Allegiant

I got about halfway through.
I didn't actually finish this book.
I don't actually want to finish this series.
I don't want to face that utter disappointment you feel when a series with such strong potential withers and dies in front of you and there's nothing you can do to stop it.
There are far better written things out there worth my time and my curiosity alone is not enough to hold my attention.
I read a few heavy reviews and a summary of the plot, spoilers and all, to see how it ended. I'm not surprised, but I had hoped the writer had more.... I can't think of the word. Just, more.

The themes I had hoped would be prominent in this series are not the themes the author chose to focus on. Too much individual sacrifice and not enough teamwork. I had hoped this would be a journey culminating in a celebration of life and humanity in all its strengths and weaknesses. Ending in a sort of uniting of the factions in people's hearts and minds, you know actually “building better worlds” and all that...
I wrote a short story when I was in high school that culminated in such a sacrifice, remembering that mindset I can understand why YA readers would like these books... I just don't agree that the direction the series took after the first book was necessarily the best possible choice.

John Cleese has a really good talk on Creativity that you can find on youtube and such places everywhere. It's brilliant. In one iteration of this lecture he said that Graham Chapman (a fellow python) was always far funnier than him, but his one fault was that he never took his ideas far enough. He always stopped at the point where something worked well. Which is ok, but John Cleese would work an idea until it was really good, and then work on it more, until it was incredible. That's why he was always the better creator. (Forgive my paraphrasing) I wish more creative people were taught to work that way. This and many other disappointing series may have been brilliant as a result.

In the end, it is what it is. It's not a bad story, it's just not a great story.
The author is young, she's got plenty of years and many more stories to write, some of which I'm sure will indeed be great.


P.S. beacause I'm a huge nerd and “Building Better Worlds” is the Weyland-Yutani Corp slogan, this as a hilarious and ridiculous tie in to the Alien/Prometheus/Predator worlds is pretty funny.