Divergent (Roth)

3/5. This was a fast dystopian-spunky-female-lead YA read (of course from my sister) -- that is to say, don't expect lyrical prose or deep philosophical discussions, but it was a page-turner and I enjoyed it. The basic plot is that the 16-year-olds get sorted tested into Houses factions that embody traits like courage and friendship, at which point they have to fight an evil overlord with no nose prove themselves through an initiation process. It's actually pretty entertaining, though sometimes a little anvilicious on the "OMG The System Is Corrupt" messages, and even more eyebrow-raising on the class-consciousness (apparently, if you fail to prove yourself during the initiation process, you are factionless and your career prospects are limited to things like construction workers and fabric makers (and presumably farmers -- no clue who grew the food-- and probably engineers too), the horror!! Still, since it's a trilogy -- what YA book isn't -- maybe this will be addressed in the future).

( Now let me ramble for a bit about my fantasy vs. science fiction habits. )

This is to say that Divergent would have worked much better for me as a fantasy book. It would have been really easy to tweak it -- make the testing process depend on magic instead of technology, same with the initiation process (the only place it really depends on being based on our world, I think, is in using a couple of Boston landmarks, and that's easily changed). Because the core idea of dividing people up into factions like the Harry Potter House system -- it just doesn't make sense to me as something that could be reasonably extrapolated from current-day US. For a SF book, that really hampers my enjoyment. But for a fantasy book, I'd totally buy it. And I wouldn't keep wondering who was growing the food. ...Maybe this is just me, though.