This is no longer a YA book about a messed up society and one little girl figuring that out.  Nope.  Because this book has morphed into a straight-up James Bond novel.  How did that happen, you ask?  Well, it was very easy.  Tris wakes up in an honest-to-god Bond-villain death-trap.  A tank slowly filling with water, complete with a camera so the villain can watch and cackle as she dies.

If I had any respect at all for this book, this is the point where it would have died.

Where did this thing come from, anyway?  Was she out long enough for them to build it, or did they have it on hand already?  And why bother?  Is she just not dead enough if she’s not scared in the process?  Tris says it’s because they want to ‘study’ her and see if her actions match up with how she acted in the simulation.  Why?  What would that tell them?  What would be the point of such a study?  And if they really do want to do that, why not put wires in her brain to see what’s going on there while she dies, instead of just stick to a very basic security camera?

These people suck at doing studies.

Why is Tris so special, huh?  We know she’s not the first Divergent that they’ve killed, but the other guy just got tossed in a pit.  So why Tris?  Do they have special hate for her?  She hasn’t done anything!  No, really, through this entire book she’s played the perfect little soldier, going along and not making waves.  The most she did was go to see her brother, but that was hardly something spectacular.  It’s not like she messed with their plans in any way, so there’s no reason for wanting revenge.  Is she just more Divergent than anyone else?  Not that we’ve seen anything that would suggest that.

Arg, I’m so confused!

It has been a long time since I thought about God, but I think about him now. It is only natural. I am glad, suddenly, that I shot Eric in the foot instead of the head.

o.o  Because…God doesn’t want you to stop the people who are planning genocide?  God would rather have Eric alive instead of all the people he’s planning to kill?

I just…I don’t even…I’m scared of this author.

Tris decides to just fucking give in and let herself drown, because fighting is for other people.  Before she goes, though, her mom breaks the tank from the outside.  Her mom has a gun and runs around being badass and shooting people.  Tris figures out that her mother was Dauntless before switching.

Um… she already figured that out once before.  Why does she need to figure that out again?

Her mom makes a sling for her arm, but there’s no word anywhere about putting a bandage over the still-bleeding gunshot wound, so…  Anyway, they’re in the Abnegation headquarters.  So…the death tank was mobile and the Erudite brought it with them?  Just for shits and giggles, perhaps?

How many Dauntless guards did she shoot before she found me?

Hey, speaking of God not wanting you to shoot people, all those guys were mind-controlled innocent people, and her mom took them out with head shots. 

But it’s a good thing you didn’t shoot Eric, no, that would have been just too much.

They run off to find her brother and father, who are both hiding.  Tris’s mom says she’s Divergent, too.  When Tris asks why they’re so hated, her mom says it’s because most other people can be brainwashed into thinking along the party lines, but the Divergent people can’t.

I’d buy this more if there was actually any sort of brainwashing going on.  Think back on the initiation.  There was no attempt to get people to stop acting like their old factions.  No one punished the Candor-initiates for being honest.  And what about the other initiations we’ve heard of?  What about Christina talking about her group being all lie-detector tests all day?  Does that magically make you un-brave?  Heck, it doesn’t even teach you to value honesty, it just teaches you grit your teeth and endure the embarrassment.  Nothing we’ve seen indicates that people are being forced or even encouraged to follow along with one way of thinking.  Everything, absolutely everything, has been completely actions-based and has had nothing to do with thought processes at all. 

So what the fuck is the big deal about being Divergent?

We can’t be confined to one way of thinking, and that terrifies our leaders. It means we can’t be controlled. And it means that no matter what they do, we will always cause trouble for them.”

I just don’t even.  Are you saying that people who have the capacity to be both selfless and brave will always cause trouble?  No they won’t!  That’s not an automatic thing!  Heck, Tris was perfectly happy being a well-behaved pet until people started shooting at her family!

They get cornered, and her mom offers to go run off and be a distraction while Tris runs for the other family members.  While attracting all the attention, her mom gets shot and dies.

God fucking damnit, book.  Really?  We finally get a badass female and you go off and kill her?

It’s another trope that I’m sick of seeing.  Strong females in fiction are very often depicted as being sacrificial.  Their great contribution to the story is to take pain and/or death.  Hell, think about it, even Katniss’s greatest act was to threaten suicide.  I cannot count the number of books I’ve read where the climax of the story involved the main female character accepting pain rather than beating down someone else.  (Maybe I should start counting, though.)  We are told again and again that the most we can offer in the name badassitude is our own sacrifice.  And you know what?  Fuck.  That.

On its own, in a vacuum, it’s not bad.  Giving your life for someone you love, of course that’s a strong image.  If Tris’s mom were one of a handful of sacrificed women in fiction, I’d call this a powerful scene, sure.  But it’s not a handful.  It’s a trend. 

Tris keeps running around, being chased, until she comes face-to-face with Will.  And she shoots him in the head.  She even aims for his head, not even anything possibly-less-fatal. 

So it’s a good thing she shot Eric in the foot, but she’ll shoot Will in the fucking face, even though he’s her friend and totally innocent?  She’s torn up about it, and that’s good (naratively speaking), but why was it so easy for her to decide to shoot him in the head?

Tris makes it to the building where her family is hiding, along with a bunch of other people.  Her father takes out the bullet in her shoulder by literally cutting it out, because…he’s a trained doctor and knows how to do that without causing more damage?  It’s implied he knows what he’s doing, but I’m not convinced.

Tris tells everyone else what’s going on and who’s behind it and that her mother died.  She decides that they need to wake up the Dauntless so they’ll stop shooting people, and Tris guesses that the control room for the mid-control program is at the Dauntless headquarters.  She guesses this based on the fact that when they were talking about what to do with Tobias, Jeanine said to send him back to ‘the control room’ where he used to work to ‘protect’ it.  Fair enough.

So, most of the Abnegation hide-outs are going to head on to Amity and hope they hide them, and a few are going with Tris to try and destroy the program.