Picoreview: Insurgent: A lot better than Divergent.
This is damning with faint praise, as I thought Divergent was pretty awful, or possibly even worse than “pretty awful” in that you could see where it could possibly be good but MOSTLY what you saw was how it Wasn’t Hunger Games.
Insurgent didn’t have as much of that This Is What It’s Failing To Be feeling to it, so that helped a lot. It’s–pretty predictable, although there were a couple of nice twists, particularly with an unexpected action at the end that left me going “OH NO!”
You know what I think is maybe really nicest about it? There are so many female characters acting from, in, and outside of positions of power. There’s a pacifist who is no less strong or certain for her pacifism, there’s a megalomaniac and a dictator, a betrayed friend and the lead, Tris, who is a little too obviously The Solution (more so than Katniss; Katniss is The Solution because she’s thrust into an untenable position and bulls her way through, whereas Tris is literally genetically special), but who is consistent about taking on responsibilities and choices even when she’s clearly scared half to death.
So I thought–yeah. I liked this one a fair bit, really. I hope they make the rest of the series into movies. That said, if they don’t, it’s not a *bad* place to leave the story, and I can always read the books to see how it all ends up. :)
(Also, this one didn’t make me come home and write a proposal for my own post-apocalyptic dystopian young adult fantasy, which is just as well because nobody wants to buy the one I did write…)
Divergent was the best book of the series. I barely remember Insurgent (although the previews of the movie look better than I remember) and the last one made me want to thrown the book across the room. I skipped ahead and read the end, which I rarely do. Then I *really* wanted to throw it across the room (I restrained because it would have broken my iPad, ha!).