Four: A Divergent Collection by Veronica Roth

TL;DR short stories from the Divergent universe written from Four's point of view

(finished 1/8/15)

So! This is my first real attempt at making an individual book review instead of doing a monthly post of reviews. We'll see how this goes!

This is going to have spoilers from the Divergent series up through Allegiant. 

I actually really like the concept of short stories / novellas from series that are told in different perspectives or that cover something that didn't happen within the series itself, so I liked the stories about Tobias' choosing day and his initiation. They'd only been mentioned in the series itself, and it did help to build up Tobias' character.

However, one of the huge problems I had with Allegiant was that Tris and Four had identical narrations, which made it really difficult for me to differentiate between their chapters. The same thing is true with Four--at one point I actually forgot I was reading about Four and got really confused when Tris was mentioned instead of being the one narrating. The narration itself feels a little awkward, too, since it's in first person present, and I'm pretty sure I had that issue with Divergent as well.

I also didn't really see the point in having Four narrate scenes that had already been covered by Tris, since I didn't feel like he added much to what had already been established.

I think if Four had been entirely new scenes about Four himself, then I probably would've really liked it. I really enjoyed the worldbuilding of the changes in Dauntless since his arrival. It just seemed like the stories with Tris didn't add anything new, so they felt kind of redundant.