Title: Insurgent
Author: Veronica Roth
Publisher: Katherine Tegan
Rating: WARTY!
Welcome to Veronica Roth's 525 page pity party for Mama Messiah and Drama Queen Beatrice, in which Tris successfully channels the depressed Katniss Everdeen! Let me begin this by announcing that I have now read enough of this volume to be able to state, without any shadow of a doubt, that in the Divergent trilogy, this novel is definitely number 2....
You may recall that I withheld my rating for Divergent (which is the first in this trilogy) until I had read Insurgent, which I now unexpectedly have from a new library which has opened relatively close to where I live, so off we go! This library copy is supposedly a collector's edition but all it evidently offers is a shiny metallic-effect cover, a ribbon book-mark glued into the spine, and some stickers. Seriously? OK. And what's with that autumnal swirly tree? Trivia Time: Do you know that the Divergent series is actually a mathematics concept?!
Insurgent also features a some forty or so pages of bonus features including "Toby-ass tells the divergent story" which has an introduction even though the story itself is only five pages long...! Veronica Roth talks about "character death" is one section along with a Veronica Roth Q&A. There are Insurgent discussion questions and tips on how to have a faction party. Seriously, I am not making this up. Nor am I going to read any of this because all that this achieved was to convince me that this novel is way below my reading level.
While I again have to give props to Roth for no prologue, introduction, foreword, preface, etc, at the start, she simply launches into the sequel without a nod or a wink to the previous volume. Even though it was not that long since I read the first volume, I confess I had to go back and read my own review just now to refresh my memory as to exactly how that panned out. I guess that's not a good sign, huh?!
You may recall that in vol 1, the world had suffered a huge war, and society had decided that unity could only be achieved by forcibly separating people into antagonistic Klans: the five families of mafia-ruled New York City, kinda, although this was set in Chicago. The five factions which resulted were the grammatically incorrect Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Dauntless, and Erudite. That latter faction, which is supposed to be smart, in collaboration with Dauntless, the defense force, was the one which revolted and drugged its own members, turning them into zombies which could then be easily talked into attacking other factions in order for the Dauntless-Erudite Axis (DEA) to take over as the sole dominant authority.
Triscuit (our hero) and her strong male protector Toby-ass, along with a complete Peter, and Triscuit's brother Caleb (without a 'K') managed to escape the drugged day of the dead finale of the previous book and throw themselves upon the scant mercy of the Amity faction (yeah I know that reads like a paradox, but please read on!). I found it interesting that the Amityville medical staff seem to think that treating an abrasion on Triscuit's shoulder is more important than taking care of Peter's broken arm, because they get to that only after they've found a salve for Triscuit! But that's not the weirdest thing! They offer Triscuit a sedative and despite the fact that she's just come out of a horrific battle which was aided immensely by the fact that soldiers were being drugged and forced to do the will of others, she accepts this sedative and gulps it down without a second thought or the slightest suspicion. Some soldier, huh? That just struck me as being just a bit dumb ledore, but let's see where Roth takes us on this trip.
By page 65 (out of a whopping 525!) I already do not like this tome. Roth has Toby-ass (aka Four), who is taller than Triscuit, putting his arms - not his hands, but his arms - around Triscuit's hips when they're both standing facing each other. I'd really like her to demonstrate how that's accomplished some time. Maybe she could make a book trailer (lol!) with that included? But that's not the worst bit. The worst bit is that Roth continues to make a very strong case for how small, and lost, and totally useless Triscuit is. So of course she needs a manly Toby-ass, who is, of course, taller and stronger than she is, and therefore must take care of her because she's just a weak and limp little girl really.
Yet despite all this stress, and despite how exhausted and stressed she feels (and did I mention that she's stressed?), this doesn't one bit interfere with her sneaking stealthily around and spying on people, trying to figure out what is the big nasty secret which Marcus, Toby-ass's piece of trash dad, is holding so firmly onto. Nor does it prevent anyone asking this unstable girl for advice.
Perhaps this conflict is why this spineless little tot has nightmares and goes running into Toby-ass's room at night to sneak under his protective covers. And of course, all she's wearing is a long T-shirt and literally nothing else. So Triscuit has been through a war and killed people, and proven herself through the barbaric "training" to join Dauntless, but when Toby-ass takes advantage of her fear and weakness, and starts feeling her up, rather than stress even more and recoil and berate him, she starts physically responding! But it gets worse! Before anything happens, she sobbingly reveals that she can't go through with it because it just wouldn't be right!
When she finally returns to her room, she discovers a big Peter there, stealing the hard drive which contains all the details of Erudite's drug program. I'm surprised he doesn't ask if she wants to put her software on his hard drive! When she tries to take back the stolen drive from him, they get into a fight, and Triscuit is the only one punished for it by Amity. The punishment is a drug which turns her into Barney the Dinosaur, but without the bruised coloration. Their fearless leader determines that Triscuit has been overdosed, but this is hardly surprising in a facility where healing wound is given priority over a broken arm.
The Amity faction has voted to allow these other refugee faction members to stay with them, but since the Amity people are buddies with Erudite, they declare that they will not take sides in this conflict, which in practice means that they've sided with the aggressors. This is Amity siding with people who have drugged their own faction and used the drugged soldiers to all but wipe out the Abnegation faction! This betrays every single thing Amity is supposed to be about, of course, but perhaps the fact that they drug their own people to coerce them into conformation with their idea of a norm is why they won't even so much as condemn the brutal behavior of the DEA?
The need to escape schizo-faction is brought to a head when the DEA arrives with armed soldiers to search Amity's compound. The refugees, which are offered no protection whatsoever by Amity (other than not to overtly betray them) are literally hunted down and killed in front of Amity's members, who do nothing whatsoever for them. Triscuit, Caleb, Toby-ass, and some chick called Susan (no word on whether her first name is Mary) manage to escape. Mary Susan completely disappears at this point.
They jump a train heading into the city (which curiously has no DEA guards whatsoever!) where they encounter a bunch of 'the factionless' - people this charming society has cast out because they failed to make it into one of the five families...er factions. Oh, and Triscuit's shoulder hurts. Edward (one of those cast out from Dauntless during Triscuit's training), is aboard the train. What an amazing coincidence. When Toby-ass reveals who he actually is, he's taken to meet the factionless leader - so it's not a leaderless faction, you see, even though it's fractionated. The factionless leader is Toby-ass's mother.
After hanging with the factionless for a very short time the pair of them head over to the Candor compound where they're promptly arrested as traitors. They're confined to a room - together - where Triscuit's shoulder hurts and they learn that they're going be be subjected to the truth serum at 7pm. Why the seven hour wait? Who knows? These things appear to be unabashedly random in this novel. They both come through the test ok, but Triscuit discovers that even the truth serum cannot control her completely. She's promptly adopted by the local Dauntless group (as opposed to the 50% who betrayed everyone else, known as the Dauntless traitors, and who are evidently hanging out at the Erudite building). This part is nicely written and was a pleasure to read after some 150 pages of posterior pain (and shoulder pain), but unfortunately it doesn't last long. Triscuit starts hanging out with Lynn. who is the one I want this story to be about, but unfortunately, we can't have that, we have to have Triscuit.
My problem with Triscuit throughout the first two hundred pages is that she's a complete betrayal of everything in book one. She's supposed to be Dauntless. She's supposed to have worked hard and become toughened, and fought hard to get where she is, but throughout this entire novel so far, she's a complete whiny wuss (oh and her shoulder hurts. Did I mention that?). She is scared of guns, and this caused endless trouble for others, yet despite pistóliphobia, she has no trouble knifing Eric, so she definitely doesn't have aichmophobia! How did this knifing come about?
Well, they decide to go climb the Hancock building so they can spy on Erudite, but as they get set to leave the lobby and head outdoors, they're confronted by Dauntless traitors outside. The entire Dauntless non-traitor group freezes and so the Dauntless traitors (who henceforth and herewithin will be known as the Dumb-ass Dauntless or Dumb-asses for short) are able to stun everyone with their simulation guns (no, the gun isn't simulated, it's real, but the round it fires facilitates a simulation in anyone it hits, thereby rendering them helpless). The Dumb-ass Dauntless attack is 100% successful despite there being loyal Dauntless guards always on duty in the lobby for the very purpose of repelling such an assault, so once again Roth completely betrays Dauntless - either that or the Dauntless loyals are as big a bunch of wusses as Triscuit is. From here onwards, they shall be known as Wuss-ass Dauntless, or Wuss-asses for short.
The point of the raid is to get a couple of divergents to experiment on. This completely betrays the fiction confection that the Erudite faction knows how to function. If they were smart, they would have raided the factionless to get the divergents since the factionless discard pack is composed of a wealth of them. Why would they raid a guarded Candor building instead? Hey, this is the kind of story Roth writes. Perhaps they purposefully took the road more troublesomely traveled precisely because they're Dumb-asses? But then that would be a betrayal of the strength of their coalition with Erudite, wouldn't it?
So what happens is that the divergents don't get knocked out by these simulant guns which the Dumb-ass Dauntless are using, so they're easy to pick out. Triscuit excels herself here, rising to new levels of incompetence. Since she's too chicken to carry a gun, she hides behind the other Dauntlesses, using them as a human shield. When a gas grenade lands near her, instead of tossing it out of the lobby she tosses it deeper into the lobby! Oookay! They later learn that the needle was the transmitter portion of the simulation treatment, whereas the gas grenade was the actual simulant in aerosol form, so Triscuit actually helped the Dumb-asses. They later determine that the transmitter is a long-lasting variety, so now the DEA can run a simulation and take over the other factions whenever they want.
Why the Dumb-asses don't simply grab the first two divergents they find and run with them is another mystery, Instead, they parade around the whole building herding up the divergents and this is how Triscuit the wuss is discovered: she failed to grab a gun and so was easily overcome, but when Eric starts getting in her face about whether she's a double or a triple divergent, she stabs him without reserve or hesitation. I guess the Dumb-ass Dauntless don't search their captives for weapons, and evidently Eric the Dumb-ass Dauntless was ditch-deep dumb because despite the fact that he pressed firmly up against Triscuit from behind, while restraining her, he never once detected that she had a knife in her back pocket!.
I've just finished two or so hours out in the yard and I wanted to lay down on the couch with a cup of hot tea with some honey in it and read a couple of chapters, but the next chapter in line is 17 and it's such an ungodly mess that if I don't blog it "live" as I read it, I'm going to forget all Le Stupide that I encounter (and this is after reading only three pages of it!).
Sixteen ends with Toby-ass telling Triscuit to drop the knife (because she's just a weak girl who doesn't know what she's doing and he's the strong manly man who gets to tell her what to do for her own good, you know). Seventeen begins with this sentence: "Tobias tells me this story." Roth has painted herself into a corner here because she insisted upon telling this story from Triscuit's PoV, but that means she can't tell us anything that Triscuit doesn't witness first hand. If we have to learn something that happened to someone else, they have to tell Triscuit so we can know it, but that's not what she does here. For the first time she simply tells the story from the third person, but there's only this limp line of 3 very faint asterisks (not asterixes!) which in the collector's edition appeared very faintly at the top of the right-hand page facing the one where the chapter starts. Tightly focused on the story as I was, I completely missed them! Toby-ass's story is only three paragraphs, ending at the bottom of the page containing the chapter header, but I was all the way down the next page and onto the page after that before I started thinking, "What the hell?".
What really triggered this was when I read about Triscuit removing the dart which contained the simulation drug, and it made absolutely no sense whatsoever! I was thinking that this had happened to Toby-ass, but then I started wondering if I'd missed something and we were now back in Triscuit's PoV (which we were), but it made even less sense then. I had to go back and re-read those three pages, and it was only then that I registered the three asterisks! Confusing! But all my dumb fault.
Here's the problem with the drug dart: It's a needle about the length of Triscuit's pinkie (little) finger, and at the outside end, it has a small disk about the size of her little finger nail, so the needle is like a nail. This takes place right after we read of Toby-ass telling her to drop the knife, but she's not with Toby-ass, she's in the bathroom. We've had no notification of her changing her location, nor of where she moved to. We just read of her removing this Dumb-ass Dauntless Jacket which she'd appropriated as a disguise in the previous chapter. So she has to remove this jacket to see the needle, but here's the question: given that the needle has a flange of about a quarter inch, how did it penetrate her clothing (she was wearing a zipped up jacket) to the point where it's snugly against her skin with no fabric between it and the skin? And how did it penetrate her shoulder so deeply without hitting any bone?
The needle isn't barbed, yet Triscuit cannot extract it without using her knife (the one Toby-ass made her drop!) as a lever to pull it with. If it was purely in skin and muscle, it would have been relatively simple to pull it out. If it was in bone, it would have hurt as Triscuit claims it did, but it would likely have snapped if she'd tried to lever it out as she describes. Confusing! But the only thing which really bothers Triscuit, who was raised all her life in Abnegation and was then taught how to be super tough in Dauntless, is that she absolutely must apply some salve to her jaw before it bruises! Oh my! And those fingernail marks on her skin are so disgusting. Seriously, I've come to the only logical conclusion that Triscuit isn't divergent or trivergent, but univergent, yet she isn't one of the five families, er factions; no, Triscuit is the founder member of the sixth faction, the Barbies! Yeay! She probably thinks math is hard....
A serious problem with seventeen is that it reveals with stark clarity what a bunch of little wusses the entire Dauntless faction is! First in that the Wuss-asses could not defend the Candor compound. Second in that, via Toby-ass's tale, we discover that once the Dumb-ass crew were surrounded, they ran away!. How one runs away when one is surrounded is a complete mystery which not even Roth's best miraculous (god helped her write this story according to her acknowledgment page) deus ex machina can salvage, but it completely betrays the claim that Dauntless faction members are fierce and brave, and aggressive! It deteriorates further from there, though! Triscuit spends all night pulling needles out of other people, so I guess the Dauntless crew are also wimps when it comes to needles!
Apparently the Dumb-asses were such exceptional shots that every single needle went into someone's arm (except Triscuit, of course, and that's no doubt because she's divergent!). At any rate, the arm is the only location from which Triscuit is pulling needles! Evidently none of the Wuss-ass Dauntless crew can do it for themselves or help to do it for others, and the candor people are honestly useless. It smarts too much for the erudite to do it, and the abnegation people think it would be too prideful to pretend they could do anything for themselves. Amity is into drugs so they would no doubt leave it be. So that just leaves Triscuit who - despite this swollen jaw marring her flawless beauty - nevertheless sacrifices her own personal comfort and works through the mild but persistently intrusive pain to serve others like the good little Abnegator she is.
What really confuses me is that Triscuit not only heard what Eric and some other Dumb-ass Dauntless crew-member were discussing about the purpose of this assault, she was also party to Eric's monologuing when she was captured, and yet she inexplicably starts tossing ideas back and forth about what the purpose of this assault was! She considers that the needles might be poisoned, even though she knows perfectly well they were not. She wonders why the assault was made even thought she knows perfectly well why it was made. She wonders what the Dumb-asses were after even though she knows perfectly well what they were after. She wonders what they hoped to achieve even though she knows perfectly well what they hoped to achieve! Maybe Triscuit should be on the Dumb-ass faction, too? Did I mention that her jaw is swollen?
So Triscuit finally gets a chance to go to the cafeteria despite her swollen jaw, and runs into her brother (fortunately not literally and not jaw first), who is seriously concerned about that swell jaw she's now sporting. Maybe this is her signature: from now on, she will always have an injury for us to fret over, switching them out like a chain smoker. But we have more important things to deal with now: this paragon of charm and empathy reveals that "I thought I had gotten to the point where I didn't need my brother any more..."! What?! What was her plan: was she going to trade him in for a new knife? But no, the answer is revealed! She wants him to go get her some food because she has to talk with Toby-ass and obviously has no time for pointless pursuits like grabbing something to eat before she goes to talk to Toby-ass! Erudite boy sees absolutely no problem with this and toddles off to do her bidding. I was expecting to turn the page and read him saying, "As you wish."!
She finds Toby-ass and his first concern is her jaw, which is swell, but he follows it with an inquiry into her state of mind because this fully-trained but extremely delicate Dauntless girl stabbed someone! Oh. My. God! She wants to tell him about Marcus, who she has learned escaped the Amity compound with his Peter they both made it to Gondor! Er, Candor! But despite his chewing her out earlier about not telling him anything, she refrains from telling him anything because they are in the cafeteria - or is it Kafkateria? I don't know. So many weird things are happening in here, who can tell? God only knows what would happen if she revealed the dread secret of Marcus in the... Kafkateria! Toby-ass would no doubt morph into a berserker, rampaging, and sacking, and burning people's houses, raping their womenfolk or whoever happened to be about, and carrying off treasure in his douche canoe which looks remarkably like a Viking longboat. FOR GOD'S SAKE DO NOT TELL HIM ABOUT MARCUS! Triscuit decides to start acting selfishly....
So she tells Toby-ass she needs to talk to him, but not in the Kafkateria. Unfortunately, on the way out, some people taunt Toby-ass about the return of his father, so he learns of it in the cafeteria anyway. I guess if Triscuit hadn't been so selfish she could have prepared him for this, but she decided to go all selfish and well, there you go. Despite his now knowing, they still go somewhere as though she's going to tell him this secret he now knows! So when they get there, Toby-ass asks her if this secret she would reveal was Marcus's arrival and she denies it and tries to launch into a discussion of the simulation drugs, but instead, Toby-ass chews her out for doing precisely the things the Dauntless crew have been taught to do ever since she joined them!
Later, at the Candor meeting, Jack Kang, the leader of Candor invites the divergent forward to hear their opinions and then disses every one of them. He does describe Triscuit accurately based on what we've been shown of her so far in this novel: a little girl, and he disses her and Toby-ass's suggestions despite asking for them! No one speaks up in their defense. King Kang wants to meet the leader of Erudite to talk peace despite this brutal and unprovoked attack. Jack Kang is a moron who reminds me of Neville Chamberlain, and who is doubtlessly going to die at some point.
Here are some fun exercises to help maintain your interest in this novel (believe me, you'll need something, and I don’t recommend drugs):
- Count the number of times where Triscuit states "I have never (insert random activity), and I never will".
- Count how many times Triscuit consecutively says the same thing twice.
- Count the number of times where Triscuit agonizes over Will's death.
- Count how many times Triscuit reveals that despite being a successful young Dauntless candidate, she has all the physical fitness and stamina of a debilitated retiree.
- Count the number of times Triscuit aches, hurts, or is sore.
- Keep your eyes open for fun sentences like this: "...the moon is bright enough that I can walk by it without too much trouble." (Think about it!).
Roth is obsessed with the numbers 7 and 12. 7 is the number of the divine in Judaism. Triscuit's truth serum interrogation with Candor was set for 7pm and she was told this at noon. King Kang's meeting with Jeanine's representative was at 7am, and Triscuit thought about this twelve hours before, at 7pm. Of course, Triscuit once again failed to arm herself, so she failed to shoot Jeanine even though she had quickly figured out that the Erudite leader was indeed close by, but as we shall see, the last thing anyone is really aiming to do is take out Jeanine and thereby end this mess. No, we have a trilogy to complete and we’re going full spread ahead and damn the torpedoes which are hitting us harder in the ass with very page we turn.
We learn that two spies have returned from Erudite, but they evidently learned not a thing - or if they did, we sure learned nothing of what they learned. This is an epic fail as we shall see later, but for now, let’s take a moment to mourn the sad fact that this kind of thing - story lines which go nowhere - isn't confined to this one incident. Consider for example the plan to climb the Hancock building to spy on Erudite, which was interrupted by the Dumb-ass Dauntless attack. This plan is completely forgotten and not only never carried out, but it’s never mentioned again! Some plan. This is a second epic fail tied very much to the failure of the spies, as we shall see in a little while.
But let me admit here that I was wrong about Eric the half-a-B. I thoght he'd live on, but he's dead meat, summarily shot by Toby-ass. I was surprised by that. Not by him being killed without even a pretense of a trial and not by the fact that Triscuit isn’t even remotely shocked or nauseated by this latest example of barbarity, but by him being killed off. I thought they would keep him for his bug-a-bear value (which is why he's only half a B), but since we still have the Evil Queen Jeanine in the role, I guess Eric wasn't important enough to keep around. The question is, can we be assured that they're not going to kill off Jeanine no matter how many glaring opportunities present themselves for them to do so (more on this anon), because she is now the last evil monarch remaining.
This novel seems like all we're getting is Roth's random ruminations®. Whatever wild idea crosses her "lateral prefrontal cortex" (which Roth mistakenly thinks is the brain's pleasure center) got typed right out and became integrated into the story. I'm really a bit surprised not to read 'and then' frequently in this fable: "Triscuit got depressed and then she cried and then she fantasized about Toby-ass, who is selflessly growing bangs into his eyes as fast as he can" because it’s that kind of breathless child-like relation of a tale which is what this novel feels like all too often. Hey, when Beatrice offends, is this a Prior offense...? I had to seriously wonder why Triscuit is made to appear far younger than her sixteen years, especially given how much tough training she's received at the hands of her manly tutors when she joined Dauntless just a month or so before. Even Roth is aware of this, as highlighted by her own reference to it, put into in Jeanine's mouth when Triscuit turns herself in.
The most glaring thing about this novel is that Triscuit is the diametric opposite of what she was in volume 1 and for no good reason. Rather than being toughened up, she's retrogressing into a childlike state, and the retardation evidently isn't just mental, it's apparently physical. Consider this sentence from Roth: "He sits on the edge of the bed and I stand in front of him and we're finally eye to eye." So is Triscuit a midget? Is she eight years old? Why would Roth champion her as a can-do candidate in volume one and then destroy all that by making her into the nary sue of volume 2? If the novel had been written in the third person it wouldn't have seemed quite so bad, but all this self-pity is nothing but nauseating in the first person.
The massive failure of Dauntless as an entity is another bizarre factor in this novel's failure. After volume 1, where we get slammed time after time after time with how tough Dauntless is, how supreme, how powerful, how aggressive and how fearless, time after time in this volume we discover how useless they are, how inert, how incapable, how worthless as a defensive force, and how incapable they are of formulating any kind of a strategy or battle plan! This entire novel is one of placid non-reactivity on the part of the Wuss-asses - hence their well-deserved name. What's almost equally bizarre is that Toby-ass, an instructor for Dauntless, and in this volume now a leader, constantly berates Triscuit for acting like Dauntless faction member should act! Or at least should act given what we were forced to swallow in volume 1! Go figure!
Check out this brain-dead sequence: Christina, who pretty much detests Triscuit for firing at Will, comes to get her - not one of the leaders or anyone else, but Triscuit, the person she most despises - when an Erudite initiated simulation causes some Wuss-asses to kill themselves. Christina fails to tell Triscuit what’s going on, and Triscuit robotically fails to ask, merely following her like a blind lamb to the slaughter. Triscuit exhibits this specific behavior repeatedly in this volume. Triscuit isn’t even remotely suspicious of this girl who, for all she knows, hates her and is plotting retaliation. Triscuit fails to alert anyone and follows with mute acquiescence. The astounding incompetence of these two results in two more deaths. When they get up to the roof, Triscuit discovers that her friend Marlene, Lynn's young brother Hector, and one other are being coerced (by a simulation) to throw themselves off the roof to their death. And where the heck do these names come from? Uriah? Zeke? Hector? Toby-ass? I'm forced to consider the possibility that it was God Himself gave those names to Roth with a divine edict to employ them. He did co-write this novel with her, after all.
So what happened here is that the Dumb-asses have invoked a simulation on three of the Wuss-asses, forcing them up the roof where they're about to plunge to their deaths. The Dumb-asses know what's going on because the Wuss-asses have exhibited remarkable incompetence in their failure to blind all the cameras in the Dauntless compound. Why? They chose to have a paintball fight instead! I am not making this up! Because Christina came down and got Triscuit, and Triscuit alerted no one else, there is no one to restrain two of the three subjects as they throw themselves off the roof and die. Triscuit manages to save Hector. Christina doesn’t even try to save anyone. If they had recruited just four more people, there would have been more than enough to save all three lives.
There is more incompetence here than just Triscuit's and Christina's. Why would the Dumb-asses pull this demo of their power in the middle of the night when everyone is asleep, and there's no one to witness it?! Why not do it in front of everyone in the middle of the day? And why wait until Christina has got Triscuit to come along, but no one else?! The result of this could have backfired. It could have been that everyone thought Christina and Triscuit had killed those three. But then, that's why they're the Dumb-asses, isn’t it?! Naturally Triscuit blames herself for all three deaths, and heaps this on top of her already overwhelming guilt, which is fair I suppose since she could have done a lot better. Never once does she consider Christina culpable, because Triscuit is painfully stupid despite baing an Erudite candidate. Actually maybe because she's such a candidate, since the Erudites are clearly stupid too.
There is a far more serious problem here, unfortunately. Recall that in the attack on the Candor building, the Dumb-asses needed both a transmitter, and a simulant. The transmitter was injected (and not single thought has been expended on how to remove or neutralize the transmitter!) via the needles which were fired at so many people, and the simulant was administered via the gas grenades. So my question is: where is the simulant in this assault on those three roof-top flyers? None was administered. The only permanent thing is the transmitter! Roth doesn't so much as gloss over this as completely fail to explain it.
This is what I mean by Roth's behavior pattern of tossing out random and ill-conceived ideas instead of creating a coherent narrative and molding that into an engaging story. I've mentioned this before in reviews, but it’s worth bringing up again: I can forgive a lot of holes in a story if the story itself is worthy. If your fiction engages my mind and pulls me along, I'm in, but even the best written story opens itself to endless nitpicking if it fails in the critical arena of proving itself to be a gripping yarn. If it fails to provide a decent ongoing narrative and if it fails in generally maintaining a respectable level of suspension of disbelief, then it fails as a novel and all there is for the reader to do is pick at the loose threads until they unravel like a badly composed Boléro.
I don’t demand that a novel be perfect. None is. It doesn't have to be perfect. I don't ask for a flawless story, and I sure don't claim to write flawless ones myself! All I ask is that the writer tell me a good story; take me somewhere I've never been; introduce me to someone interesting and fun, someone I've never met but would like to meet. You give me that, and I'm yours, and your story will be embraced, warts and all. The problem is that Roth isn't even pretending that she needs to fabricate a decent story; she's just palming us off with a fabrication, and stringing together two dozen plot holes and telling me it's crochet is just going to get me crotchety.
So Triscuit predictably declares herself the scapegoat of Gethsemane, and offers herself like the Messiah in the park in the dark. She outright lies to Toby-ass, for which I hope he will never forgive her but for which the moron doubtlessly will forgive her, and she bows down to terrorism rather than trying to use her erudition skills to figure out a solution. Never once does the thought even cross her mind that Jeanine will not keep her word, indeed has no incentive to! Never once does she entertain the idea that her sacrifice for all humankind will actually benefit the devil and give her more power to continue to harm the Wuss-asses regardless of what happens to Triscuit. On her way out the door, she tells Christina to find out what Marcus knows, and Christina is so monumentally stupid that she doesn’t figure out that Triscuit is going to turn herself in to the Erudite.
But it gets worse. When Triscuit hikes over to the Erudite compound (complaining all the way of what a chore it is to have to actually walk several blocks), she discovers that the compound is completely unguarded and unprotected. If the Wuss-asses went over there, they could walk in and take over the entire building, but erudite candidate and Dauntless graduate Triscuit never even notices the lax security, let alone considers haring back to the Dauntless compound with this amazing piece of extremely valuable intelligence. This is a revelation which the two spies should already have conveyed but spectacularly failed to do so! It is also a revelation which, if they actually had completed their plan of scaling the Hancock building to spy on the Erudite compound, the Wuss-asses would also have discovered.
So Triscuit once more bemoans her fate and the Erudite people conduct some sims on her, all of which fail because she's quite evidently magic girl on whom no sims work. The funny thing is that Triscuit, who hates Peter, is joking and flirting with him throughout her captivity! This is Peter who put out her friend Edward's eye for no reason other than pure jealousy, in volume 1 of this trilogy. Worse than this, Triscuit at one point has the opportunity to stab Jeanine in the eye with a needle (which they stupidly give her so she can inject herself), yet she goes right ahead and injects herself. Given the revelation which comes shortly afterwards, this behavior is utterly, absolutely, completely, and in every other way inconceivably moronic. Except in a Veronica Roth novel, evidently.
So what comes later? Well Triscuit accidentally runs into Toby-ass, now a prisoner. Rather than kill him outright - a Dauntless faction leader! - the Dumb-asses let him hang around. They use Triscuit to force Toby-ass to betray the location of the factionless safe houses, and Toby-ass, a supposed Dauntless leader and instructor, spills every last detail and doesn't even feel remotely bad about it. Do they kill him then? Nope! Toby-ass even escapes at one point, takes Triscuit with him and then surrenders! Still they don’t kill him. Erudite my ass.
Instead, these geniuses decide to kill Triscuit! Now this is the one person who actually is immune to their drugs - the one who they truly need to figure out (by their estimation), but rather than pursue this course, they decide to kill her and substitute Toby-ass, who is far more troublesome, and from whom they could learn far less. I say, 'by their estimation' because all the Erudite have to do in reality (this reality, that is) is to kill all the divergent, and their problem is solved. They don't need a drug. For that matter, why even bother killing them? There are so few of them that they cannot possibly pose a threat, yet genius Jeanine is obsessing on them. Wouldn’t it be funny if she turned out to be one? And in true Star Wars tradition, also turned out to be Triscuit's real mom! Heh!
But we know Triscuit is never going to die because this is only volume 2 of a trilogy! Does Roth really think she's ramping up the stakes and making us sit on the edge of our seats? She's delusional if she does. So no, of course Triscuit doesn’t die. There's a traitor in the midst of the genius Erudite compound, and it’s Peter! Yes, he's a spy for the Wuss-asses.
So please, someone help me out here. I have two serious problems with this. Here's the first: Peter is a spy. He's working for the Wuss-asses, but he's embedded in the Erudite compound. Given that, what in god's name was the motive for Toby-ass breaking in there? And this is the same Toby-ass who was lecturing Triscuit not long before about not taking stupid risks??? His purported motive was to discover where the Erudite control rooms were. Peter couldn’t pass this information on?!! And Toby-ass was in one of these two control rooms. He had the chance to completely destroy it, but he failed to do so! This fable has now adventured well beyond Le Stupide and has spliced its drooling, slack-jawed visage deeply into the USB (unevacuated stinking butt-hole) port of the monumentally microencephalic.
Here's my second problem, and this makes the first look like a mere hiccup. You recall when Triscuit had a needle in her hand and failed to plunge it into Jeanine's eye? Guess who the only other person in the room was? Yep, it was Peter the spy. Eric and Max are already dead at this point. Triscuit and Peter could have taken out Jeanine right there and then, thereby completely chopping the head off the Erudite faction. They could have ended this whole war right there, yet both of them epically failed.
I'm sorry, but this cheap-ass excuse for an action adventure is total trash. My only purpose in finishing it now is to expose it for what it is by digging up the rest of the dirt and airing it in public. So continuing in this vein, Peter, Triscuit and Toby-ass escape down the garbage chute in true Star Wars fashion (honestly), and Triscuit decides that the best way to escape the Erudite pursuers is to be illogical because the logical Erudite people will never find them that way! Seriously? Since when did logic become the defining factor of the Erudite? It used to be smarts, not logic! But get Triscuit's brilliant idea: don't run, quietly hide instead. So they fire their gun to shatter a window to get into a building. I am not kidding you. They way to avoid the brilliant Erudite pursuers is to loudly fire a gun, smash a window, and then hide in the building which the gunshot and the shattered glass unmistakeably point out. I think even microencephalic is too generous for this level of numb-nuttery.
Well I pretty much skipped chapters 25 and 26 (or somewhere around there) because, amazingly, they were in almost exactly imitation of my joke! I expected Roth to start writing "and then she did this and then she did that" like a lower school writing assignment! These chapters spew out the most pointless and tedious details of completely uninteresting crap. But one part was actually interesting given this other joke I'd made about Triscuit being the Messiah: Toby-ass washes her feet! I am not making this stuff up. I now expect Triscuit to be transfigured and rise up to Heaven at the conclusion of this trilogy!
As if telling her chosen disciple Toby-ass one humongous lie wasn't enough, Triscuit lies again to him in a situation where she should definitely have trusted him. The Factionless and Dauntless (FAD) coalition plans on raiding the Erudite compound and destroying all their information, which is considered to be their power. But get this: the raid isn’t to take place immediately, it’s to take place three days hence (another number which has religious significance!). What in the name of ass-backwards bone-headed dim-wittedness was the "planning" behind that brain-dead decision? To give time for the Erudite goons to learn of this plan from their spies? To give them ample opportunity to shore up their defenses (which they do)? No, there is no reason for this decision aside from sheer incompetence in telling this fable. I guess we ought to be grateful that at least it’s not seven or twelve days....
Roth employs uses the verb "to inch"! That reminds me of a biography someone wrote about the creator of James Bond: Ian Fleming. I may be misremembering this (I sure don't remember who wrote the biography!), but I recall the writer mentioning that none other than Noël Coward had taken Fleming to task on his turning of the noun into a verb, and Coward declined it for him along the lines of "I inch, Thou inchest..."! I found that immensely amusing, but the fact remains that language isn't what's written in some dictionary, or in some grammar manual somewhere. Language is what's spoken the street, and I don't think it's ever been more dynamic than we find in the English language today.
It’s an exciting time, and while I often rail at misused or misspoken words, and at bad grammar, I also realize we can’t stop it, so we need to find a way, if not to embrace it then to turn this trend to our advantage as writers. In this particular case with the inch (and should we now change it to the centimeter?!), it would probably behoove a writer to employ, instead of something like "I inched my way along the ledge" to write something more like "I navigated the narrow ledge by inches". A simple dedication to subtle changes like that - a kind of retro-writing, rebelling against the new norm - might make the difference between your novel being a part of the herd, and to it standing out in an editor's - or more importantly these days of self-publishing - in your reader's mind.
Triscuit and her token black friend Christina head off over to the Amity compound with Marcus (is his last name 'Asdoomed'?!). Once again Triscuit immediately does someone else's bidding, allowing herself to be drawn into the Amity people's prayer to a god who never lifted a finger to help them, but instead, quite evidently gave this society the finger. She becomes aware of her weakness for once, but instead of simply sitting this one out, this brave Dauntless girl runs away like a child, until her lungs burn, which (given her fitness level) is probably only about ten yards or so.
Roth's stereotyping reaches hitherto unattained heights when she declares all Erudite faction members, without exception, to be wearers of eye-glasses! I guess they’re not smart enough to have come up with a fix for eye problems, or even to wear contact lenses?
Triscuit's plan is to seek the advice of the Eyeglass faction which is in hiding at Amity. This is bordering on the insanely stupid because the Eyeglass-wearers have yet to prove that they have any smarts whatsoever as judged by their behavior in this novel so far, but they're logically stupid so that's all right then! They tell Triscuit that instead of storing the information she wishes to retrieve on a disk, she should just transmit it to the other factions over the network. Cara advises them that it will then be impossible to destroy, but I guess she's not so smart because whatever can be sent over the network can also be deleted over the network! Does Roth not know this?
As they're about to enter the Erudite compound, Triscuit chooses a taser because she's still terrified of guns. Roth tells us that her heart beats so hard that it marks each second. I can only conclude that either it isn't really beating that hard, or they must have remarkably short seconds in Roth World™.
Now the Erudite compound is surrounded by guards (for no apparent reason, unless the Erudite actually do know about the FAD invasion plan)! Scores of armed Candor drones surround the building! The FAD coalition blew it by delaying their assault, but at least now the attack can get good and bloody. Triscuit has to try and sneak in by some alternate stealthy means. Of course 'stealthy', in Roth’s dictionary, means shooting off a loud gun again and thereby destroying all hope of secrecy! This marks twice that Roth has made this glaring mistake.
They climb to a floor where they have a window opposite which, when broken, will allow them direct access across the alley to the Erudite building. They decide to use a device which will break windows sonically, but even though this device can shatter all the windows on both sides of the alley, they somehow feel they have to get it across to the other window rather than simply set it off on the window ledge where they're at. Note that despite the fact that the other building is very close by, the candor drones are apparently literally surrounding the building - not just blocking off the alley but right down there in the alley!
Now please prepare yourself for Le Stupide to be ramped up higher than you or I ever thought Roth capable, because she outdoes herself in the next few scenes. They get a ladder and use it as a bridge to the other window, then they toss the disk which shatters every window in both buildings all the way down to the ground. The mindless drones fire one shot each into the air and then resume their guarding duty, and not one single Erudite person looks out to see what the hell is going on with all these windows shattering!
They crawl across the ladder and enter the building, but when Fernando, the eyeglass-wearing Erudite (because you know it’s quite illegal to be Erudite sans eye-wear), puts his eyeglasses in his pocket, they promptly fall out and drop to the ground. The candor drones do not fire at the source of the noise (the glasses impacting the ground), but fire wildly up into the air, thereby killing Fernando! (Cue ABBA). When Triscuit arrives in the bathroom across the alley, a woman comes out of one of the stalls, and this genius accepts it as perfectly normal and even logical that fellow Erudites will shatter all windows and enter the building on the fifth floor or wherever they are, rather than use elevators or stairs. She happily romps off without even dreaming of raising any alarm!
Now recall that the entire complement of windows on this entire side of the building have been literally shattered. It starts to rain, and Triscuit is momentarily freaked out by the rain "hitting the window". WHAT WINDOW??? So the crew exits the bathroom, whereupon Triscuit remembers that she left her stunner in the bathroom - this is the Dauntless girl with Erudite extensions. She simply sighs, "Oh well" and toddles off without taking five seconds to recover her only weapon, thereby once again leaving herself unarmed in a crucially important situation. She's evidently given up on wearing a knife - I think that was because the silver of the blade conflicted with her Amity dress. It turns out that the Factionless-Dauntless attack was not set for three days hence after all, because, in a miraculous coincidence, it's taking place precisely at the same time that Triscuit and crew and breaking in! How delightfully convenient.
They find the control room, but they cannot access Jeanine's super secret info stash, since it’s not on those computers. The funny thing is that (you may recall) Toby-ass was scouting out the control rooms so they could be destroyed in the attack, yet despite both Edward and Tori, a Dauntless leader, being in the vicinity, there's not one single FAD person doing anything to the control room!
So they climb the stairs to try and reach the Jeanine's private office. This is Triscuit's logic: The information is precious to Jeanine, so let's not go to the highly secure lab; it's far more likely that she keeps this vitally important info in her unlocked office! They unexpectedly run into Edward on the stairs. I guess they weren't keeping an eye out for him! Even though he's on their side and has no idea what they’re up to, he refuses to let them up the stairs. They fight and Edward gets shot. Obviously he's not a patch on them. Upstairs, Triscuit enters the lab and is hit by a simulation where she has to fight herself. Despite all these delays, she still gets to Tori before Tori kills Jeanine! What was Tori doing all this time? Chatting her up? And how come Jeanine never destroyed the information before they arrived?
Since Triscuit tried to save Jeanine just long enough to figure out how to access the info on her computer, Tori immediately brands this girl (who she knows very well), as a traitor and without further ado, Triscuit is arrested! She begs Toby-ass to listen to her, but he's pissed, as he should be, for her lying to him. At that point she tries to have the conversation with him which she should have had two days ago, but gives up almost immediately, and clams-up completely in a flood of self pity instead of trying to convey the vital importance of this information!
So how does this end? Well it doesn't - it's open to volume 3, but the link is so abysmally weak that it doesn't even merit the name. Essentially the insanely valuable, super-secret file on Jeanine's computer is some chick popping up on a video and saying that, hey, guess what, there are people outside of Chicago and only the divergents can save you now! I am not kidding you. Does she give any details? Nope. Does she say exactly why the divergents are valuable, no! That's how completely FUBAR this volume is. By all means buy it so you can immediately recycle it. We can use the toilet paper.
