Thursday, May 29, 2014

Allegiant

This is the third, and final, installment in the Divergent trilogy from Veronica Roth. I wouldn't be surprised if the 2nd (Insurgent) and 3rd books are also made into movies as they are doing with the Hunger Games trilogy. But I can almost bet they will change the ending a bit.  When we left our heroes, Tris had revealed the video from Edith Prior telling the people of the city (a futuristic Chicago) that their society was, in fact, an experiment being run by people "out there," i.e., outside the protective fence which has been guarded for generations by the Dauntless faction. So Tris will be tried as a traitor, but able to withstand the truth serum as she has withstood the fear serum and the serum that at one point turned almost all members of Dauntless into a mindless army that nearly wiped out the Abnegation faction. A small group--from various factions-- believe the tyrannical imposition of a factionless society in the wake of the Factionless' takeover is not an improvement and plan to rebel. First and foremost, a small band will escape the city and seek to discover who is controlling the city. Tris, Four, the traitorous Caleb, and murderous Peter are among them that group. The society they discover, it turns out, has as many things wrong with it as the Faction system they just left behind, except this set of prejudices and limits is based on whether or not a person is "genetically pure" (GP) vs. "genetically damaged" (GD). A rebellion is brewing here as well, and Four is lured into helping when he finds out that he is not Divergent as he originally thought, but is GD with a few anomalous behaviors. Although it does not change Tris' view of or love for him, Four is devastated and ripe for manipulation by the disaffected GD's. When the geneticists in this compound decide that the Chicago "experiment" is teetering on the brink of self-destruction, they decide to "reset" the situation by erasing everyone's memory. Tris and her friends, many of whom have left family and friends behind in the city, can't let that happen.

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