Hi there, so this is going to be quite different from my other reviews. If you hadn't gathered from the title, I'll be discussing the Divergent Series by Veronica Roth.
I am selfish. I am brave.
Usually I give a decent breakdown/summary of the book and then express my feelings on what happened. I will not be doing that today. This series means more to me than words can explain, but I'll do my best. This will be really, really personal, and I've never actually written it all out, so bear with me. If you're not interested in that, I won't be offended! In fact, I'm nearly certain that only my mother and my partner read these anyway!
"First Jumper-- Tris!"
In all honesty, this could either turn into a sad diary entry or, oppositely, a love letter to Veronica Roth. Last chance to jump ship!
I believe in ordinary acts of bravery, in the courage that drives one person to stand up for another.
Most of this will be about my experience reading the series as a teenager, so before I do that I would like to talk a little about my re-read. Unsurprisingly, I had to try really hard not to cry at just about every page of the first book. It felt like I was looking back at an old family scrapbook. I didn't expect it, but it was the littlest things that kept getting to me-- Will telling Tris that statistically, she should have hit the target by now, or Christina saying "Your Abnegation is showing" when Tris couldn't stand to see two people kissing. It felt like old inside jokes that had slipped my mind over time, and I was finally being reminded of them. I tried for a little while to write out notes for this "review" but I quickly realized that it was hard to be analytical when the book is tied to so many of my emotions and memories. I do want to say that, though I already believed the movies did a massive disservice to the novels, they especially hurt how I thought of Tobias. They turned him into a stoic robot who never smiled and I hate that my brain has been remembering him that way all these years, because that's not who he is at all. He's sarcastic, constantly cracking jokes and both him and Tris laugh together all the time. Just because he takes things seriously (as he should !) doesn't mean he no longer has a personality. Also, I had forgotten how much Tris and Tobias fight in the last two books. It hurt to see, especially because I hate when sequels force fights upon the main couple, but I don't think that's what was happening here; all of the fights seemed... Reasonable? Justified? Though it was hard to witness, I didn't feel as though it was ever irrelevant. Plus it opened up the floor for Roth to show that relationships aren't simple, and it is hard to forgive. Pretending that forgiveness comes easily, especially to these characters, would have been bullshit, and it would have done them an injustice. We choose to stay with the people we love, and we have to choose them again and again every time things get difficult. When I finished Allegiant, I sobbed really, really, really hard for a few hours. So bad that I had to take a shower to calm down, and when that didn't work, my partner turned our room into a little movie theater (snacks and all) and put on a cute animated movie to distract me. And for the first time ever, I read Four by Veronica Roth. I hadn't expected it to put me at ease, but I think it helped. It made things feel less raw, perhaps because we went back in time and now I feel suspended there, in those moments at Dauntless Headquarters, where it all started. I think, though, that I would like to implement a re-read every couple of years or so, to remind myself of these books I love so dearly.
“But becoming fearless isn’t the point. That’s impossible. It’s learning how to control your fear, and how to be free from it, that’s the point.”
Now, I would like to start this out with a disclaimer: I know, for a fact, that part of the reason this series had such a large effect on me was because Tris is described as looking nearly identical to me. I'm short, scrawny, blonde-haired and blue-eyed. I've always been small and sarcastic, and always will be small and sarcastic. Though that is obviously not the only reason she is important to me, I wanted to mention it because this made it all the more easy for me to see the world through her eyes. Representation matters because not everyone looks like me. It's not hard for me to find a character who I identify with, but it is extremely hard for people of color. Seeing myself in novels has done so much to help me grow into who I am, and everyone deserves that opportunity. We should all do our best to help support and promote authors and art that do NOT solely focus on straight/white/cis stories.
“There were some things I needed to learn.” “How to be brave?” my father says quietly. “How to be selfless,” I say. “Often they’re the same thing.”
I read these books when I was 15 or so years old. I was just entering my freshman year-- going from a class of 80 at a kindergarten-8th grade school to a campus high school with over 3000 students. I'd never felt more irrelevant or unimportant in my life-- especially because I loved getting attention as a kid and it was much easier to get it when I had less competition. I still have yet to figure out if these books would mean as much to me if I hadn't found them when I did-- would I still feel such a connection to them if I was only discovering them now, at 23 years old? Though I still have much to learn about myself and what I want for my future, I'm without a doubt in a much better place.
We both have war inside of us. Sometimes it keeps us alive. Sometimes it threatens to destroy us.
My first year of high school was a nightmare-- I gave up on the hobbies I've always loved because I was petrified to learn that I was garbage compared to others my age. Acting, specifically. I didn't join my high school drama club until my senior year when I finally stopped caring what people thought (or so I told myself). At 15 I was depressed, nearly suicidal, a ball of stress and anxiety, and I felt an intense hatred for myself and most of the people around me. I didn't feel like I fit in, but I know deep down that I also romanticized the idea of being broken, which allowed everything to last much longer than it should have (could have?). I refused help from friends, teachers, parents, therapists. My friends eventually became so worried that they got the school involved and I was forced to talk to a therapist. I was so embarrassed that I refused to discuss anything about my mental health. Instead, she allowed me to pretend nothing was wrong and we talked only about my favorite tv shows. I remember thinking I had her completely fooled-- but now I'm realizing that maybe she saw that making me talk would only worsen things, or perhaps she just thought it was a lost cause and she could just get my parents' money no matter what we discussed. I've tried for a long time to bury all thoughts about that year of my life and pretend it never happened, but maybe burying it isn't what's best for me. I still don't feel like I've fully healed from it, and perhaps putting it out there to examine will help.
“What did you do?” I scream. “You die, I die too.” Tobias looks over his shoulder at me. “I asked you not to do this. You made your decision. These are the repercussions.”
The biggest emotion, so to say, that I remember feeling was this strange idea that no one really knew or understood me. I convinced myself that if I was gone, anyone who thought they cared about me would get over it. Sometimes I still feel like people don't fully know me because I often act like a different version of myself depending on who I'm with. I'm trying to get better at that so I can be my true self with everyone, but I think I'm learning that my real self isn't just one thing, but that I am made up of many things.
“Why do I have to? Why can’t someone else do something for once? What if I don’t want to do this anymore?” And what this is, I realize, is life. I don’t want it. I want my parents and I have for weeks. I’ve been trying to claw my way back to them, and now I am so close and he is telling me not to.
In my search for escape from the real world, I turned to books. I've loved books since early middle school. It began with the Percy Jackson books, to Twilight, to The Hunger Games, etc. but my love for those always felt somewhat separate from me. I loved them, but I loved them as art, as books. They were important to me and I ate them up, but they didn't feel like they held a piece of me.
Except now I think that she isn’t just beautiful in spite of the scar, she’s somehow beautiful with it, like Lynn with her buzzed hair, like Tobias with the memories of his father’s cruelty that he wears like armor, like my mother in her plain gray clothing.
Reading Divergent made me feel understood. There's a lovely quote from Blue Lily Lily Blue by Maggie Stiefvater that put the feeling into words for me "Gansey burned with guilt and thrill and desire and the nebulous feeling of being truly known." Is that something we are all searching for, in different ways? Not just for someone to know us as the funny one, or the pretty one, or the smart one-- but for the deepest part of our hearts to be seen and heard and known. I so desperately needed someone or something to explain me to myself, in a way. And then suddenly, every chapter felt like looking into a mirror. I felt as though Roth somehow knew the essence of my soul and put it into these books. I didn't read them and suddenly find a missing piece of myself-- it was more as if I read Divergent and discovered a piece of me that had already been there the whole time and I had never noticed it before.
I wonder if fears ever really go away, or if they just lose their power over us.
Does all of this mean these are my favorite books ever? No, actually I don't think they are. They're absolutely in my top 10, but there are so many other books I'm obsessed with for a million different reasons. The point is not that this series has the best writing or the best plot or the best dialogue or whatever people will tell you makes a book great-- I'm also not implying that Divergent is poorly done in any of those cases, mind you, be patient-- what I'm trying to say is that a book doesn't have to be the world's most incredible piece of art to mean something to you. If it is, yay. If it's not, there's no reason for you to love it any less.
I laugh, and it’s laughter, not light, that casts out the darkness building within me, that reminds me I am still alive, even in this strange place where everything I’ve ever known is coming apart. I know some things-- I know that I’m not alone, that I have friends, that I’m in love. I know where I came from. I know that I don’t want to die, and for me, that’s something-- more than I could have said a few weeks ago.
If you look at books with only a surface-level scan, I'm certain you won't understand anything I say in this post. For example, if you think Divergent is only about genetics, dystopian futures, or romance, you've completely missed the point. I can't come up with the right words to sum up what these books are about, but I can make a lame attempt to tell you what I find important about it. For me, the series is about courage, selflessness, acting in the face of fear, forgiveness, love (between friends, family, lovers), doing the right thing even if it is not the easy thing, hope, freedom, finding where you belong, human nature, class structure, refusing to give weight to being defined as "damaged", mental health, fighting through the most (emotionally and physically) painful moments of our lives, what it means to be alive, second chances, the meaning of self sacrifice, and healing.
I fell in love with him. But I don’t just stay with him by default as if there’s no one else available to me. I stay with him because I choose to, every day that I wake up, every day that we fight or lie to each other or disappoint each other. I choose him over and over again, and he chooses me.
Now you may be asking why it took me nearly 7 years to re-read these books... I think part of me was afraid to read them again. I was scared that they wouldn't have as much of an effect on me-- that I would realize everything had been in my head or that I overdramatized my connection to the material. I was worried that it wouldn't mean as much anymore, now that I'm older and have so many other books. And upon finishing it, I realized how utterly ridiculous that fear was. Just because time has passed does not mean we do not care anymore or that our love diminishes. Do I love my family any less simply because I have known them for 23 years now rather than 22? Time has no effect on our emotions, or at least it doesn't to the things that really matter to us. These novels were a lifeline for me when I needed something to pull me out of the darkness-- something to hold onto, something to ground myself with, something to bind my soul to, something I wanted to embody in my own life.
I thought that when I spilled one secret, the rest would come tumbling after, but openness is a habit you form over time, and not a switch you flip whenever you want to, I'm finding.
There are things that Tris does that I know I would love to do-- ziplining over Chicago, falling off the edge of a building into a net, learning how to throw knives and fight, running alongside and jumping onto a movie train. But those aren't what draw me to her-- if I'm honest with myself, all I've really ever wanted is to feel like I can protect the people I love. Even though I spend most of my time terrified of impossibilities, I know I would do anything to help my friends and family. I've had nightmare after nightmare of home invasions, apocalypses, serial killers, etc. but 9/10 times, they aren't coming after me-- they're coming after my mom or my best friends or sometimes, even my pets. And every time, I feel the genuine terror of what if I can't save them? I'm small and weak and I don't have the strength to fight back in real life, and I hate that. So reading a story where a girl just like me has those same worries and learns how to act in the face of that fear? How could I not feel a connection to her? Tris embodied everything I felt, the good and the bad, and everything I wished I could be. By no means is she perfect-- she has a martyr complex, she's quick to fight, and she's not overwhelmingly warm. I feel that I am all of those things too. I needed someone who felt as damaged as I did, who needed to figure out how to save herself, so that I could do the same. When she died, it was so much more than a fictional character's death-- it broke my heart in half. I mourned her loss, and even though I finished my Allegiant re-read 5 days ago, I've cried over it each day since. I don't know why it hurts like it does-- I've read so many novels where a beloved character dies. I think, maybe, I feel abandoned. She fought so hard and she deserved so much, and she'll never get it. And not only that, but I became so obsessed with following her guidance and then she was gone and I didn't have anyone to look to anymore. I feel left behind and the unfairness of it all still makes me want to scream. She was so important to me and I think it finally hit me that someone like her-- who had made mistakes and had flaws and didn't always do the right thing-- people still loved her beyond belief. So why had I convinced myself that no one could possibly love me? She gave me the strength to stand the hell up and fight back, even if it was myself I was fighting against. I got out of bed every day and lived in my own little fantasy world where I could ignore the bad things and focus only on being brave because I knew that's what she would have wanted for me.
I don't belong to Abnegation, or Dauntless, or even the Divergent. I don't belong to the Bureau or the experiment or the fringe. I belong to the people I love, and they belong to me-- they, and the love and loyalty I give them, form my identity far more than any word or group ever could.
I know Tris's death made a lot of people unhappy with the series. We've been conditioned to only accept happy endings, and if something doesn't go the way we want, it is completely spoiled for us. I don't agree with that. I think happy endings are unrealistic and I only accept the happy stuff if it comes with a little bit of pain. I'm sure that says something about me, but I don't think I want to know what. Despite my devastation, I do think Roth made the right choice. If you really look at each book, everything was leading up to it. Throughout the series, Tris's main objective is learning what it really means to be selfless. She thinks she has an understanding of it when she nearly lets Tobias kill her in the first book, but it isn't quite right. And then in the second book she battles with the difference between sacrifice and suicide. Only in Allegiant does Tris finally learn what it really means to sacrifice yourself for someone-- it is not easy, it is not something you want to do, and it is meaningless if it is not done out of love. I don't think there was another way for the series to end that would have made sense and been realistic. Though I wish she could have continued on, I think Tobias was right: "A fire that burns that bright is not meant to last."
Can I be forgiven for all I've done to get here? I want to be. I can. I believe it.
On the topic of her death, I would like to point out something that I hadn't noticed when I first read the series: there are a few moments where Tris is faced with imminent death, but none more prominent than when Tobias is holding a gun to her head at the end of Divergent, and, obviously, when she does actually die in Allegiant. In both of those moments, Tris asks herself "Can I be forgiven for all I've done to get here?"-- I remember the line punching me in the gut, having no memory of her saying the phrase two books prior. Her answer changes over time, and I truly don't know if I've ever seen a more heartbreaking example of character development. When she first asks the question, she thinks "I don't know. I don't know. Please." I think maybe the uncertainty comes from not truly believing that she is about to die. As seen in the above quote from the final book-- when she knows that it is truly the end, she comes to terms with the life she lived. I'd like to think we all have a moment of clarity before we die, and maybe that sounds like a dark thought, but I don't think it is.
There are so many ways to be brave in this world. Sometimes bravery involves laying down your life for something bigger than yourself, or for someone else. Sometimes it involves giving up everything you have ever known, or everyone you have ever loved, for the sake of something greater. But sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it is nothing more than gritting your teeth through the pain, and the work of every day, the slow walk toward a better life. That is the sort of bravery I must have now.
One final personal thing I would like to share: my tattoo. A week after I turned 18, I got Tris's three birds tattooed onto my rib cage. I remember laughing when people reminded me of the permanence of tattoos, because what you like now, you might not like when you're older. I always said that no matter what, I know I won't regret getting those birds. My friends decided the three birds represented the three of them, sometimes I told people they were for my three family members, but I know deep down they were all for me. To remind me who I am, who I was, and who I can be. I can be selfless and brave in my everyday life, where I so often need it. Not for saving the world but for saving myself. Tris provided the inspiration I needed to push through each day, and for that I am forever grateful to Veronica Roth. I hope someday I get the chance to thank her for it. I was in a bad place when I read the Divergent Series, and I know that sometimes the simplest everyday task can be the hardest. I dug myself into a hole I didn't know how to get out of, and these books showed me that it is okay to feel things and it is okay to acknowledge my fear-- it is about working through my problems, not pretending they don't exist. It is about knowing that we are all damaged, but we can be mended.
Since I was young, I have always known this: Life damages us, everyone. We can't escape that damage. But now, I am also learning this: We can be mended. We mend each other.
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