Book #18: Insurgent by Veronica Roth

This book's obviously book 2 in the Divergent trilogy. After finishing book 1, I saw that this one was waiting for me at the library, so I ended up picking it up and basically inhaling it in one fell swoop late last night before I fell asleep (so that's why I didn't go to sleep until 1:30!). It kept my interest the whole time, that's for sure. I feel like it's a pretty common belief that the second book in a trilogy is kind of the boring one--the first has to catch your attention but the second is just a bridge to the climax in the third. But I didn't necessarily think that felt true in this one. I almost liked this book better than the first one, possibly because a lot of the things I didn't like/understand about the plot in the first were taken out (necessarily, because of the plot twists of the first). I still feel like there is a lot of explaining to do about the civilization and why the heck everyone cares so much about Divergents anyways, so I'm still interested to see what happens in the third book and how the author wraps this whole story up.

Here's something that bothers me about this story though: Tris being a Divergent is supposed to be this crazy rarity that makes her test instructor freak out, that makes the test freak out and everyone hears about how her scores had to be entered manually, right? So why, in this book, does it suddenly appear that there are Divergents all over the place? There's even another Divergent right in her group of initiates into the Dauntless group, who would have been taking the test at the same time, right? Come on. I don't think this makes much sense now. The other thing that was annoying was how much of the story was about Tris and Four (her boyfriend of the first book) fighting with each other and keeping secrets and blah blah blah. Well, I couldn't even get myself to care, not once, that they weren't getting along. I wasn't at all worried that they might not get back together, because I knew they would in the end. All their fighting did was make the rest of the plot drag. I know that every romantic storyline HAS to have some stumbles to make it interesting, but I do not think that Roth did it very well because I was completely unfazed by it as the reader and wasn't really convinced by their romance ever in the first place.