One choice. A choice becomes a sacrifice. A sacrifice becomes a loss. A loss becomes a burden. A burden becomes a battle. One choice can destroy you......And one choice can be the most idiotic choice a character could ever make.
Just a quick note, this may contain spoilers on Divergent depending on how you look at it.
Insurgent is the second in a series of what it seeming to be three books, and following it's predecessor Divergent it had a lot to live up to. I do not believe that Veronica Roth achieved that at all with this sequel to an amazing book.
Roth's sequel carries straight off from where Divergent ends, it could literally be the next page in the book. This is one of the only things I loved about this book, just the fact that it started as action packed as the other ended and it made an exciting start for a new book. There's a war between the factions, sides are being formed, and everything seems to be in pieces. In Insurgent Tris is out to stop all of this happening and finds out along the way it isn't as simple as it first seems and there are some truths that need to be uncovered.
I loved Tris in Divergent, she was strong and brave yet vulnerable and naive at the same time which added to her good qualities as she wasn't perfect or down right dumb like a lot of protagonists I have read about. However, in this book Tris became the biggest idiot I have read about in a long time - now you can't call this character development at all because it was just ridiculous. She was just irresponsible and quite frankly acting her age, making rash decisions and not caring for the consequences. She would on several occasions be told to stop being stupid yet she would carry on doing the most annoying things and putting herself in needless danger thinking it was for the sake of everybody else. No, Tris, you're just a stupid little girl who for one thinks before she acts and two doesn't think at all or at least logically or thoroughly like any sensible person would do in that situation. I could go on but I'll just say that her character thoroughly frustrated me throughout the entire book.
The storyline was very haphazard and I blame this on Tris' character mainly due to her stupid behaviour. It just seemed to chop and change every few pages, stupid situation after stupid situation, each being caused by one of Tris' many bad choices. Obviously there were a few amazing scenes where I was on the edge of my seat and at one point I actually laughed at some of the twists they were that unpredictable, but unfortunately this was a minority of the book and I felt the majority to be very disappointing storyline-wise.
The one thing I loved about this book however, was the fact you see how the other factions live. Even Tris was caught up by the stereotypes of the different units and was surprised when they acted like normal human beings. It was a wonderful insight into the dystopian world which I felt was greatly needed to carry on from the prequel as they weren't examined as deeply in Divergent. The carefree nature yet efficient of the Amity, the sternness of truth yet accepting of Candor and the intelligent and well though through (and not all bad) nature of the Erudite - the Abnegation and dauntless you saw more in Divergent.
The end of the ending was amazing and shocking and left me excited for the third instalment of the series no matter how awful Tris was in this book. I can tell that the third book will answer all of the unanswered in the second book, unless a fourth book is planned of course. I just hope above all hope that Veronica Roth thinks twice about the stupidity of Tris.
All in all I thought this was the biggest disappointment for me of this year and only a few factors bring up my rating and that's the explanations of the factions being one of them. I'd only recommend reading it if you want to read all of the series but as a stand alone book this was awful.
★★