Recommended to me by one of my students who said she couldn't put it down. It was very riveting, but took too long for plot to arrive. The action scenes (and there are many) are very well written, but the romance sections get a little tedious and boring. I am interested enough to have downloaded Insurgent to listen to next.

Many reviews compare Divergent favorably to Hunger Games. There are certain aspects of both stories that are similar, but Divergent is a mere shadow of the stories told in the Hunger Games trilogy.

My first complaint is my fault more than anything - Divergent is sold as a YA book and it's geared toward young women in particular, so the romantic aspects of the story are far more front-and-center than I would have preferred. The aforementioned reviews and comparisons to Hunger Games swayed me, but I definitely do not share some of the enthusiastic reviews and I would not place Divergent in the same category as its trilogy cousin.

BTW, I'm a 49-year old male, so I'm clearly not in the intended demographic. On the other hand, I really enjoyed Hunger Games, et al, in part because the world the characters inhabited was so well described (and the romance was nicely handled). Not so in Divergent - I felt many times that I wanted to understand more about how the world ended up as sketched out, but precious little was forthcoming.

Every time the protagonist, Tris, became all woozy with her love interest leaning close or touching her face sending jolts of teen electricity through her, I wanted to skip ahead. As noted, I realize I'm not the audience the author is aiming at, but the sophomoric descriptions of these encounters weren't even that interesting. I barely even got the sense that the romantic elements were driving Tris in any way besides hormones. If the story had none of these moments, it would have not only held up fine, but probably would have been improved.

The story felt as if it is missing a chapter. When the climactic moment passes, there's almost no easing Tris back into her new life - we're simply told everything's different now, with the implication being we'll have to read the next book to understand how. I would have really appreciated even a short chapter that swept things up a bit after the messy adventure ended and gave me some sense of where Tris was going next.

The narrator, Emma Galvin, does a decent job, though she tends to be rather one-note throughout. There were only a couple of times that I had the sense that she was truly into the story and inhabiting the characters. Most of the time she was a good reader, but nothing more.

Much too similar to The Hunger Games. While I fully enjoyed that trilogy, this book seemed to be so similar in plot and style that it couldn't hold my interest. Stopped listening and deleted the content after about two hours.

Written something original.

Narration was fine.

None that I picked up in the first two hours.

...it's still a fun book. I like this book enough that I plan on reading book #2. It's about a girl who comes into her own in a brutal society that challenges everyone to the extreme. There are some surprises and some predictable plot turns, but the virtual pages turned quickly.

Divergent was a well-narrated and unexpectedly good story. It felt like some weird cross between The Hunger Games, The Giver, and The Wind Singer, which are all in their turn rather good stories. But Divergent is much better paced than The Hunger Games and the narrative style is less grating, and the narrator does a decent job with the characters and their emotions. Maybe this isn't a life-changing, box-office-record-breaking story, but totally worth a listen!

Middle

Although a common theme, there are twists and turns that kept me listening.

At times, the main character annoyed me, but I still wanted to know what happened to her.

pretty boring. listened for about 2 hours - sounded way too much like hunger games except more boring.

There are plenty of reviews to give you the gist of the plot - but I had to put it out there that my 12 year old daughter, who resists reading at every turn, fell in love with this book as well as its sequel. She loved the characters, the way they were developed and interacted and really grew to care for them. My 15 year old son disdains some similarities to Hunger Games, but I believe the story and characters are different enough to set them apart. It was a fun read and my daughter and I both look forward to book three!

After seeing Hunger Games, I have no interest in reading that series. Divergent, however grabbed me and won't let go!!

The premis on which this seems built reflects the way we, as mankind, must choose to live our lives. In essence, we choose between "factions" on a daily and sometimes, even hourly basis. We constantly use our own personality traits (both weak and strong). The author gives us streaming access to Tris's thought process and I found myself comparing it to my own! So Divergent became a psychologically charged adventure with characters that could age nicely both in print...and on the screen.

Sure, I'm far from being a "young adult" but, who gives a rip!!! Thanks to Veronica Roth, my hunger for a terrific series is being fed!!

Entertaining and an interesting thought experiment. Not quite as well done as The Hunger Games, but still worth it.