I think the author just thought Dauntless was so COOL! and BADASS! and her excitement over the whole wearing dark clothes! and leaping off moving trains! and getting tattoos! irritated me. I don't know, I don't remember much about the story now because I read it so fast and disliked it so much that my brain can only dredge up random pieces of information about the story. I do remember one character being so EVIL! that it took me entirely out of the story. Write in a villain, by all means, but give them some kind of humanity/sympathy/motivation beyond mustache-twirling, please. I actually feel that is especially important in YA fiction. The YA phase of one's life is the time when you learn about life not being black and white, so YA books that present the world that way drive me mad.

The world of Divergent made no sense to me, which was a major block for me. (And Tris was annoying, and Four was such blatant teengirlnip that I was quickly bored by him. He's the typical Bad Boy With A Heart Of Gold that we've seen soooooo many times before. Never any suspense there as to a) where he came from and b) whether he'd fall in love with Tris or not.)

But I shouldn't be too critical because writing is hard. I am trying to write a YA dystopian novel just as a response to this, and The Hunger Games, because I've pinpointed mostly what I am not seeing and what I want to see, so rather than just ragging on existing works, I figured I should write what I want to read. But it turns out world-building is super hard, so maybe I should cut Veronica Roth some slack. (Maybe not. She can go cry into her giant stack of money and just not read her Amazon.com reviews at all.)