Allegiant by Veronica Roth

Allegiant by Veronica Roth
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Spoiler alert - Allegiant is the third in the highly popular Divergent series of books, and as with most trilogies that I have read, the third book is usually the weakest. As Veronica Roth tries to wrap up the story of Tris and Four and their attempts to address the power hungry leaders of their isolated society, book three has them joining a group of rebels called Allegiant, to over throw Evelyn and her factionless army, but they do not stay and fight, instead Tris and Four and several of their friends decide to venture outside the safety of the community walls to see who or what is out there, and they find a group of scientists and soldiers who are monitoring their entire community, which was put there intentionally as a scientific experiment. This is where the book starts to loose its focus. The scientists are trying to correct genetic mutations that have created two classes of people; the genetically pure and genetically damaged. This creates an unfair society. Tris learns that her Mom was not from her community, but instead had come from this outside world and chose to go join the experiment. Roth loses the focus that her first two books had. Tris and Four spend most of the book fighting and making up in a severely dysfunctional relationship, and yet another group of rebels, this time the genetically damaged, raid the scientific community due to the unfair conditions they face. The attack is confusing and does nothing for the story. To me this dilutes the original work of the first two books. In Divergent and Insurgent, we see how unfairly the social outcasts or factionless are treated, but this whole new social problem of genetically pure versus genetically damaged just muddies the waters. Roth then focuses a great deal on the death of a minor character. Tris' character doesn’t seem as consistent in this book, she cannot forgive her brother for his betrayal, which is not her usual style, and the ending is just as muddled, Tris eventually winds up going on a suicide mission to spread memory serum, but gets shot by David, the leader of the science community and a former love interest of Tris’s mother. This book did not have the building tension and excitement of the previous two books, it was chaotic and confusing at times and felt like Roth was just throwing words on a page to finish out the story. It’s a shame that this was the ending to the series.

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