"If you feel guilty for not having hours and hours to write every day, challenge yourself to write at least fifteen minutes a day. You can usually find time before you leave home for the day or during your lunch break. You may not win a speed award, but if you do it every day, you will finish your story."
Book Critique: Divergent
I would rank Veronica Roth’s first published novel, Divergent, up there with The Hunger Games in terms of action, world set-up, and a storyline that grows massively in scope and tension by the end of the book. Veronica achieves this by doing a few things very well.
First, when writing a book involving any sort of history or created world, you have to be careful not to dump a lot of information on the reader. Veronica creates a perfect barrier for herself so that she can’t do that: her point of view is first person, so she can’t step out to give a omniscient narrative explanation; and most importantly the main character, Beatrice, knows very little about her world. By definition, then, Beatrice constantly learns about her world, which means we do too in a natural way. Even the moment where the five factions of the city are explained, it feels natural to the scene and not an excuse to explain things. (Also, the reasoning of the five factions is perfect.)
Second, Veronica gives Beatrice three goals to reach, as her training in her faction progresses. I don’t know if Veronica did this intentionally, but I think it’s a great idea for first-time writers as they tackle the second act of a story. The middle of a story is the hardest to get through because the ocean is so big, but by giving herself goals with deadlines (one and half a weeks for the first stage, etc.) Veronica is able to move the story along and keeps things moving.
Involved in doing that is having a solid knowledge of her world. The way things work is well thought out, and because Beatrice doesn’t know anything beyond the small circle she used to be in the exploration of the city, factions, and people is exciting. This extends even to the faction Beatrice came from. Because of the life Veronica chose to give her before, even small sensations like eating a hamburger or getting to fully look at herself in a mirror have a big emotional deal.
Emotions play a big part in the story. As in The Hunger Games, this is a story of a girl thrust into a world that demands she forget the values she had in her old faction. Things like selflessness and kindness are scorned upon, but they are engrained so deeply into Beatrice that she wrestles with how to combine the two value systems. That is her struggle—how to live in a harsh world but stay kind, gentle, selfless, and caring. It’s telling that although she takes on a new name, Tris, she still thinks of herself as Beatrice.
The breadth of the story is interesting, because Veronica carries past where you would think a trilogy would go. There is an epic battle in the end and things seem to be resolved, rather than building to some conflict that will happen in another story. This is what The Hunger Games and The Floating Islands do, and I think a great choice. A lot of times a trilogy is drawn out longer than it needs to be in order to sell future books, so it was great to read a book that reached an ending—but yet you can tell still has room to grow.
For a first book, Divergent is incredibly written. I’m exciting to read future books in the trilogy and see what Veronica writes next.
Published by Katherine Tegen Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
Jacket and art design by Joel Tippie
"The characters (and thus, the readers) should learn something new every chapter. This keeps the story moving forward and doesn’t let the characters get too relaxed. It also gives each chapter a cliffhanger, which makes it really hard to put the book down."
Book Critique: The Way We Fall
It was the title and cover of The Way We Fall that caught my eye at the library. The title is a fantastic turn of phrase, very much like Kenneth Oppel’s This Dark Endeavour. I can’t quite put my finger on what is so great about it, but it’s a very intriguing phrase. It hinted at demise and great tragedy. After reading the synopsis, I added it to the check-out pile.
In an unique twist, the story is told through the journal entries of Kaelyn. She addresses the entries to a friend named Leo, who is not on the small island and we never meet. The way the backstory is explained works really well; we get glimpses here and there of what happened in their relationship and over time we come to understand the tension between them and between Kaelyn and Leo’s girlfriend, who is still on the island.
I’ve actually considered telling a story through journal entries, but being a person who journals I’m aware of the limitations of it. A journal or diary is merely a collection of thoughts and (at least in my case) rarely a coherent depiction of everything that was said or happened. Kaelyn’s entries, in contrast, include all of the conversation (with tags) and movement that happened during a day. In the end, the journal entries were like a normal book, but with occasional comments that remind the reader we are in a journal. For the most part it worked, but as a journaler and writer I know the compromises Megan had to make for the technique to tell the story.
The technique became really interesting in the middle when Kaelyn gets sick. The entries get shorter and bizarre, and it felt like you were really in her heard. In contrast the other parts felt like a normal book.
Another decision Megan made was to make Kaelyn’s brother gay. This initially sets up some tension between him and Kaelyn’s father, but it ended up having no bearing on the story. In fact, her brother spends most of the time disappearing from the house and doesn’t factor in much to Kaelyn’s journey. I dislike this for two reasons: first, I think homosexuality is wrong, and so it seems like an obvious choice to make being gay a natural thing, something as casual as a person wearing shoes. This creates a mindset for all the young readers that homosexuality is just a normal part of life—which it isn’t. Second, if you’re going to include something, it needs to have implications to the story. The brother’s character is angry about how their dad is handling things and sets off to do things himself, but that whole conflict and journey worked fine without any mention of him being gay. So why include it in the first place?
Lastly, it was interesting how the book ended. Everything goes down, down, down, and I wondered how there could be any hope in the end. It almost ends badly… but then Kaelyn realizes, “We’re on a cliff, all of us, and surviving isn’t about who’s the best or the brightest. It’s about holding on as long as we can, and trying, and failing, and trying again until we’ve inched a little closer to getting through this.”
It’s reading final points like this, and how The Hunger Games ended, that makes me want to write. Because people are desperate for hope, and all they have is “holding on as long as we can”. But there’s more. The tricky part is figuring out how to write it, of course, but there is more, and I want to tell stories about it.
Him, I mean.
Published by Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group
Jacket design by Tanya Ross-Hughes
"Put your characters in danger—and don’t let them get out of it easily. If a character is being chased and trying to get through a door, don’t let them escape and breathe a sigh of relief. Or if they do escape, there had better be something on the other side that flips it. Don’t waste of a good danger."
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If you don’t know how to use your language correctly, people won’t understand what you are trying to say.
