Legend

Legend
Marie Lu
Penguin, 2011
336 pages

June and Day both live in the Republic, but that is where their similarities end. June is the daughter of a highly regarded family and has entered into the military to serve the republic that she so strongly believes in. Day's family lives in the slums and has already survived an attempt on his life by the Republic even though he is but 15. Thrown together after June's brother is murdered - seemingly by Day - the two opposites find out how truly similar they are, and how the Republic is far from what either of them imagined.

While this is a decent dystopian teen novel, Legend pales in comparison to the works of Veronica Roth, Suzanne Collins, and Scott Westerfeld. This first novel in the series certainly sets up an interesting model of our future, but one that seems to be made piecemeal of the futures we've been shown by other authors. A fun read, but not as engaging as it was hyped up to be.

Book Count: 22 down, 178 to go!

Divergent

Divergent
Veronica Roth
New York: Katherine Tegen, 2011
496 pgs

Reader be warned: If you are approaching the middle of the book, stop reading unless you have time to finish it. Trust me.

Teens hot off The Hunger Games trilogy will love this novel by Veronica Roth, although I found it more similar in tone to the Uglies series by Scott Westerfeld. Divergent is the first novel in a series and it is intelligent and action packed.

Triss lives in a city where people are divided into factions to better regulate their lives. Brought up in Abnegation, her test scores indicate that she could belong to more than one faction. She is divergent. Told to hide this fact from everyone, Triss chooses to leave Abnegation and her family and join Dauntless, the fearless faction.

Put through a rigorous initiation, Triss finds herself the target of other trainees and finds it more and more difficult to hide who she is from the others. Surviving her training soon becomes the least of her worries as she discovers a plot against her old faction, and her divergent ability may be the only thing that can save them all.

Book Count: 7 read, 193 to go!