and all, but…it’s dumped on us all at once, and Tris can’t do anything about it (and has no motivation to break rules and do anything about it) until after initiation is over.  So even though here we have a hint of a plot, we also know it’s going to be put on hold in favor of more idiotic training. This is really poor pacing, to have a completely dull and pointless series of events that’s just punctuated at random by hints of what the plot is supposed to be.