Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I've been struggling to put into words why I so violently disliked Allegiant after so eagerly anticipating it for months. It's hard to narrow down a list of all of the things that I hated about it, but these are the things that stood out: SPOILERS 1) Derivative plot. It was basically "The Village" with better technology. That's not to say that there wasn't the potential for a good book in there. Just that the execution was so ham-handed that it brought the derivative nature of the plot into much sharper focus. 2) Completely inconsistent characterization. I mean, night and day differences from Divergent to Allegiant. In many cases, it was hard to believe that Roth was even writing about the same characters. This was somewhat of an issue from Divergent to Insurgent, but the better plot and pacing helped to gloss over those issues a bit. There is no such distraction in Allegiant. Many of the significant plot points happened because of a character behaving in ways that were completely out of character. That made the fallout of those decisions feel like manipulations, not an earned reaction. I didn't believe what she was having them do, so what followed was completely unrealistic to me. 3) My feeling that as the plot points (and deaths) added up, that they were not contributing to a greater whole. Look, I have no problem with entertainment that has a high body count. Games of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Justified, The Sopranos, Deadwood, the Wire, Oz, Homicide-I love them all. But the difference between those series and Allegiant is that the deaths in those stories served a purpose. They moved the plot along, they were used for the development of other characters, SOMETHING. The reactions they caused felt earned, not something to jerk your chain just because the showrunner felt like messing with you. There was no point to the deaths in Allegiant. Beloved characters dropped like flies for seemingly no reason at all. Horrible characters emerged without a scratch. And pointlessly horrible things happened. E.g. Tori dying right before the others discover the compound where her brother is still alive. The big event, which was IMO pointless and completely avoidable. Roth's choices seemed to just be for shock value, rather than to add anything to the story. I don't like stories that are so obvious about trying to be a tearjerker. 4) The whole thing felt like a rush job. I would really like to see what could have happened if Roth had been given a longer timeline to work in and a better team of editors. Whoever edited this mess should be fired and blackballed from the industry. Throughout the book, I kept thinking of ways that the story could have been told better. There are a lot of interesting places that Allegiant could have gone and a lot of cool things it could have done. But Roth chose to do none of them. I can't recommend Allegiant to anyone. Not for fans of the series, not for anyone who is at all attached to the characters, and certainly not for teenagers. It is truly horrible and I would not suggest that anyone spend their time or money on it. I took the bullet of reading it for all of us, and my conclusion is that I would be happier pretending that this half-baked mess never happened. I reject Allegiant's very existence. As far as I'm concerned, the series ended with Insurgent. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it, no matter how much Truth Serum you give me.