Insurgent (2012)

The second book in the Divergent series improves on its predecessor in some places and stumbles in others.  Overall, it’s a strong follow-up; it builds on the setup from Divergent and prepares us for the big finale of Allegiant.  As I was reading, I came across plenty of scenes that made me pretty excited for the upcoming movie.  (Spoilers for both Divergent and Insurgent are unavoidable.)

After the events of the first book, both of Tris’s lives – the simple one she lived with her family in Abnegation and the thrilling new one she forged for herself in Dauntless – are gone.  The surviving Abnegation members hide out as refugees, and Dauntless members who haven’t joined forces with the despotic Erudite are on the run.  Tris’s world has been teetering on the brink of revolution, and it’s finally hit.  Her life is now a war:  for survival, for retribution, for truth, and for liberation.  This war takes her all over the city, into and out of different factions as she searches for allies and answers.

The biggest plus of Insurgent is the expanded view we get of the world of the series.  We follow Tris into all the different faction communities and learn a lot more about how each one functions.  We see the various factions’ values, customs, and dangers, and it’s really interesting to explore the peculiarities that crop up when an entire subsection of society devotes itself to a single virtue.  Additionally, more is revealed about Divergence, the world at large, and the secrets at the center of everything.

I also really like the way Tris’s experiences in Divergent continue to resonate throughout Insurgent.  They influence her choices and the way she looks at people, and she reconciles everything she thought she knew with what she’s learned.  Although she’s undoubtedly brave and determined, she’s been traumatized as well, and she can’t just brush that off.  Her damage paralyzes her at critical moments and keeps her up at night turning over what she should have done differently.  The book does a nice job showing how, despite powering through and forcing herself to keep fighting, the things she’s had to do are massive, and they have a major effect on her.

Plot-wise, I feel like Insurgent isn’t quite as tight as book one.  It feels a little more aimless, spinning its wheels from time to time.  A good chunk of that is intentional, since Tris and many of the other characters are at a loss and trying to regain their bearings – I mean, come on, their entire society is going up in smoke.  However, it still results in some uneventful time-killing that’s a bit tedious to get through.  Plus, it might just be me, but the way certain characters handle the big secrets in the series are flat-out insufferable.  It’s that infuriating situation where a character says, “I have so much important information that people are willing to kill for and nothing is more important than getting this information out and your life will never be the same after learning this information!!!  But I can’t tell you the information.”  Talk about a prick-tease; I didn’t know how long I could take that.

I will say that we (finally!) get to the big reveal by the end of the book, and while it still seems unfair to keep us on the hook for so long, it doesn’t come off as anticlimactic.  My foremost thought when I finished reading was, “Allegiant is gonna be insane!”