age: YA
rating: 3/8 tentacles
Sequel alert: beware of spoilers for Book 1.
Most of Insurgent felt hazy and meandering. It didn't have a solid, forward moving pace. It didn't pull me in or hypnotize me. I read most of the story a little detached from it, waiting to be swallowed up into the world it created. I never really was. Little tiny barriers kept shoving me back out.
The lack of contractions, although a valid stylistic choice, only irritated me. The witty/romantic banter between Tris and Four felt unnatural and not as clever as I assume it was intended to be. The dialogue in general felt staged.
I've been noticing that a lot of contemporary YA authors write with this introspective, flowery, self aware voice that is sometimes--in extreme cases--so overly descriptive it veers into pseudo-poetry built of descriptions crafted for effect and not function. I think we get a little of that in Insurgent. There's a lot of words flying around but not a lot of substance.
I would hazard that most of my hazy meandering feelings came from being trapped in Tris's thoughts and fears and regrets. In Divergent, we live in Tris's world, experiencing it through Tris. In Insurgent, we live in Tris's head, which is not as interesting.
I floated through the book, until about the last third, when my interest was finally sparked and I sat up in my seat, eager to read ahead. It wasn't until Tris was faced with a clear goal and an intriguing obstacle to outwit that I thought, "Yes. This is what I wanted. This is why I liked Divergent." Insurgent needed more immediate conflict, more tension. And the twist! Oh, the twist. How frustratingly unoriginal. Maybe Roth will do something to the freshen the idea in her third novel, Detergent (a guess), although none of the millions who've already used it in movies, books, and probably television have, so I daren't dream.
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