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Let’s get this out of the way now. I’m going to do something here I rarely do, and give you a disclaimer up front: This review WILL contain MAJOR spoilers for Allegiant. If you do not want to be spoiled- including knowing how the book ends- DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER. You have been warned.
Allegiant is the final book in Veronica Roth’s Divergent trilogy. It picks up just after the ending of Insurgent. Divergent was one of my 2011 Bookish Bests, and I devoured it in a day. Insurgent was, I thought, a perfect sequel, with the right amount of emotion and action, and it teed up the start of Allegiant perfectly.
And while I don’t feel nearly as strongly about the ending of this series as I did say those vampire books or the Hunger Games trilogy- in other words, I didn’t want to throw this book across the room- it still left me disappointed.
One last warning:
***************MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW**************
It took a lot more for me to get into Allegiant than the first two books. That could be because of all the things going on in my life when this one was released, and just not having much time to sit down and read. Still, it took me almost two weeks to finish this book, which is not what I expected. It wasn’t that the book wasn’t interesting, it is more that I was “meh” about it until the last 150-200 pages or so.
Unlike the first two books, Allegiant is told in part by Tris and in part by Tobias. I often found myself flipping back to the beginning of a chapter to verify the voice of that chapter, because if I didn’t pay close attention, it would throw me when it switched narratives. And since that wasn’t a tool employed in the first two books, I wondered what made Roth choose that path.
Then I got to the end. And the heroine DIED. Don’t get me wrong, in the Harry Potter books, I didn’t expect Ron, and Harry, and Hermione to make it out alive. Knowing JKR and all those she had killed off prior to the end of Deathly Hallows, it wouldn’t have completely surprised me if Harry had died, but since he was “The Boy Who Lived”, I didn’t really expect it. To this point, Roth hadn’t pulled punches, either, and it would not have surprised me if Tobias had not survived.
But to kill Tris? That explains the two voices to the story. It couldn’t have ended quite the same way if it was only Tris telling the story. While I understand it in part- sacrifice for the greater good is a theme throughout the books, after all- it really disappointed me because it took this great voice, this brave and funny and stubborn heroine, and turned her story into Tobias’. And we have enough heroes. The alternating voice just so the end can be Tobias’ reflection on his life without Tris and how he goes on without her really takes away from the first two books for me. It doesn’t do Tris, as a heroine, justice.
So there you have it. Was it a good trilogy? Yes. Would I have been more accepting of Tris’ death if the whole trilogy had been told solely in her voice? I think so. The disappointment for me is in truly feeling her voice was robbed by the ending of the series.