Allegiant, the third and final installment to the Divergent Series by Veronica Roth, was released on October 22. As a reader who personally loved the first book and was intrigued by the second had high hopes for the third book that were met and then quickly crushed in the last few chapters.
The book starts with the main character Tris and her boyfriend Tobias leaving the secured walls of all five factions. Inside the contained walls no one really knows about the outside world. This is a dystopian book and they have no idea that they are not alone in the world.
Factions in this book help divide people into what they believe would help the world best find peace and prosperity. The first faction, Abnegation, is where our main character starts her journey. The Abnegation believe that it is best to be selfless.
Another faction would be Candor, who believes honesty is the key to success. Other factions include Erudite, who believe in intelligence, and Amity, who believe in peace. The homeless faction, or the people who did not graduate initiation, are called the Factionless. The final of these factions, and my personal favorite to learn about, is Dauntless. The Dauntless believe in bravery and protect the city from outside evil.
Now that we have the factions down, it will be easier to understand the rest. So Tris and Tobias leave the secured walls and go to the outside world to see if they can find out anything about problems going on inside the walls. Right away, almost too easily, do they find other people and begin to learn more about the world they thought was the size of the city of Chicago.
They also learn that they are a part of an experiment inside the walls. The United States Government has failed and the Bureau of Genetic Warfare is controlling Tris and Tobias’s people from the outside to see if they can make the perfect bodily cells to make a person emotionally stable. The rest of the story takes place in the formerly known O’Hare National Airport in Chicago.
The reader is aware from the beginning of the series that this takes place hundreds of years in the future but does not know exactly how things came to be as dysfunctional as they are today. In Allegiant, we get more of the reasons.
The United states has been destroyed during the Purity war, which came about because the government wanted features of its people’s personality eradicated. This began to backfire on the government when penalties began coming up quickly.
In order to try and get things back to how they were the government took a group of people, Tris and Tobias’s people, and secluded them inside a high wall and made them live for hundreds of years trying to figure out who is now genetically pure, which means they are back to normal, and damaged, which means they need a few more generations to get the genes back to normal.
The Bureau, who created the factions, is trying to differentiate between the genetically pure and the genetically damaged. We learn that Tris is, in fact, genetically pure but Tobias, who always believed himself to be, is sadly not. From there on he goes in a spiral down trying to figure out who he is and what his role in life truly is. Along his way trying to figure it out he meets up with a bad group that ultimately leads him down a bad path but he finds his way out.
From there on the reader will go through many emotions, as they read from both Tris’s perspective as well as Tobias. I believe that this is a great way to end the final book because the readers in the other two books are very curious about Tobias.
A very tiring thing about this book though was that every other chapter Tris and Tobias were in some sort of argument or disagreement until the ending where they finally made peace right before tragedy hit the book and the reader. The ending came to be the actual climax of the book where everything came to a head and Tris, Tobias and a group of their friends are trying to stop the Bureau from restarting everyone’s memories inside the walls again. Without giving too much away, just know that I finished this book in Barnes and Noble and had to leave because I found myself crying.
I loved this series and counted down the days until Allegiant was released, the book lived up to my expectations to a point and besides a few dragging moments that left the reader a little bored, the book held my attention until the end. If the book had not ended the way it had, I perhaps would have loved this book wholeheartedly but the ending just left me feeling empty.