Why Veronica Roth is Dauntless

    

                                           Goodreads

Its been almost three weeks since I've been home and I have steadily been reading through my boredom as best as I can.  One of the books I decided to catch up on was Veronica Roth's, Allegiant.  Now I'm not going to do a traditional review because let's face it there are plenty of amazing reviews already out there.  Rather I am going to talk about why this series has shown Veronica Roth is a dauntless writer.  This being said, there are going to be major spoilers on this page so if you haven't read any of her books and plan on doing so turn away now.

I repeat get off this page now!

Okay now that you've been sufficiently warned I'm going to continue onward by saying that Veronica Roth is a bad ass writer.  Her series is well written and her characters and relationships are about as realistic as it gets.  

The first reason I wanted to post this was after finishing Allegiant I was completely stunned.  She killed off her heroine.  Like bang dead!  Authors find it difficult to kill off characters to begin with, let alone kill of the one person that they have placed at the forefront of their story (unless, of course, you are George R.R. Martin).  However hard it was to kill of Tris, though, I commend Roth on her ability to finish her character's journey.  She completed the character development of Tris fully and thus created on of the most whole and realistic characters I have read.  Sure Roth may have been able to get around killing off Tris but would that have made her character truly whole?  Maybe, maybe not, but I think that in the end Roth did the right thing even though it was truly heartbreaking to read the last few chapters of the book. 

It is strange when a character that you liked so much dies.  You say to yourself 'no this won't happen.  Someone will save them' and then they die.  It was a little like the way I felt when Ned Stark dies in Game of Thrones (wow there are spoilers all over this post, sorry).  I felt like it wasn't happening and by some miracle someone would save him and everything would be okay.  Instead it made for a more realistic story line because in real life odds are they would die.  I don't like to say that life doesn't have happy endings because great things happen every day but I will say that sometimes things happen for reasons we don't know.  To have a book end the way the Roth ended Allegiant makes it more realistic.  Tris had to die. 

The second reason that Veronica Roth is a beast of a writer is her ability to create realistically imperfect relationships.  I feel like too often books are filled with perfect relationships that always work out when in reality relationships aren't like this.  Tris and Tobias' relationship is filled with flaws.  They lie to each other, they feel betrayed sometimes, they bring huge amounts of baggage that only people who live in a post apocalyptic society could ever imagine, but they make it work.  I love the way that this allows people to connect to characters simply because they can empathize with the relationship on the page.  

The final reason that Veronica Roth is a great writer is that she make statements about life and society.  I believe that every good book makes a statement about something.  I think one of the statements she makes over the course of her series is that people should be judged on their personality and not the groups society places them in.  While it may seem as though she is criticizing the factions I think that she does a good job of highlighting the good in each faction.  She equalizes both the good and bad by having both good and bad characters represent each faction showing that individuality is what makes a person not a label.  

It is obvious that I enjoyed reading and watching the characters evolve as the stories went on and while the last book felt somewhat hard to get through I have immense respect for Roth's ability to create a realistic story.  I look forward to seeing what else she creates in the future.