Allegiant, the finale of the Divergent series debuted this week and it is certainly action-packed. Did it live up to the hype and expectation? Read our review – but beware, spoilers aplenty!

Once you finished the book, perhaps you feel like zip-lining down a skyscraper or staring at symbolic water-dripping sculptures. Allegiant is exhausting both for the reader, trying to remember plot points and who is good and who is bad, and the characters, as they are certainly put through the ringer, through an initiation of epic proportions that requires the skills of all factions.

Let’s start this review there. The factions. After everything we’ve read from Divergent and Insurgent, we come to learn the factions mean, essentially, nothing. They were just a way to divide the population and control them the way they thought was best – with honesty, or bravery, or selflessness. This realization pulls the rug out from under Tris, and particularly Tobias, who learns he was never really Divergent, just expressed a few false-positive indicators. This ignites his search for his identity, away from the factions, away from his parents.

We wonder what it’s like to go from only knowing a few square miles your entire life, not knowing the shape of the continent, or the enormous size of the world and other planets, solar systems. Caleb, thanks to his natural Erudite-ness, does find a wealth of information about these topics in a library within the Bureau compound. The feeling of being small is a theme throughout the story, from the zip-line to riding in the airplane, it’s a reminder of our own mortality and how we commonly forget about the bigger picture. The blindfold has been ripped off this group, and they’re scared as a result.

Ultimately, Tris’ death will probably be the deciding factor for readers whether or not they liked the book. Or, it’ll be a “ I liked it, but…” situation. There certainly were enough plot points packed into this book that not everyone will like them all. However, people who are frustrated at or feel betrayed by author Veronica Roth for killing Tris for whatever reason – Tris and Tobias belong together, she should’ve lived based on sheer principal that you don’t kill your protagonist, etc., arguably miss the point of the series: this is not a story with a happy ending, this is a dystopian where people who should live, die.

The truth, revealed

The Bureau of Genetic Welfare – the group who created the factions and the experiments and the difference between genetically damaged and pure. It is headquartered in what used to be O’Hare International Airport, and for anyone familiar which the Chicago area, knows the complex really isn’t that far away from the center of the city where Tris and her friends originate from, which really hammers home the point that they were so confined to their city, they didn’t know an entirely different world was just a short thirty minute drive away.

Allegiant finally allowed us to put this futuristic Chicago into a more contextual relationship to today. We know it is a few centuries in the future, and before the various metropolitan ‘experiments’ were formed, the United States was largely destroyed by the Purity War – between those whose genes have been modified to eliminate a characteristic which resulted in unintended consequences. If nothing else, this is a warning to scientists today: don’t go meddling around in our genetic code. Either a Purity War will break out or we will become the Hulk or Captain America.

After the Purity War, an attempt to eradicate the wrongdoings to our DNA were created. The experiments began all over major mid-west metropolitan areas, and we learn only a few experiments still stand and Chicago happens to be the strongest. Which is saying something, considering they are on the brink of another civil war.

Express yourself

Another prominent theme, like we said, was discovering your identity and, in some cases, creating it. While this is not new, the Divergent series has always largely been about finding who you really are, it is presented in more subtle ways in Allegiant. Whether it be choosing to align with the rebellion, or rebranding yourself as a man with only four fears, instead of a boy scared of his father, your identity becomes much more important than your faction.

Tobias clung to his Divergent title as a means of being connected to Tris and distance himself from his family, but at the same time, he realizes the importance of being united in a community – why else would he have the symbols of all five factions tattooed on his back? Tris and Caleb are blood family, but Caleb’s unwise decisions redefined their relationship – Tris dies as essentially a stranger to Caleb who really only knew her as Beatrice.

The two POVs

The alternating points of view was something a lot of people approached with trepidation, and it might not have been easy to always remember who’s head we were in, but by the end, after Tris’ death, it made perfect sense. By getting to know Tobias on the first-person level allowed readers to know how much he truly cared about Tris and really understand his internal conflict when it came to helping Nita, and selecting which parent to ‘save.’

The book isn’t perfect

There were a lot of good things about this book, but there were also some frustrating things. The symbolism of what it means to be genetically pure or damaged almost erred on grating, we get it, some people think being Divergent – genetically pure, fixed after a government misstep of monumental proportions – is better than being damaged. The Bureau think the GP’s are the superior humans, but there’s also the argument of nature versus nurture. Your genes might not be healed, but you could be just as good as a GP depending on your upbringing. There is a lot of psychological themes trickled in among the warfare, explosions, fights and kissing that occur in Allegiant.

From the looks of it, Roth tried to shove way too much into one book. It wasn’t one story, it was a few stories and a even more plot threads. It jumped around from one uprising to the next – the GDs on the fringe, the Allegiant within the city – without really ever fully bringing the rebellions to fruition, until the last one.

The entire uprising with Nita and the GD’s arguably did nothing for the story put a divide between Tobias and Tris that could’ve been easily placed there by other means, especially considering how relatively easy the came back from the brink of breaking up.

There are just so many new characters and while it’s easy to see why they’re all introduced, their true intentions feel half-baked. What was David really trying to do in that room when Tris died? Matthew may have aligned himself with the ‘genetically damaged,’ being a GD-sympathizer, but his one-dimensionality until the end always led me to believe he may have had an ulterior motive.

Roth: ‘Be brave.’

The biggest motif is bravery and courage. It’s shown in big and small ways, from people believed to be both good and bad – Evelyn chose her son over power, a painful, yet brave, decision. Tris was about to let her brother die, up until the last possible second, when she sacrificed herself instead. Tobias takes responsibility for Uriah’s death, even though he could’ve gotten away with omitting his involvement in the explosion. Matthew goes behind the Bureau’s back and becomes an informant for Tris and Cara and Caleb and Nita and Tobias.

Tris’ death

She would have lived if she hadn’t been shot. She had done the impossible, resisted the death serum, but David, under the wrong assumption, and the other guards, shot her too many times and she doesn’t resist death any more. Is this symbolic of something bigger? Probably.

After the end

In the end, the epilogue shows Tobias, two and a half years later, living alone in a new part of Chicago. Things are different now, people can travel in and out of the city at their own will, those who lived inside the city never knew they were better or worse than anyone else, the Bureau of Genetic Welfare had their memories reset, now they are saddle with good intentions, to bring peace to the world they know.

Everyone is doing their part to rebuilt, and even Tobias is in an assistant within the government, with implied aspirations to gain a seat in power someday. A place where his father once was, only this time, under completely different circumstances.

Final thoughts

Allegiant was anything but boring. It was compelling and interesting, confusing, and even kind of frustrating. How did it match up to Divergent and Insurgent? Only time, and reader’s reaction, will tell.