Divergent, a la Shmoop.
Beatrice Prior here, and I’m from Chicago.
No, not that Chicago. THIS Chicago.
Yeah, I live in the future. Wicked, right? So… stuff has changed since back in the day.
Now the city is divided into five groups – Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Dauntless and Erudite.
The members of each group are charged with
upholding a different virtue.
I was born into Abnegation, which is sworn to protect… selflessness.
Which isn’t easy, I’ll be honest – I kinda like myself. One day each year, every 16-year-old in the
land gets together and takes a test that determines which group they’re going to wind up in.
Very Harry Potter-Sorting Hat-type stuff.
Wouldn’t be surprised if Dumbledore popped
out from behind a curtain. We get to either stick with the fam, or branch
off in a new direction.
Unfortunately for me, I didn’t fit neatly into just one category.
Nah… my results put me somewhere in Abnegation/Erudite/Dauntless territory. But because it was inconclusive…
I was labeled “divergent.”
You’d think it would be a great thing to be a jack of all trades, but… not around
here. I’m not even supposed to tell anyone I’m divergent. Honestly, I’d rather have
been diagnosed with the measles. On Choosing Day, I threw everyone for a loop
and joined forces with Dauntless, the group that was all about bravery.
My brother Caleb went with Erudite. Nerd.
A new faction deserves a new name, so I christened myself “Tris.” It’s a cool name in the
future, just trust me.
I met some chill peeps in the new digs – namely, Christina, Al and Will.
And, of course, my story wouldn’t be complete without a few jerks to keep things interesting.
This guy Peter and a couple of his friends were on my case the whole time, always telling
me I didn’t belong. Ah, well, no biggie. Just need to get a hold of a voodoo doll,
that’s all. And then…school was in session. We were
taught by someone named “Four.” Yeah… “Tris” isn’t sounding so weird anymore,
is it?
We were told we had to pass an initiation. If we didn’t, we’d get kicked out and
would have no faction. So… no pressure. The name of the game was bravery, and there
was to be no backing down.
We had to fight each other with guns and knives. Did I mention that play time was over?
But elsewhere, trouble was stirring. The gang over in Erudite were… rousing some rabble…
They had started making some pretty serious accusations about a couple of the folks from
Abnegation…
…including someone in the government, whom they accused of abusing his son…
…and…my own parents. The reports suggested that my brother and I were raised poorly,
because we both abandoned our original faction.
On the upside…at least they avoided any nasty physical abuse charges…
So while all that was going on, we moved into
simulations, where we had to face various fears.
Please don’t let it be spiders, please don’t let it be spiders…
I pretty much owned the simulations… in part thanks to the whole Divergent thing,
which gives me some mad skills.
Of course, there will always be haters. Peter, Al and this guy Drew attacked and tried to
dispose of me, but Four came to my rescue.
Al felt bad about it after the fact, but…I sure wasn’t about to forgive that two-timer.
Apparently he took that a bit hard, because he killed himself by leaping into a chasm.
Which majorly bummed me out. Our final phase of the initiation was the
fear landscape. Sounds like a painter’s worst nightmare.
Here we got to face a combination of all our greatest fears.
Because I was in tight with Four by now, he actually gave me a leg up by letting me into
HIS fear landscape.
I also found out that his real name was Tobias… and that he was the son of that Abnegation
leader who’d been accused of abusing his…son. Ah… all the pieces were coming together…
There were seven fears in my fear landscape, including drowning, being on fire, being eaten
alive by crows… you know, the usual.
Wouldn’t you know it, when all was said and done, I was ranked first!
That’s the good news… the bad news is that, right after the test, Erudite had each
of us injected with a serum that would make us attack Abnegation.
But let’s focus on what’s important… FIRST, people!
This serum was intended to turn us all into mindless zombies… but fortunately, it doesn’t
work on us Divergent folk. i.e. me and Tobias.
We tried to make our getaway, but those Erudite guys are TOUGH. For nerds.
They captured us, injected Tobias with a new serum that would override his Divergence…
…and sentenced me to death. Man, I ALWAYS get the short end of the stick.
But just when things were looking their bleakest… my mommy saved the day!
Guess I got the Divergent thing from her, because she was one, too! Her own mad skills
allowed her to rescue me from my glass cage, and we made a break for it.
But… seems like my good news always comes with a dose of crappy.
While making our escape, my mom was shot and killed. No time to shed tears though…
I tracked down my dad, my brother, and Tobias’ dad, and the four of us made tracks back to
Dauntless, to see if we could put a stop to this thing.
Ready for more crappy? My dad was killed, too. Now I’m a Divergent orphan, which is
like THE WORST.
Anyway, we found Tobias, who was under the spell of that new serum, and he tried to end
me. But he shook himself awake at the last second, and I was spared.
Together, we were able to stop Operation Kill Everyone, ridding my fellow Dauntless peeps
from their mind control.
Then a bunch of us hopped a train out of town, to see if we could find any other survivors.
Don’t you just love a happy ending?