Read All The Things! Reviews

The ending to this series took a lot of courage for the author to write. I’m giving the book 4 stars for the sheer ballsyness of the ending. The author had to know that a lot of readers would hate it. I admire her dauntlessness.

I did struggle through the first 400 pages of this book. It felt very repetitive. I couldn’t connect with the underdeveloped, inconsistent, moody characters. The worldbuilding and plot were flimsy and illogical. Switching perspectives between Tris and Four didn’t work for me because their “voices” sounded so similar that I sometimes forgot whose perspective I was reading until something came up in the story to remind me. I did consider putting this book on the shelf and reading something else for a while, but I wanted to know how the series ended. So, I read a summary of the entire book online. I did spoil the ending for myself, but spoiling the ending was what kept me reading. I wanted to know how the author would make that ending happen.

There were some things about the book that I really liked. Tris’s complicated relationship with her brother was interesting, even if you disagree with the choices they made at the end of the book. The action scenes were written well. I liked the parts of the story where the characters realized their own smallness. One of my favorite parts of the entire series was when Peter put a dot on the world map and realized that his entire life had taken place inside that dot. Chicago was Tris’s whole life because she didn’t know anything else, but Chicago was only a small part of the lives of the scientists who were observing/controlling the city. The scientists didn’t have much of a problem destroying Tris’s whole world because their world was much wider than hers. They were incapable of seeing how important Chicago was to her. I liked that element of the story.

Overall, I’m happy that I read this series.