A-Z Marathon! Author of the Day: Veronica Roth

We already had an Author of the Day today, but in the future, nobody will notice.
It also doesn't matter. "Author of the Day" just sounds catchier than "A post about a certain author because I haven't finished reading The 5th Wave yet, and I kind of want to maintain an audience by posting daily, but this might not be posted daily, so don't get your hopes up."

You might know Veronica Roth because she wrote the Divergent trilogy. And you may not know that Four, a Divergent collection, will be coming out pretty soon.

For those of you who don't know, Divergent is a relatively new dystopian trilogy about a girl named Tris. Her society is separated into 5 factions, and when you turn 16, you get to choose which faction you want to live in for the rest of your life. So, she has a pretty tough decision because she doesn't fit into one faction. She is divergent.

Now, here's the thing about Veronica Roth's writing:
-I think that she is more of storyteller than a writer. I'll explain. This isn't at all an insult towards Veronica Roth. I just think that there's a difference. A writer is someone who I think creates very thought-provoking work, and every sentence is well articulated. I think that a storyteller is someone who takes you on this wild and fun and exciting adventure through words (or pictures, but not in this case). Veronica Roth can definitely write. She seems to have a pretty good vocabulary, her sentences are pretty, and there are some things in her writing that did make me think and consider the possibilities. But Divergent, more than anything, is a fast paced, kickass story with cool characters in a cool world and a cool concept. What I'm trying to say is that her writing is not a work of genius. It's not a very deep series. There are messages in the books, but it's kind of lost with the whole awesome-heroine-trying-to-stay-alive thing. It's pretty fun to read, though, and they make for cool movies.
-Oh, the plot holes. You can find plot holes in almost any work of writing. Without them, most stories would have no climaxes or satisfying resolutions, and writers would have immense writer's block. But the plot holes in this series are a bit lavish. Now, I didn't really notice them when I first read the series. I whipped through the series in under 3 weeks. During the time I was reading, I wasn't thinking very much. I never stopped to think "Hmm . . . that isn't like Tris's character . . ." or "What? That makes no sense!" But as soon as I was finished and I started speculating the books, I realized some things. I don't want to say much, but Allegiant is just kind of one big plot hole.
-No love triangles! A little refreshing in YA.

Overall, her writing is exciting, but don't speculate it while you're reading it if you want to enjoy the series. If you want to write an intelligent review, speculate all you want.

A-Z Marathon! Insurgent by Veronica Roth

You see, nothing that I read starts with I.
I kid you not, no authors that I have read (that I remember) have names that start with I, nothing of their characters have names that start with I, and no books except for this one book starts with I.
Well, I suppose The Invention of Hugo Cabret counts, now that I'm looking at my bookshelf . . .
Still. Not much of an option.
Everyone just start naming your kids Isa and Ivy and Ivan and any other names that start with I. Please.

I already did a book talk for Insurgent and you can see it here: http://bookahooligans.blogspot.com/2014/05/dystopiathon-insurgent-by-veronica-roth.html

Anyway, we're just going to look at pictures. But there are certain pictures that I want to show--the fan made covers/movie posters. I don't know what it is about the Divergent fandom, but they are all awesome artists and they can do some pretty cool stuff with photoshop.
I mean, the covers are so good that some of these, especially the fan made Allegiant covers, are probably good enough to actually be the actual book cover. *Also, I think that one or two of the, are just less popular editions of the book.

These two covers are the actual covers.

Dystopiathon: Insurgent by Veronica Roth

**To view spoilers, drag your mouse over the empty space between"<SPOILER>...<SPOILER>"

Insurgent was . . . was . . .
Okay. If you haven't seen it yet, I did a book review of the first book in this trilogy called Divergent. You can view it here: http://bookahooligans.blogspot.com/2014/05/dystopiathon-divergent-by-veronica-roth.html

If you haven't read Divergent or Insurgent, then bye!!!

<SPOILERS>
I liked this book. I feel like it was a decent sequel. There were some problems I had with the plot, and I felt like Tris was acting way too selfless. However, it was pretty fast paced. The author started the book right where we left off, which was fine with me because I started the Divergent trilogy about a month before the movie came out.
I absolutely loved the part where Tris and Four were being interrogated by the Candor. Some part of that just was really interesting to me, and I my heart was racing and I couldn't put the book down.
When they were living in Amity, that was also really interesting because we never really learned much about the Amity.
But when Tris came into Tobias's room in the middle of the night and she "realized she wasn't wearing any pants," I was just like  - _ - Really?
But I thought that the rest of the book was pretty fast paced and interesting, again, I didn't agree with some of the plot or the thinking in the book, but I feel like it was nicely done.
The parts of the plot I didn't like was the plot twist when it turned out that Caleb was plotting against Tris. That wasn't really well explained and it seemed a little bit out of character for Caleb. Also, Tris just seemed completely out of character. I feel like she was thinking "well, I've been in abnegation all of my life and haven't really done anything there, and my parents died, and my brother is a traitor and I don't really have much to live for . . . so I might as well die heroically."
I could tell that it was nicely done because I wasn't paying attention to the page numbers, which I do a lot whenever a book is boring me, so I was really entertained and enjoyed my reading experience.
<SPOILER>