I read Divergent a while back. It intrigued me enough to know that I wanted to read the rest of the series eventually, but not enough to make too much of a mad rush to get my hands on it. Although now I have read the rest of the series, despite many people telling me not to bother, and I’m glad I did.
So there’s a little too many fingers curling into shirt scenes… it might be the only way Roth has seen or experienced closeness – in the form of people tugging on t-shirts or twining their fingers around fabric in a near desperate manner. That’s ok. As a writer, I have a nasty habit of tucking things places. She tucked this into that. He tucked blah blah blah. My editor gets on me about it all the time. I’m surprised Roth’s editors didn’t nab her for the finger curling. But that’s not the point…
The point is, despite the teen coming of age romance that we’ve seen over and over again, I liked one major thing about THIS romance.
Tris acknowledges that Love is a Choice.
“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.”
After Twilight and Bella’s helpless infatuation… After The Mortal Instruments and the “to love is to destroy” mantra… After Hunger Games and a PTSD induced marriage of comfort… I’m glad Roth had the guts to write about another kind of choice, the kind that doesn’t happen just once, but every day in every moment.
I think that every true relationship has a little bit of all of those things: infatuation, passion, trust and comfort, and thousands of choices. It’s interesting that in one sub-genre of young adult fiction, all released within a decade of each other, all popular enough to make blockbuster films out of them… we’ve covered such a vast array of relationships in our teen romances. It’s good for young people to see such a variety of examples.
Even though Roth’s aren’t my favorite books ever, I like that she had the courage to write the ending no one wanted, but the one that would be expected in a world such as the one her characters live in.
I still haven’t seen the Divergent movie, but I’m looking forward to the day I do a little bit more, hoping that they stick to the books and don’t go too Hollywood with it. I also look forward to seeing what Roth will write next.
