I was disappointed that my favorite local book store didn’t have a copy of Allegiant on Tuesday afternoon when I biked over to Full Circle to pick up the finale on the day of publication. They called later in the day to say “the afternoon truck” had brought it to Oklahoma City.

I was delighted, consequently, to purchase it the next day after work — and to spend the rest of the afternoon and evening, well past my bed time, reading Veronica Roth’s surprising conclusion to her Divergent trilogy.

In keeping with our HogPro custom of throwing up (ahem) twenty or more threads after the arrival of a much anticipated novel, let the fun begin here with you comments about your delight and/or disappointment with Allegiant. Tell us how the concluding novel met or failed to meet your expectations, what you loved, what you hated, what you wished had happened, what happened that knocked you off your tuffet.

And, then, of course, please share your thoughts after the other 19 or so threads… Feel free to talk openly about the book’s plot points and twists; if you’re reading this, it’s upon you to have read the book first or to forgo complaints about “having been spoiled.”

We are in the last months before Allegiant is published, which publication will reveal at last the secrets of the post-apocalypse Divergent psycho-drama theme park in Chicago.

Is it a mad scientist turned voyeur experiment for broadcasting a la The Truman Show? Are Tris and Tobias starring in another re-make of Special Service?

An Art Farm for human beings set up by aliens akin to King’s Under the Dome?

Or is this something like the Chicago ‘Projects,’ urban renewal and political correctness become self-perpetuating nightmare? Is Divergent something of a psychologist’s Cabrini Green?

Reading Louise Freeman’s thoughts last week about the possible revelation that Tobias’ dad is not the bad guy of the piece but a willing player in a drama has pushed my thinking in this ‘reality television’ direction, a grand re-make using psychological archetypes as shadow-makers of Plato’s Cave Allegory. That Tris’ grandmother is Amanda Ritter/Edith Prior (?), of course, doesn’t hurt this speculative thread.

I’ve posted the Manifestos of the Five Factions (with Veronica Roth dressed in her Faction-plate clothing…) after the jump to see if you think as I am beginning to that these statements were delivered to leadership by a higher authority, Ms Ritter’s idealist group?, and  that Allegiant will largely be a Morality Play or ‘Everyman’ re-telling in which all the players get to face their personal/faction narratives as aspects or fragments of the whole.

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As we await the final installment of the Divergent trilogy, I am obliged to note that there are previews of what we can expect in Allegiant that are being leaked in what I assume is a campaign to inspire discussion and interest. Who needs inspiration? Let’s take a look, though, at what we have and what we’ll be getting soon.

What we have: Divergent, Insurgent, ‘Free Four,’ and ‘The Transfer’ are canon, per se. In addition, there are the items that have been published as a 48 page booklet included in the Divergent box set (which set, of course, will look silly when the third book is out, hence the incentive ‘extra’). Many of these previews and peeks behind the curtain have been posted by the author and by fans online — see the Faction Manifestos, the Series Inspirations, etc. — and will be released as a Kindle give-away on 24 September as Path to Allegiant: The World of Divergent. Here is the Amazon description of that —

Fascinated by the world of the Divergent series? This fifty-page bonus, previously only available in the Divergent Series Box Set, includes faction manifestos, a faction quiz, Q&A with #1 New York Times bestselling author Veronica Roth, book playlists, discussion questions, series inspirations, and much more!

So what we will have, in this case, is something we already have for the most part. More on this in a second.

We also have in hand a quotation from Allegiant, chapter 7, that was posted on Entertainment Weekly last week.

“We don’t know what’s happened out there since they put us in here, or how many generations have lived and died since they did. We could be the last people left.” Chapter Seven, Tris

What We Will Have: The insert to the box set was 48 pages long and The Path to Allegiant is 50 pages. A formatting glitch? Maybe. It could also be the actual only authentic ‘extra’ that we don’t have already. The Amazon teaser for Path concludes:

It also contains ten enticing teasers from Allegiant, the final book in the Divergent series.

Three quick questions:

(1) Do you believe, as I do, that we will not be given anything substantive, anything not already apparent from the ‘wow’ finish of Insurgent, in any of these teaers and extras?

(2) In the quotation from EW, are we to assume that Chapter Seven is titled ‘Tris’ or that this is Tris speaking? There must be quite the opening action scenes or play-back for us (her?) to have only learned this much after six chapters, no?

(3) I’m guessing that there is more to be learned about Allegiant in The Transfer, especially in Tobias’ relationship with the woman who read him as a Divergent and the man in charge of his initiation (who tags him as ‘Four’) than in anything that we’re getting from the publisher. Ms Roth enjoys a good mystery, I think, and it isn’t afraid to offer hints to serious readers.

Your thoughts?

If you cannot wait for Allegiant to come out next month, Veronica Roth has published a new Divergent short story, the first in a series of four, available on Amazon Kindle for $1.99. At 30 pages in length, it’s not a per page bargain but for the Divergent-o-phile, it’s certainly worth the price of a decent comic book (okay, half that price).

My first three thoughts on reading it are after the jump. You don’t want to go there, of course, if you don’t want to know what The Transfer is about before reading it yourself.

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