For those of you who have not read Allegiant, please don’t read. There will be many spoilers. Just warning you. You really don’t want to know until you find it out in the book.
For those of you who have read the book, you know exactly what scene I’m talking about. Now, I’ve heard a lot of mixed reviews on the book. Some people love it, some people hate it, some think that it’s just plain stupid. I’m of the loving it group.
I’ll write this review in two parts. From a writer’s point of view and then from a reader’s. The writer’s part will mostly focus on the big thing at the end where as the reader part will focus on that and the part with Tobias.
As a writer, one of the hardest things to do in a book, is to kill off a character. Any character, let alone a main character. Why? Because they, no matter how evil, annoying, different, or awesome they are, are a part of you. You created them. You wrote them into this story, this world, that’s theirs. A story world you created for them and the other characters. How a reader feels about their favorite character is usually how the author feels about all of the characters, at least that’s how it is with me and a few of my friends.
The amount of strength it takes to kill off a character, especially one like Tris who was the main character for two and a half books, is enormous. Not to mention doing it despite knowing that a lot of people would hate it. Roth had a lot of strength to kill her off and not let any fans convince her otherwise. Believe me. It was just as hard for Roth to kill her off as it was for you to read it. Not to mention Tris was killed in a way that made sense and worked well with the story.
Now readers think differently than authors. I’ll start with what happened to Tobias. That was another big part of the book, but it tends to get overlooked because of Tris’s death.
My best friend got to this part before me and accidentally spoiled that Tobias wasn’t Divergent for me. (It really was by accident. She thought I was farther along than I was.) She said she didn’t really like how he went through an ‘identity crisis’ and everything that happened along with it. Which, in part, was what led to Uriah being killed. For me, that part made a lot of sense. I knew what he was going through because I’d been through it and was still going through it at that point. I thought it was important to the book because it showed how much that kind of thing affects people.
Now about Tris’s death. Like I said earlier, I’m in the group that really liked the way Roth ended it. A few of my friends, the ones who didn’t like the ending, have asked me why I liked it. Well, for one, this is a series that didn’t cheat death or treat it like it was just something that happened because they were at war. Yes, death does happen when you’re at war, but that does not mean the deaths cannot be mourned and the effects are short term. A lot of other book series do that. Tris died because she was put into a situation with a choice. A choice between her and Caleb, her family. Every other time she has had a choice like that, or even between her and her friends, she chose to sacrifice herself. In Divergent, when she turns the gun on herself in her fear landscape and when she’s fighting Tobias. And in Insurgent, when she chooses to go to Jeanine instead of let her kill more of her friends. Like Tobias says when he hears what happened, ‘Of course Tris would go into the Weapons Lab instead of Caleb. Of course she would.’ Because that’s her character. Anything else would have destroyed who she was. As for her getting shot instead of being killed by the death serum… Roth didn’t let her cheat death. The ending was real.
~M+W=L
Seven Miles Deep 