Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I know everyone is harping on the ending, but that isn't even the problem in this novel. I don't expect much YA novels to be Hemingway, or Rowling even, but reading Roth's monotonous and continuously stilted, short sentences for the duration of this story made me long for some artistic flare. A bit of purple prose, even. My main problem is that Roth, for having decided to alternate POVs to both Tris and Tobias, has created no discernible tonal differences between the two. Neither develop a distinct personality and that leads to a boring read. If each chapter title did not state whether it was in Tris or Tobias' view, then I would not have been able to tell who was the narrator, aside from situationally figuring it out. Both viewpoints really do read that similarly. Again, the very minimal diction (not to be confused with the bare style of The Road, an artistic masterpiece in simplicity) also leads to little passion. For all the kissing that Tobias and Tris do (a lot), there's little romance and tension. Unfortunately, this style also renders the rest of the novel, including all those action scenes, as repetitive and somewhat boring. Finally, about that ending. I give a lot of leeway to authors. They can do whatever they want, even if it devastates me, as long as it serves a purpose. In this case, I don't see how the ending served the story for the better except for "shock-value," mainly because the end is filled with too many plot holes. Plus, by the time I even reached the end, I was already bored to apathy. And just to be clear, my low-ish rating of this novel was not affected by the ending. I found the rest of the novel to be far more problematic.