I have a good feeling about this book!

Here’s the opening.

THERE IS ONE mirror in my house. It is behind a sliding panel in the hallway upstairs. Our faction allows me to stand in front of it on the second day of every third month, the day my mother cuts my hair.

WORLDBUILDING.

When I first heard about this, I was picturing something like a bunch of kid’s cliques, where everyone’s all IT IS SUPER SERIOUS BUSINESS WHICH HAT YOU WEAR!!!! but here we see her faction is hardcore about being different.

(Unless faction determines which day you’re allowed to have a mirror. But even then it’s already a really different world than ours.)

The main character says her mom is just focused on her hair and how she’s better because of that, and goes on to talk about sneaking a look at her appearance, which seems to be banned because of vanity. Other banned things include birthdays, and she says that yeah, everybody else gets them, so this is the Puritan faction.

But today is a day that even the joyless buzzkills recognize: aptitude test day, when I understand she’ll turn out to qualify for two different factions and everyone’s head will explode. (That or she’ll qualify for one and then turn out to be a great fit for another one. Something like that.) Oddly, she says that the aptitude test is followed by being allowed to choose a faction, so I’m not sure how this is going to work out. I mean, why make it a choice if everyone’s supposed to only fit one?

I think my mother could be beautiful, in a different world. Her body is thin beneath the gray robe. She has high cheekbones and long eyelashes, and when she lets her hair down at night, it hangs in waves over her shoulders. But she must hide that beauty in Abnegation.

So definitely the joyless Puritans then.

Our narrator goes on to say that she feels guilty about wanting to leave Joyless Puritan Faction. That both sucks and makes total sense!

She rides the bus to school with her brother.

The bus stinks of exhaust. Every time it hits a patch of uneven pavement, it jostles me from side to side, even though I’m gripping the seat to keep myself still.

And there’s the first hint of our dystopia. Crappy buses on crappier roads. She goes on to talk about how her brother’s so much better than her because he instantly hops up so someone from Candor faction, who are apparently the grouch faction, can sit down. So the buses are also overcrowded.

Also, although her brother’s attractive… If he wasn’t Abnegation, I’m sure the girls at school would stare at him and I don’t think just wearing boring clothes is enough to prevent that, so maybe the other factions all respect Joyless Puritan’s hate for being seen as attractive and make sure to avoid them.

The building that was once called the Sears Tower—we call it the Hub—emerges from the fog

So we’re in Chicago. FUTURE Chicago.

There are also trains but she says they’re Dauntless-only, because I guess everyone took factionism so seriously that when one person said, “I call bravery!” everyone else sighed and said, “Well, I guess the rest of us are scared of everything, including traveling at more than twenty miles an hour.”

Five years ago, volunteer construction workers from Abnegation repaved some of the roads. They started in the middle of the city and worked their way outward until they ran out of materials. The roads where I live are still cracked and patchy, and it’s not safe to drive on them. We don’t have a car anyway.

Oooh!

So, how would that work? They don’t have actual construction workers? How does Abnegation get materials if everything they do is volunteer? I mean, I’m assuming they didn’t just have a giant stockpile of the stuff left over from the days of paying with money and this last push used them up and now no roads will ever be paved again.

Specifying volunteer construction workers means they should have non-volunteer ones. So perhaps there’s other construction workers who keep some areas going, but Abnegation doesn’t do their own areas until there’s enough for everyone? But this still seems like it should lead to their faction dying a slow death as they divert needed resources to everybody else first. It’d be one thing to do this if there was enough to go around, but apparently just keeping the roads functional for everyone is more than their society can handle.

Candor values honesty, but our faction, Abnegation, values selflessness.

So the grouchiness is either a personal trait or and outgrowth of being honest all the time.

But it sure seems Abnegation values more than selflessness if they ban mirrors. Maybe there’s linked traits, so they’re Future Puritans who decided selflessness was best done with sex negativity.

Outside her school is a tall sculpture that the Dauntless kids climb, presumably to be dauntless.

Last year I watched one of them fall and break her leg.

So maybe that’s why the other factions don’t overwhelm Abnegation, maybe each one has one handicap trait, like Dauntless having insane child mortality, and maybe Candor people commit suicide a lot?

She explains that schooling doesn’t stop at sixteen, but you’re educated by your faction after that point. Which does make sense given how much indoctrination they’d need to pile on the new recruits. Also, she’s terrified about the test, although she has yet to explain why so I can’t tell if it’s just general jitters about the rest of her life hinging on it or if there’s anything more. She continues not to admit this for some reason.

The hallways are cramped, though the light coming through the windows creates the illusion of space; they are one of the only places where the factions mix, at our age.

…if I’m reading this right, faction kids don’t even mix in classes? I’m going to assume it’s misworded and she’s saying school in general is where kids mix, because otherwise there’d be no need to leave to shift over to faction-only education.

Why are the kids factionized anyway, if they’re supposed to choose? Shouldn’t it be the Dauntless-wannabees on the sculpture, the Abnegation-wannabees dressing in grey, the Candor-wannabees being honest and grouchy? It seems like if your society is based around the kids choosing a faction, they should have opportunities to try each one out rather than just deciding at sixteen where they’ll spend the rest of their life.

And Erudite kid shoves her over while calling her Stiff.

A few people stopped when I fell, but none of them offered to help me. Their eyes follow me to the edge of the hallway. This sort of thing has been happening to others in my faction for months now—the Erudite have been releasing antagonistic reports about Abnegation, and it has begun to affect the way we relate at school. The gray clothes, the plain hairstyle, and the unassuming demeanor of my faction are supposed to make it easier for me to forget myself, and easier for everyone else to forget me too. But now they make me a target.

The writing is getting frustrating. She doesn’t give us any context for if the ignoring her part is a recent change or not. Do they never help because her faction helps and theirs have other priorities? Do they not help because the Erudite/Abnegation fight is spilling out and making other factions pick a side? Are they fellow Erudites? Do they not help because they don’t want the Erudite kids bullying them too?

That last one seems possible because apparently the Dauntless haven’t even shown up yet, so the crowd must be a mix of whatever other factions have shown up. Maybe the Dauntless beat you up if you step on their faction’s toes by doing anything brave.

At exactly 7:25, the Dauntless prove their bravery by jumping from a moving train.

Dauntless: brave against everything but peer pressure.

My father calls the Dauntless “hellions.”

…huh! Are they more likely to be disruptive, or are they just on the opposite end of the alignment wheel as selflessness? Their bravery seems very self-centered.

They are pierced, tattooed, and black-clothed.

So yeah, they’re slaves to peer pressure. Oh, goth kids, you are nowhere near the rebels you think you are.

Their primary purpose is to guard the fence that surrounds our city. From what, I don’t know.

Oh, for fuck’s sake book, NO. Bad. The entire purpose of a faction would not be mysterious, especially when from the sounds of it there’s some sort of tax system where factions are allotted certain funds. After all, fence-guarding doesn’t grow corn.

She might not know much about what’s out there, but at the least it’d be a vague “the enemy” or “scary animals” or “bandits”.

She then lampshades about what do piercing have to do with courage but just goes on to moon over them more. I know she ends up Dauntless, but it does seem set up pretty well here – they’re flashy, they’re in your face, they’re mysterious…

And as the last few cars pass, a mass exodus of young men and women in dark clothing hurl themselves from the moving cars, some dropping and rolling, others stumbling a few steps before regaining their balance. One of the boys wraps his arm around a girl’s shoulders, laughing.

Plus they’re the only ones around who seem to be having fun.

On to Chapter Two! (If I do double chapter posts I finish this by the end of the month exactly.)

Anyway, test time.

I sit next to Caleb and across from our neighbor Susan.
Susan’s father travels throughout the city for his job, so he has a car and drives her to and from school every day. He offered to drive us, too, but as Caleb says, we prefer to leave later and would not want to inconvenience him.

So…is she Abnegation? If so, it looks like within their groups Abnegation can’t get anything done because they’re too busy having a selfless off. Also, I thought the roads where they were had fallen apart so much they could barely be used? The roads where I live are still cracked and patchy, and it’s not safe to drive on them. sure sounds like no one there should be driving their kid to school.

The test administrators are mostly Abnegation volunteers, although there is an Erudite in one of the testing rooms and a Dauntless in another to test those of us from Abnegation, because the rules state that we can’t be tested by someone from our own faction.

Well, that’s weird.

The only thing I can think of is that they’re worried the faction will tell their own kids to stick around. But if they’re going to fuck with test results couldn’t they do that to the other faction’s kids too?

This feels like it makes sense for a split second (oh, conflict of interest, sure) but then, what exactly is the conflict? It’s not something where there’s a win/lose and you’d be motivated to make your side look better.

Hm. Unless perhaps the test data isn’t just used for deciding faction but for some other thing. Like maybe how well you do in general has something to do with how large a chunk of resource-pie they get? If the factions exert extra pressure to try to force kids to stay in them, then that might be a motive – people would notice something’s up if the kids consistently score as another faction but stick to their birth one. If the factions get along badly enough, you might also have them trying to shunt their own troublemakers into a different faction to make it the other guy’s problem.

But almost every motivation they’d have to screw with their kids’ test results is one that’d apply for screwing with data from the rest of the factions.

Although maybe that’s being acknowledged by the Dauntless being here. Perhaps normally Abnegation and Erudite are the only ones, and with tensions between them neither side wants their kids tested by the other guys so they picked the faction brave enough to wade into the mess.

She also says they’re not allowed to prepare, which makes sense. Oddly, she doesn’t actually say that second part, so I’m kind of suspicious about if the author is thinking about how obviously you wouldn’t want people trying to train for what’s a personality test or if this is the same as her not knowing what the Dauntless protect them from, a matter of assuming that if dystopia, then mysteriousness everywhere.

My gaze drifts from Susan to the Dauntless tables across the room. They are laughing and shouting and playing cards. At another set of tables, the Erudite chatter over books and newspapers, in constant pursuit of knowledge. A group of Amity girls in yellow and red sit in a circle on the cafeteria floor, playing some kind of hand-slapping game involving a rhyming song. Every few minutes I hear a chorus of laughter from them as someone is eliminated and has to sit in the center of the circle. At the table next to them, Candor boys make wide gestures with their hands. They appear to be arguing about something, but it must not be serious, because some of them are still smiling.
At the Abnegation table, we sit quietly and wait. Faction customs dictate even idle behavior and supersede individual preference. I doubt all the Erudite want to study all the time, or that every Candor enjoys a lively debate, but they can’t defy the norms of their factions any more than I can.

This really doesn’t work with the idea of choice, unless it’s supposed to be a rarely taken outlet for people who absolutely can’t fit in their birth faction.

And the longer this goes on the more impossible it is for me to believe these are teens. There’s apparently zero rebellion in this world. Even when their parents aren’t there they’re actively embracing their stereotype. And what about crushes? What happens when two kids fall in love across boundaries? They’re sixteen, is the school food all filled with hormone-killing drugs or something?

I guess the closest this gets is ethnic divisions, and even those are nowhere near as stable despite the fact you don’t get to decide to join a new one midway through high school.

Her brother goes before her and she says he’s not nervous because he’s a perfect Abnegation guy who always thinks of others first and how when they were little kids he told her she should’ve given her toy to another little girl to play with. (Increasingly suspicious how their faction manages to hold onto anything.)

I have tried to explain to him that my instincts are not the same as his—it didn’t even enter my mind to give my seat to the Candor man on the bus—but he doesn’t understand.

In fairness, that’s because it isn’t about instinct by this point. If you’re drilled to always give up your seat on a bus, it should enter your mind. I wonder if the author just isn’t willing to have her heroine say she resents having to give stuff up so she’s falling back on the idea our narrator is just totally oblivious and kind of stupid.

She angsts more about how she’s not Abnegation material. Still no word on how common faction switches are. If they’re common this is all ridiculous because kids getting born into unfitting factions happens all the time, so it doesn’t mean it’s a particular failing of hers. And everything seems to be assuming switches happen with at least some regularity.

This gets back to it all seeming more like an ethnic thing, where being born into it has some meaning and you’re failing to uphold your culture.

Maybe if each faction preaches that they’re the best one, so having her primary trait be courage still means she sucks. But it’s really not elaborated on and so far the book seems to be relying on the reader to fill in with standard teen worries about the future and who you are and parental expectations.

Her brother comes back looking terrible, but she says she can’t ask about the results, therefore she says nothing because she can’t express normal sympathy. Also, why can’t people tell what their results were? It’s not like that’s something that might screw up test results.

An Abnegation volunteer speaks the next round of names. Two from Dauntless, two from Erudite, two from Amity, two from Candor, and then: “From Abnegation: Susan Black and Beatrice Prior.”

So Susan’s dad was indeed a fellow Abnegation factioner. Also, are all the factions required to have the same population sizes? That must be especially rough for Dauntless given their child mortality.

Waiting for us outside the cafeteria is a row of ten rooms. They are used only for the aptitude tests, so I have never been in one before.

Holy shit you people have no idea how to use space. You only use these once a year! Store boxes or something in them.

Unlike the other rooms in the school, they are separated, not by glass, but by mirrors.

All your other rooms are divided by glass? Really? In the future we don’t have any other building material, I guess.

Anyway, turns out both the Erudite and Dauntless are for the Abnegation kids, so I was wrong about anyone realizing Erudite might have conflict of interest problems. Poor Susan gets the Erudite.

Anyway, panic panic terror. Also, the Dauntless looks less over the top than her classmates, which means that perhaps their idiotic sculpture climbing is also just adolescent stupidity and not the actual definition of bravery they’re using.

“Why the hawk?” I blurt out as she attaches an electrode to my forehead.
“Never met a curious Abnegation before,” she says, raising her eyebrows at me.
I shiver, and goose bumps appear on my arms. My curiosity is a mistake, a betrayal of Abnegation values.

So only one faction’s allowed to be curious? I did say I was glad they had major differences but you really can’t function with only one group being allowed to ask questions. (Although this does hopefully explain why she doesn’t know what Dauntless do – it’s not hidden knowledge, Abnegation kids just don’t know anything. Although you’d think the school classes would’ve just said it by now…)

Also, even assuming the adults are able to segregate themselves this thoroughly, curious Abnegation kids should be perfectly common.

Anyway, the hawk is because it symbolizes the sun and she was afraid of the dark, so she got it while trying to overcome that. This does not sound like a healthy faction if they’re dealing with fears through superstition and bullheadedness.

Our narrator’s hooked up to a weird machine and then drinks a liquid that causes her to instantly go into a dreamworld somehow. She finds herself presented with a basket of cheese and a basket of giant knife and disembodied lady voice tells her to pick one.

At this point as far as I can tell the narrator just snaps and decides that no fuck you I don’t have to do anything. She seems to have completely forgotten this is supposed to be a personality test. But maybe psychotic breaks are common when you force kids to act like whatever stereotype they’ve been born into, because the test just goes eh whatever and moves on to the next thing, which is a vicious dog.

A growl gurgles from deep in its throat, and I see why the cheese would have come in handy. Or the knife.

I am not sure I’ve had a single character here so far who would have thought the solution to a dog was foremost to try to offer it food, with a weapon as an afterthought.

Beatrice has been pretty boring and generic in her angst, but this is impressive.

She tries to figure out what to do and comes to the conclusion that she’s apparently pretty pathetic physically and nothing will save her, so she runs through her very limited dog knowledge, realizes all she knows is not to stare it in the eye, and decides to try kneeling down in submission and hope that’s how dogs do it. But this works and the dog licks her face and nudges her hand for petting and she thinks it’s a good thing she didn’t have the knife after all.

But then some idiot kid appears and startles the dog, who goes back into murder mode, so she jumps on top of it. Test ends.

Instead I am alone—in the testing room, now empty. I turn in a slow circle and can’t see myself in any of the mirrors.

Creepy!

Leaving the room she finds herself on a bus where there’s some guy reading a newspaper with hands scarred by burns. The newspaper is about some murderer being caught.

In the picture beneath the headline is a young man with a plain face and a beard. I feel like I do know him, though I don’t remember how. And at the same time, I feel like it would be a bad idea to tell the man that.

The guy demands to know if she knows the murderer. This whole bit is really confusing, since it’s full of “I just knew.” She knows she knows the guy somehow. She knows she can’t admit to it for some reason. She knows the guy will do something horrible if she does.

finally I see his face. He wears dark sunglasses and his mouth is bent into a snarl. His cheek is rippled with scars, like his hands. He leans close to my face. His breath smells like cigarettes. Not real, I remind myself. Not real.
“You’re lying,” he says. “You’re lying!”
“I am not.”
“I can see it in your eyes.”
I pull myself up straighter. “You can’t.”
“If you know him,” he says in a low voice, “you could save me. You could save me!”
I narrow my eyes. “Well,” I say. I set my jaw. “I don’t.”

And we end with me having no clue what that shows beyond, I guess, that she’s not a good fit for Honesty Faction. She doesn’t know what’s going on or why she’s lying or what the stakes are, there’s no context for why the guy suddenly says he’ll be saved if she admits it or what that means, the test just told her everything she was supposed to do without reasons and then she did it.