Tris goes back to the dorm and finds Al hiding from his family.  Seems the first round of eliminations hasn’t happened yet.  Well, then I’m very confused.  Are they being eliminated tonight?  But that would have to mean that the knife throwing and the fight with Molly happened on the same day…but she got dressed in between those two things…and her clothes fit in the morning but they didn’t fit in the afternoon? 

…and when her pants suddenly didn’t fit, she had to wear her dress to go run and buy new ones.  She didn’t pull out a second pair of pants and see if those fit.  Does she only have one set of clothes?

Everything about this book is so sloppy. 

Back to the story.  Al is scared about his low rank and disappointed to find that Dauntless isn’t what he thought it would be.

“No. I guess it was because…I think it’s important to protect people. To stand up for people. Like you did for me.” He smiles at me. “That’s what the Dauntless are supposed to do, right? That’s what courage is. Not…hurting people for no reason.”

Oooookay, so the book does understand that concept, it just went with stupid because reasons?  I mean, I guess if Dauntless is supposed to be wrong here, I can give a little bit of leeway for that, but you can’t just tell me that they sank to this level of batshit insane.  I would buy them being ultra-competitive instead of group-minded, maybe.  But jumping off trains?  Making Christina hang off the edge of a waterfall?  These brain-damaging fights?  It’s all coming off like an okay concept that got dragged out just a little too far and crossed the line into ridiculously stupid.

Then Al tries to hug her, and she pulls away, and he gets the hint.  It’s delightfully awkward and bittersweet and actually well handled.  It’s so rare you see this in a teen book, a girl being pursued by a guy and allowed to turn him down, without her needing a reason, without anyone getting aggressively hurt over it.  Yes, that’s a painful situation to be in and of course Al is hurt, but it’s still so sweet and quiet and realistic.  I wish the whole book was like this.

“You weren’t allowed to have pets?” Christina demands, smacking the table with her palm. “Why not?”

“Because they’re illogical,” Will says matter-of-factly. “What is the point in providing food and shelter for an animal that just soils your furniture, makes your home smell bad, and ultimately dies?”

Well, you’re quite stupid then, aren’t you?  Pets provide affection and comfort, and there have been numerous studies to show that pet owners have fewer health problems than non-pet-owners. 

Might as well ask ‘why bother having kids?  They just cry and poop and mock you as teenagers and then leave the house and then die.’  There you go, Will.  You are illogical.

I almost forgot. Those with an aptitude for Dauntless picked up the knife in the simulation and stabbed the dog when it attacked.

Right.  All of them performed the exact same action.  Because human psychology is that simple.

“In Candor,” says Al, nudging me with his shoulder. There. That feels normal. “We learn to read body language so we know when someone is lying or keeping something from us.”

So all of Candor isn’t truthful all the time?  But Peter still got away with lying, and Abnegation ‘can’t’ be corrupted.  Make up your mind, book.

She tells them she didn’t kill the dog during the test, then everyone is confused on how she got into Dauntless, because apparently there’s only one way to be brave, ever.  It’s not like protecting the little girl can count as brave, nope.  That’s unpossible.

After dinner, they learn their rankings, and cuts will be announced the following day.  Tris ranked 6.  Al ranked 8.  (Out of nine, so not including the class of Dauntless-born people, who seem to be doing training separately?  Maybe?)

Sixth? I can’t be sixth. Beating Molly must have boosted my rank more than I thought it would.

Hm.  So Tris thought she was low enough to be cut from the class, but she wasn’t worried about becoming factionless?  Seriously, it hasn’t even been a blip on her radar this entire time.  It’s almost like she has some mysterious knowledge from an author-god in the sky, telling her not to worry…

Molly gets pissed off that losing to Tris lowered her rank and vows revenge, while all the others chat about rankings.

If I want to fight my way to the top ten, I will have to beat them first.

I just hope I don’t have to betray them in the process.

Where did this even come from?  Tris is in competition with her friends, yes, but scoring higher than them doesn’t equal betrayal.  They aren’t working together, so she doesn’t have to backstab them or break any promises in order to out rank them.  There’s never been any hint that anything like that might become necessary in the future.

Is this another hint from the author-god?  Tut-tut, author-god.

Later that night, Edward (ranked first, compared to Peter’s second) has been attacked and stabbed in the eye with a butter knife.  Tris tries to keep him calm and does the smart thing by not letting him pull the knife out.  She notices that Peter and Drew are missing.

You know, if she wanted to paint Peter as ‘pure evil,’ this is a much better example.  Someone who reacts this extremely to coming in second place is out of the ordinary.  I would be far more impressed if he hadn’t been a pathetic bully, if Tris hadn’t bought into the ‘evil’ thing right from the get-go, and if this event here had come as a semi-shock.  But given his behavior up to this point?  It’s far too obvious that he did this. 

After Edward gets taken away, Tris and Christina talk.  They both know Peter did it, but they decide not to tell anyone, because they assume the authorities won’t do anything about it.  I guess in Dauntless, there are no rules and it’s brave to stab a kid while he’s asleep?  Sure, why not.  Anarchy for all.  No rules, no responsibility.  The whole place runs on vigilante justice and violent revenge.  If you don’t like your neighbor for playing loud music at 3am, you can just toss him off a cliff, no questions asked.

Either that or Tris is an idiot for not telling, which seems far more likely.  I’m really sick of books where teens take matters into their own hands instead of going to the adults.  It’s one thing to do that when there’s no choice, but when you have to come up with excuses for cutting out the adults?  When you have to twist the world into idiocy to make it work and paint the adults as useless and uncaring?  You’re just reinforcing in teen readers the idea that they can’t go to the authorities in real life, and that’s not really a message we want to be sending.

I don’t want to cry for Edward—at least not in the deep, personal way that you cry for a friend or loved one. I want to cry because something terrible happened, and I saw it, and I could not see a way to mend it.

This book really does have its good moments.  I wish they weren’t so rare and so hidden in so much idiocy.

The Dauntless have rules against attacking someone like that, but with people like Eric in charge, I suspect those rules go unenforced.

Uh, so go to someone other than Eric.  He’s not in charge of the whole place; he’s one of five.  Make a stink about it.  If he’s bucking the rules just because he can, no one’s going to like that.  Even people who don’t care about Edward are going to care about a leader who says “buck the rules, I do what I want.”

They talk about how Dauntless used to count standing up for others as bravery, and it’s sad that now it doesn’t.  I wish we could actually see this.  We haven’t seen any of the faction except training, and the only full members we’ve had any interaction with are Four and Eric.  Four’s on board with standing up for others, and Eric is insane.  How does she know that the rest of the faction shares in the ‘every man for himself’ mentality?  We have such a narrow view of what’s going on, and Tris is basing all of this on pure supposition.  And we could have seen more by now.  The kids aren’t isolated.  They can go and mix with other members in their free time.  But no, instead we’re just supposed to believe Tris when she says this.

Later that day, we see that Eric and Myra have both quit, and the other two to be cut were from the Dauntless-born class.  So all her friends are safe.

The next day, it’s a free day, and Tris randomly wanders around until she runs across a group from the Dauntless-born crowd.  They invite her to come with them, but don’t say where they’re going.  It seems even they don’t know where they’re going, but they fall in with a bunch of other members, climb up to the surface, and get on the train.  She starts talking to another girl named Shauna about Four, because Tris’s heart has decided to go flip-flop every time someone mentions his name.  Eh, I guess it’s better than the insta-love so common around here, but not by much.  She still only thinks positively about his looks, and every comment on his personality is negative.

but I still feel rattled by what she said, half confused by the idea of Four being “nice” and half wanting to punch her for no apparent reason.

Jeeze, I know you have a crush on the guy, but what’s with the violent tendencies?  Between this and nearly attacking Will’s sister on Visiting Day, her anger issues seem to have popped up out of nowhere.

They end up at the Hancock center and head up to the roof.

“Do the elevators work?” I ask Uriah, as quietly as I can.

“Sure they do,” says Zeke, rolling his eyes. “You think I’m stupid enough not to come here early and turn on the emergency generator?”

Where are you getting the gas to run the generator to a building that’s abandoned except when you want to come…do whatever this is you’re doing?

In fact, there’s a lot of electricity going on in this place, especially that underground facility you live in.  Plus busses and trains that run all the time.  That’s a lot of gas for a dystopian Chicago.  Where is it coming from?

Part of me wonders if this is a suicide mission disguised as a game.

No, it’s a suicide mission disguised as a lifestyle.

We’re going to slide down a steel cable in a black sling from one thousand feet up.

But if it were a red sling, then everything would be okay, obviously.

Hey, they have safety straps this time! 

So Tris gets in line, and then we have a lot of boringness as we wait for the people in front of her go.  Like lines aren’t boring enough when I’m actually then, now I have read about all the other people launching, too?

What happens between initiation and membership that transforms panic into delight?

Brain damage, duh.  Anyone who has a healthy sense of self-preservation gets kicked out.  Everyone else gets hit on the head until they stop caring so much.

Finally it’s Tris’s turn, and she straps in and goes.  It’s all sorts of fun.

At least there’s a proper method of slowing down at the end, a run of parallel line, so she doesn’t jerk to a halt.  On the other hand, she was going from 1000 feet up.  That’s a lot of speed to bleed off.  I’m not sure there’s enough room for her to do that.

I still smell like wind when I walk into the cafeteria that evening.

WTF does wind smell like?

Anyway, she walks into dinner all badass and accepted by the Dauntless zipliners, struttin her stuff, happy that she performed one single act and then got fully accepted.  Because it’s really that easy, don’cha know.

While she was gone, Christina almost punched out some Erudite guy who was ‘asking opinions on Abnegation leadership.’  That’s it.  Not even saying anything bad about, just polling.  Apparently the kids though he should be doing better things with his time.  Because Abnegation is in charge, damnit, and you knowledge people have no business coming around and trying to verify things and see if they’re doing a good job.  They’re incorruptible, and your face is stupid, so there. 

“Yeah,” she says. “While you were off having fun, I was doing the dirty work of defending your old faction, eliminating interfaction conflict…”

No, idiot, you were just creating more conflict by trying to punch some guy for doing his job.

So, anyway, yeah.  That was a whole chapter of wasted space.  You could argue that its purpose was to have Tris accepted by the Dauntless, but I’d argue back that it was a really stupid and insultingly easy way for her to get accepted.  She didn’t have to have patience and determination and fortitude.  She just had to do one big act, and a really fun one at that.