Reading Response #5: Allegiant

     With this book being the third and final book of Veronica Roth's Divergent series, I decided to slow my reading pace down so that it doesn't end too quickly. I have read a good chunk of it and I am about 2/3 of the way finished now. Once again, Roth picks up right where she left off. After the war of the factions, the factionless and their leader, Evelyn, rise to power. They believe in a world without factions and Tris discovers shocking news about the world outside. Tris, Tobias, Christina, Caleb, Uriah, Tori, Peter, and Cara go out into the unknown world in order to see what it holds. Tris is very hopeful to find a peaceful place where her and Tobias may finally live without fear or danger. Unfortunately but not surprising, the gang finds an even more twisted world on the outside. Everything they have ever known turns out to be a lie and once again Tris finds herself caught in the middle of all the chaos. Together, Tris and her friends must find a way to solve their problems with complications of prejudices and racism lingering around them.
     To an extent this book reminds me of a movie I once watched called The Truman Show. In this movie, Truman, played by Jim Carrey, lives in a world that is staged around him. Initially, Truman is unaware that he is living in a constructed reality T.V. show being broadcasted 24/7 around the world. As the movie progresses, Truman becomes suspicious of his perceived reality and embarks on a quest to discover the truth about his life. I find this to be similar to Allegiant because Tris also embarks on a quest to discover the truth about her life when she finds out that her world is not what she believed it to be. Tris describes the outside world like this, "The world beyond ours is full of roads and dark buildings and collapsing power lines. There is no life in it, as far as I can see; no movement, no sound but the wind and my own footsteps. It's like the landscape is an interrupted sentence, one side dangling in the air, unfinished, and the other, a completely different subject." Even though the two worlds portrayed in Allegiant and The Truman Show are two completely different scenarios, the concept is the same. And I am excited to see how the book ends!