I watch the others run in the opposite direction—toward safety, toward Amity—for a few seconds, and then I turn away, toward the city, toward the war.

Book, you keep using that word.  I don’t think it means what you think it means.  See, in a war, two groups of combatants fight each other.  In a coup, one group of combatants takes shit over and starts shoot civilians in the head.  This is not a war.

So Tris’s group splits up, and only her, her brother, her dad, and Marcus (Toabis’s child-beating daddy) go along.  Um…why?  It’s said that Caleb knows the Erudite plan, but so what?  They are going for one specific purpose: to stop the computer that is controlling the Dauntless.  If Caleb knows anything that is relevant to that, he should tell them and then get his ass out of the way.  Marcus is going because he ‘knows computers,’ and her dad is going for reasons mysterious.

Oh, hey, look at that.  It’s one solitary female and then everyone else who’s important is male.  No wonder mom had to die off early.  She could have actually been useful here, and that would have taken attention away from Tris.

She decides to take them in the ‘back’ way, the one that involves jumping off a roof, because it’ll be less guarded.  Because apparently the ‘smart’ faction is full of idiots who don’t guard every door and entrance, just the main one.

For an instant I am suspended in nothingness, and then my feet slam into cement and I stumble to the side, away from the roof’s edge. My knees ache, and the impact shudders through my body, making my shoulder throb.

Why can no one learn how to land properly?  This is, what, the second or third book we’ve done in this blog that had people land hard on their feet?

Guys, please don’t ever do this.  You want to hit the ground and collapse, falling forward.  Don’t make your poor knees take all that impact.  You’ll fuck them over something good.

Well, try to do that.  I guess it usually ends up like this.

“There’s a net at the bottom,” I say, looking over my shoulder. They look confused. They haven’t figured out what I am asking them to do yet.

They understand.  They’re just wondering why you think a net is going to help an untrained jumper falling from that height.

So she talks the others into jumping, and they all do it and survive.  …are they Divergent, too?  Really, when you set things up by telling us that Divergents can be more than one character trait, you really need to stick to that.  Or else come up with some other definition.

I never noticed how cold [Marcus’s] eyes were before.

Uhg, half the problems in this book could be fixed if ‘Divergent’ simply meant ‘mildly psychic.’  Really the only thing that has any relevance so far is their ability to throw off the mind-control, and it would certainly be a better excuse for why Tris can apparently tell when people are evil right off the bat.

So as they’re walking down a hallway, someone sees them and starts shooting.  Then the hallway is suddenly described as a room for the rest of the scene, even though they haven’t left the hallway and gone into a room.  Editor?  Editor, where are you?  You’ve been doing fairly decently so far.  What happened here?

I shuffle quickly sideways, one foot crossing over the other,

Really, author, you’d be better off if you just left such details out.  Or at least try running across the room like that.  It’s a basic rule of moving in combat that you don’t cross your feet, because it’s too easy to trip.  Bring your trailing foot up to your lead foot, then move the lead foot forward.  And don’t pick your feet very far off the ground.  That way you can feel for obstacles without having to look down.  Which, yes, is a long and unnecessary description, which is why you should have stopped at ‘shuffle.’

Anyway, the person shooting at them is Peter.  Oh, good, is this the part where we find out the bully is pure psychotic evil and the only proper comeuppance is brutal pain and/or death?  Because that’s really an awesome message to send to teens.

Yup, this is that part.  Peter isn’t mind controlled, he just really wants to kill people.  In fact, he says that he didn’t get controlled because the Dauntless leaders knew he’d go along with them anyway.  Um…why bother?  They’re planning a hostile take-over; did they really take the time out of their day to sit and pick out people who didn’t need to be mind controlled?  Kind of pointless, since the more economical option would be just to do the same thing to everyone.  So why is Peter special?  Just so Tris can have a Big Bad to fight against?

The saddest part is that I can see the better story here.  The one where Tris comes across mind-controlled Peter and realizes that, for all his faults, he’s being forced into this as well.  That even though he’s a bully, he’s still helpless and bullied in turn by the true villains of the story.  She might have to evaluate her willingness to shoot people who, even though she doesn’t like them, are still basically innocent in this regard.  She might realize all over again the senselessness of the enemy’s plan and the sheer scope of the people they are willing to hurt. 

Oh, fuck it, she shot Will in the face.  Maybe it wouldn’t actually make a difference and she’d just be happy that Peter couldn’t fight back as well while she shot him.

Tris decides she’s going to torture Peter into telling her where the control room is, and she shoots him in the arm.  Peter says that he’s being watched and if she doesn’t kill him, the leaders will instead, so he’ll tell her if she helps him escape.

Um, wow, kind of a 180 from saying that he’s out of the mind-control group because he’d willingly go along with the bad guys.  Why…what even is this?  Why are the leaders going to kill him?  He really doesn’t say.

“They’re listening,” he spits. “If you don’t kill me, they will. The only way I’ll tell you is if you get me out of here.”

Apparently they just want to kill him for shits and giggles.  So why didn’t they just mind-control him, to eliminate the chance of him turncoating like this?

They bandage up Peter’s arm and head off to the control room.  Along the way, Tris’s father chides her for shooting someone.  I don’t even know what this book is trying to say here.  I guess her dad thinks it’s better to…just ask the guards to let them get in and destroy the computer?  Really, what did he think was going to happen?

I hear my father huff and puff over the sound of rushing water. I forgot that he is older than I am, that his frame can no longer tolerate the weight of his body.

Uh, why?  Is he fat?  Because that’s not the same as being older than a 16 year-old.  Does he have osteoporosis?  Why not just say he has a desk job and he’s out of shape, instead of implying that all middle aged people are by-default disproportionate?

She gets to where the guards are and has a shootout.

Thank God the glass ceiling is bulletproof, or the glass would break and I would fall to my death.

Bulletproof doesn’t mean that bullets bounce off it!  You’re still compromising the strength of the glass, which is already a poor building material in the first place! 

She kills a couple guards, and then by some miracle the last guard is also Divergent and lets her go.  Wow, lucky that.

Caleb and Marcus and Peter stay put while Tris and her dad go on.  *sigh*  Why is Caleb here?  And wasn’t Marcus’s whole purpose to shut down the computer, because he knows computers?  Why is any of this happening?

Well, when they get to the right floor, they kill more guards.  (Why are they killing so easily?  They’re treating these guards like robot mooks, when they are in fact innocent people being mind-controlled.  But they’re not even trying to control the body count, or to use a distraction to sneak around them, or anything.)  There’s a whole bunch of guards, and her dad draws them away and gets shot to death, just like her mother did.  Man, he was pretty useless, wasn’t he?  I mean, nice of him to protect Tris and all that, but why was he even here?

Tris makes it to the control room where Tobias is, and they get into a brawl.  Tris ends up getting away from the physical fight and has a gun, but she can’t shoot him.  She could shoot Will in the face, and she could shoot all those guards in the hallway without a second thought, but when it comes to the pretty boy, she just can’t do it.  Nice to see where your priorities are, Tris.

I can’t kill him. I am not sure if I love him; not sure if that’s why.

Love!  The only reasonable explanation for not shooting and innocent person.

What?

So she gives him the gun and tells him to shoot her instead.  Because this is the one and only chance to save scores of innocent people, both in Abnegation and Dauntless, but that’s less important than her boyfriend.

Fortunately, her game of suicide chicken works, and Tobias snaps out of his mind control rather than shoot her.  They both make out and cry for a bit, then remember “oh, yeah, we should probably stop all that mind control.”  So Tobias does that, because he’s…um, totally knowledgeable about computers and programming now, and he can turn off the simulation and destroy the program and all the data?

And these super-smart people don’t have backups somewhere?

Hell, I make backups of my fanfiction, and yet there’s only one copy of this program in existence?

But no, here Tobias is able to put all the data onto a removable drive and gives it to Tris.  Then they run back to Caleb and Marcus, and find them in a group of now-conscious Dauntless guards.  There’s a very anti-climactic meeting between Tobias and Marcus that basically consists of a lot of glaring, and then they run off to catch the train.

No, really, why is Marcus even here?

And Caleb, too.

The group of all five of them hops on a train heading to Amity, which is apparently outside the city. …the city surrounded by a fence that’s locked from the outside?

The kindness of Amity will comfort us for a while, though we can’t stay there forever. Soon the Erudite and the corrupt Dauntless leaders will look for us, and we will have to move on.

Uh, no.  The guys with guns are awake now and severely pissed off at being mind-controlled.  The Dauntless leaders should no longer be leaders, and the Erudite will have their hands full being attacked by angry soldiers.

Seriously, these guys were only in charge because they were doing their dirty deeds secretly.  There’s no reason to assume they’ll still be in charge now that their plans have been exposed.

And then, as they ride the train off into the sunset, Tobais tells Tris he loves her.  Because…yeah, that’s really appropriate right now. 

Well, I guess it’s a decent ending.  It’s got a cliffhanger, but it doesn’t feel like the first act of a book that got chopped into a series.  It’s definitely a complete novel, with its own self-contained story to tell and a proper conclusion.  I would have liked a bit more falling action, but at least it had a climax. 

Honestly, I can see why this book got popular.  I really can.  It’s pacing is decent, or would be with a few minor changes.  (For instance, if Tris didn’t put together the danger until the end, we wouldn’t have the wall-banging question of why she doesn’t say anything.)  The characters have a little more spice than the usual fare in YA, and the book has some very quotable lines.

The problem that I have, however, is that I hate quotable lines.  If you tell a bad story full of bad morals and then shove in a couple of lines that talk about good morals, then who cares?  Go write poetry.  I want to see those good morals actually put into action, not just tossed aside in Tris’s inner monologue.  But I think people are grasping onto those good, quotable lines and assuming that’s what the story is about, rather than taking any time to actually think about what they’re reading. 

And, of course, there’s all the utter fail in the logic, worldbuilding, and plot of this hot mess.