The Sixth Faction, Part 1: "Stiff" (CH 1-8)

Note:  This post includes spoilers only for the first part of The Sixth Faction:  "Stiff" or Chapters 1-8.  Please do no spoil any later part of the book in the comments. 

My hardcover arrived today and I just enjoyed a reading of the first part, "Stiff," comprising Chapters 1-8.  While my entire being is telling me to proceed to the next part, I thought it better to record my thoughts now. 

This wasn't exactly what I had expected.  I was expecting the exact same Divergent world I fell in love with back in 2012 or so, with the only changes being the "tragedy" at Tris's Choosing Ceremony, which leads to her making a different Faction.

Instead, there are multiple changes from the original series, starting from the initial haircut scene, where Beatrice asks to take the scissors from her mother and trim her locks herself. This version of Abnegation apparently considers private home occupancy excessively selfish, resulting in the Priors sharing with Robert and Susan Black's family. 

Goblet of Fire-Running Grave Links, Part 3. Arrivals and early days at Chapman Farm and Hogwarts.

As Ed Shardlow pointed out a few posts ago, Chapman Farm has quite a few parallels with Hogwarts, so it should not surprise us that more GoF-TRG connections spring up once Harry and Robin reach their destinations.  Of course, many of the similarities could be said to link to any of the Harry Potter books, except, ironically, Deathly Hallows (the book most similar to TRG, see here also) in which our Trio does not return to Hogwarts.  Still, I think we can make some reasonably specific connections to GoF. Here, I am going to compare the book sections that start with arrival (Chapter 22 in TRG; Chapter 11 "Aboard the Hogwarts Express" in GoF) and ending with Robin joining the UHC (Chapter 35) and with Harry's name coming out of the Goblet of Fire (Chapter 16: "The Goblet of Fire.") 

Goblet of Fire-Running Grave links, Part 2. Slim pickings at the World Cup and at Rupert Court.

It appears we have another piece of evidence against the "Louise can find connections between anything" hypothesis because I am hard-pressed to see much similarity between Chapters 4-10 of Goblet of Fire and Chapters 4-22 of The Running Grave, other than that a lot of stuff happens before Harry travels to Hogwarts, and a lot of stuff happens before Robin travels to Chapman Farm. 

Confessions of a Past and Present Erudite: Revisiting a 2015 book chapter in light of The Sixth's Faction's impending publication.

    The following is the introductory chapter of what I had hoped, in 2015, would become an entire book on the psychology and behavioral neuroscience underlying Veronica Roth's Divergent series.  Three factors converged, resulting in that project never getting off the ground. 

1. First, the Allegiant book disappointed a lot of readers; personally, I liked the ending, but hated the genetics after being so enthralled with the psychology and neuroscience of Divergent and Insurgent. 
2. Second, the movie-makers clearly overplayed their hand thinking they could squeeze four books out of the series and deviated so far from the source material that the third installment, Allegiant, was barely recognizable as Roth's book, and was a box-office flop. The result was that the fourth installment, Ascendant, was never made. The fizzling out of the movie franchise would make if much harder to market any sort of scholarly book on the series and made it less likely that Divergent would join the Harry Potter and The Hunger Games as topics of study in universities.  
3. Third, I became enraptured by "Robert Galbraith's" detective series, Cormoran Strike, and began focusing most of my blogging and analysis on that.  A quick look at this blog will show about 99% of my writing is on that series. 

    Still, if Suzanne Collins and Veronica Roth can go back and revisit stuff they wrote in the mid twenty-teens, so can I. The impending publication of The Sixth Faction, an alternative-universe retelling of the story in which Tris chooses a different Faction, has Divergent-fangirls and made me interested in at least sharing the first chapter of my aborted book.  Who knows, The Sixth Faction may be so brilliant it ignites an entire new generation of Factioneers, and the book could be marketable again. 

    A lot has changed in the 11 years since I wrote this, for both me and Veronica Roth. She is no longer a straight-out-of-college first-time writer, but a seasoned author with many other volumes published. My own career diversified in ways I never thought possible in 2015. I took early retirement from my professorship in 2023 and now run my own behavior analysis business. And the teenager with whom I read dystopias recently had a child of her own. The numerical footnotes below are original to the piece; I have added some new notes in red print and with asterisks. 

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

Perhaps it should not 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. 

Goblet of Fire-The Running Grave Links, Part 1: A look at perspective and content in the first three chapters.

As I go through this somewhat strange exercise of testing the Double Wedding Band model with a look at potential connections of the seven Harry Potter books with the last seven Strike books. one thing that is becoming clear to me is that some of the clearest thematic connections turn up in the openings of the books. See here, here and here for examples. In a way, this makes sense, given that some of the most obvious examples of chiastic structure in the Harry Potter series show up in the opening Dursley segments. See the illustration from my chapter on humor in Harry Potter from Harry Potter, the Ivory Tower and Beyond for examples. 

Happily, as I started my look at The Goblet of Fire and The Running Grave, I saw that this pairing is no exception.  The most notable similarity is that both books start with a somewhat unusual point of view, one of someone other than the protagonists. Goblet of Fire sets up the main storyline by providing first a newsreel-like history of the Riddle family murder in Little Hangleton, followed by the suspicion cast on Frank Bryce and his subsequent discovery of Wormtail and Voldemort hiding out in the old Riddle house.  Interestingly, though the end of the scene cuts into Harry Potter's scar-tingling nightmare that he presumably sees through the mental link with the Dark Lord, the narrative presented to the readers is from the perspective of Frank Bryce, including events and thoughts of which Voldemort was unaware. Chapters from the perspective of someone other than Harry are very rare in the Potter series, occurring only in the first chapters of books 1, 4 and 7 and in the first two chapters of book 6. 

The Strike series is also usually from the perspective of one of the lead detectives, although other perspectives are more common than in Harry Potter. For example, Book 3 has multiple chapters from the killer's perspective, while Book 6 shows many online chats among the moderators of Drek's Game. The Running Grave opens with a Prologue setting up the detectives' major case, delivered through a series of letters between Colin and Sally Edensor, their son Will, eventual murder victim Kevin Pirbright and Edensor's lawyer, along with some interview excerpts with church principals Noli Seymour and Giles Harmon. 

Both of these opening, alternate-perspective segments end with a relatively abrupt death. Frank Bryce, like the Riddles of fifty years prior, is Avada Kedavra'ed by Voldemort, and therefore "is dead before he reached the floor." Sally Edensor succumbs fairly quickly to her brain tumor, even though "the doctors thought she had longer." Although neither of these deaths is the major murder our heroes will eventually solve in these books, the story of both deaths is used to set up the major storyline. 

Prisoner of Azkaban-Ink Black Heart links, Part 2: Howlers, bombs and not falling over on purpose.

As I expected, once we got past the book introduction, there weren't as many clear connections between PoA and TIBH.  Notice, then that I was able to complete the blog series in only two parts, as opposed to the six I needed for PS-LW and the four for CoS-TB. 

The closest character parallel I saw was between Strike and Hermione. Strike  foolishly keeps pushing the limits of his bad knee and hamstring until he collapses and has to get treatment in the hospital for not just the stump itself but the stress-induced muscle spasms in both his leg and face. Hermione, by trying to take every subject Hogwarts offers, drives herself to the breaking point, culminating at the DADA final exam when she falls apart and fails to recognize the boggart, much less defeat it. By book's end, Strike has finally resolved to address the issues and take some steps to improve his health by losing weight and stopping smoking. Hermione decides to turn in the Time-Turner, drop Muggle Studies and Divination and take a normal schedule.