Disclaimer: this article contains spoilers for the following books: Divergent, Allegiant and The Hunger Games. I would also like to urge that this is just my opinion, so try not to get offended if you are a fan of the books or movies. Again, this is just my opinion.

Veronica Roth, you may know her name through the book series Divergent. And for those who haven’t read Divergent, congratulations, because the series is literary garbage, as well as a Hunger Games rip off. The only difference is that The Hunger Games is about a hundred times better. You want me to prove it?

Divergent starts out with a girl on a special day of a ceremony that no one really likes, but they have to go to it anyways. She then goes to a new area and has to participate in a set of exercises that test her physical and mental strength. Sounds familiar, right? Of course it does! If I had taken out the word Divergent in that last sentence and replaced it with Hunger Games, you wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. She falls in love with a boy and sparks a rebellion/civil war. Guess what happens in both books? The literal exact same thing! If I sound a bit angry talking about Ms. Roth, it’s because I have been meaning to write about her for some time now. The Divergent films do nothing for the books either, except make them look worse.The Hunger Games films had actors who put forth effort, the Divergent films had actors with little enthusiasm. There is a scene in Divergent where Tris, the main character, has to jump off of a building, and she displays no emotion at all. The bad thing is that every single one of the actors in Divergent has that same emotion.

On top of that, by the end of the whole series, we learn that the reason there are walls is for a large social experiment to rebuild society. Ok that’s all fine and great, but then the people who control the experiment want to kill off everyone in the experiment. That’s the equivalent of saying that I just spent billions of dollars on an experiment using live human subjects, but let’s trash it because It’s useless.

Let’s jump to the third book of both series for a moment, because let’s face it, the second books of both series are mediocre at best.

Now, the third book of the Divergent series, Allegiant, is by far the number one book that pisses me off the most. It's not because of how poor the writing is, but because of the transitioning views between Tris and Four (her boyfriend/love interest). Up until now, we only saw things from Tris’s point of view, so why in the hell do we need to see things from both points of view? The differing perspectives are also unnecessary, because Roth herself released a book titled Four in which we do see things from Four’s perspective. So again, why the hell do we need to see things from two different perspectives?

Then, there is the whole end to Allegiant which can be summed up by Tris going into a chamber full of poisonous gas, when literally anyone else could have done it. Then, she dies. Don’t get me wrong, heroic sacrifices are all fine and dandy when they’re done right, but there was no reason for her to die. Her sacrifice was like three people needing to change a lightbulb, having two of them be immune to electric shock, and then having the one that isn’t immune change the light bulb. If you’re one of the readers out there with common sense, asking yourself how exactly do you get shocked to death by changing a lightbulb, congratulations you’re starting to get it.

To put the nail in the coffin on this thing, if you see the Divergent series in a bookstore or a library, go read something else, preferably something with better writing. Rick Rioden has multiple books on Greek, Roman and Egyptian mythologies with memorable characters in them. I would recommend his books to anyone, any day of the week. If by some chance I haven’t persuaded you into not reading this series yet, then go ahead and read it. But when you get to the last sentence of the last book, I want you to ask yourself something. What were the names of the characters in the books? If they were good characters, then you would be able to tell me their names like in the Harry Potter series. In the Harry Potter series, one could name off almost every single character, because we grow with them. However, since the characters in the Divergent series are blander than saltine crackers, it is safe to say that you’re not going to remember the characters by the last page.