A new Divergent book, ten years later: Can Roth capture the magic again?

Perhaps it should surprise us, after the book and movie success of the Hunger Game Prequels, that a new offering of arguably the second most popular YA dystopian series of that era, Divergent, would also get into the new-books-a-decade-after-its-heyday game. Thought the bulk of my blogging and published work has been on Harry Potter and Cormoran Strike, my first efforts at YA blogging and my first published book chapter were actually about The Hunger Games,  Back in my Hogwartsprofessor days, I became the resident Divergent expert/junkie/fangirl. Like a lot of folks, I really enjoyed Divergent and Insurgent, then was quite disappointed in Allegiant, more because of the less-coherent science behind the fiction than the controversial ending.  And the less said about the way Lionsgate overplayed its hand, tried and failed to squeeze four films from the trilogy, the better. 

While Roth expanded her Divergent-verse in some follow-up short stories (compiled in Four and We Can Be Mended) The Sixth Faction is being billed as something quite different:  an "alternate version" of the story where Beatrice chooses a different faction. 

While I have read some of Roth's post-divergent fiction, nothing has ever grabbed me the way the original series did. What I truly loved was the way Roth used psychological and neurological concepts like the Big Five personality factors (see here and here) and mirror neurons in shaping her dystopian world; much of what made Allegiant fall short was her inability to do the same with genetics. Taking the protagonists out of her well-developed Faction-divided Chicago also made the story hand together less well.

For these reasons, I am quite excited that Roth is taking us back to Tris's choosing ceremony, and embarking on a great "what-if" story. The Sixth Faction is the first of two books planned in this alternate universe, the second to be titled The Last Testimony. Given the misstep of Allegiant, that sounds like a good plan. 

I will absolutely be blogging about The Sixth Faction once it is published, and I eagerly await my copy's arrival on October 6th. I have also taken this opportunity to reprint most of my old Divergent writings from Hogwartsprofessor.com on my Farting Sofa Archives site; they can be accessed here.  In addition to my posts on personality and mirror neurons, linked above, I also recommend this post about personality research inspired by the series.  Finally, I hope to find time to write a few more posts about the original series, topics I meant to address back in the day, but which I never got around to. 

Be Brave!