The beginning of winter quarter is upon us, and the beautiful thing about the first weeks of the quarter is that we tend to have slightly more free time. But what are we to do with it?
When I have a day off, I know I can’t wait to just crash on my bed and lay there for an hour or two. But once I have gotten that out of my system, sometimes I tend to blank on what I should do next.
We all like hanging out with our friends and maybe even catching up on the new winter television shows, but something that tends not to cross people’s minds is reading for pleasure.
I am a strong advocate of reading. I think a lot of people fall out of touch with reading for fun simply because they do not know what to read.
So I am here to share one of my favorite series: The Divergent Trilogy by Veronica Roth.
Let me tell you a little bit about Roth’s trilogy. The series revolves around a girl named Beatrice Prior. Set in the future in dystopic Chicago, the books tell of a world where people are divided into factions. These factions were formed in honor of the virtues that this society’s people felt their ancestors lacked. There are five total factions: Erudite (the intelligent), Candor (the honest), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Abnegation (the selfless). On a designated day each year, all sixteen year-olds must select the faction they will be a part of for the rest of their lives, whether or not it lines up with their family’s choices or the results of a necessary aptitude test.
Beatrice eventually chooses Dauntless as her faction. Rechristened as Tris when she reaches Dauntless’ grounds, she is a beautifully realistic character who embodies a great many of our own struggles. For example, she deals with self-confidence issues after choosing her faction and leaving the only life she has ever known behind. But she is truly fearless nonetheless, as she keeps her head held high and her morals straight, sticking up for her friends and even butting heads with her initiate trainer, Four. Tris is not a reduced character who is just stereotypically “strong,” but is rather a multi-faceted one who rightly expresses that one does not have to be strong all the time and that is okay.
This story also includes romance, but I won’t give too much away! I’ll just say that for me, it was refreshing to read about a Young Adult protagonist who grows stronger due to her romance and does not grow unbearably dependant as soon as a love interest reciprocates her feelings. She continues to be a dynamic, intelligent powerhouse who, over the course of the series, comes to understand the painful truths of humanity and her personal short-comings.
Tris teaches girls that only we determine our own self-worth and that we have control over our path and how we choose to walk it.
Her story is also complete, so make sure to catch up because the movie is coming out March 21, 2014!