Killing Off Your Beloved Main Character and Other Ways to Piss Me Off.

I have a bone to pick with you, Veronica Roth. I just finished reading the Divergent trilogy in about four days. Clearly, I was riveted. Couldn’t put it down. So after investing hours and hours and approximately 1,500 pages (**Spoiler Alert**) you killed the heroine!  Now, I don’t use exclamation points lightly, so clearly I was caught off guard by your betrayal.

Okay, okay.  Was it meaningful and poignant?  Yes. Was it profound? For sure. Was it moving, yet devoid of any Nicholas-Sparksian (remind me to add that term to Urban Dictionary later) saccharine contrivance? Sigh. Definitely. Was I a 41-year-old woman feeling relieved that her husband and teenage daughter were not home to see her crying through the last 30 minutes of the book? You betcha. Do I understand, deep down, why you felt like you needed to kill her? Not so much.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t only read happy, little novels with endings that could be played by Meg Ryan. A Tale of Two Cities is my very favorite novel, I didn’t curse Edith Wharton’s name after House of Mirth left me a sobbing mess for an hour, and don’t even get me started on my love for Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Maybe, in this case, I had lulled myself into a false sense of security because these novels are considered “young adult” fiction and so I expected a kinder, gentler ending for your characters (which, I’ll admit, was fairly naïve given the overall brutality of the story).

Bottom line? It was sort of the literary equivalent of someone fighting long and hard to battle cancer, overcoming it, and then getting killed in a car accident (if the car accident was representative of sacrificing your life to save those you love and thousands more…so I guess it isn’t the same thing at all). Admittedly, Veronica, I loved the books, but I’m pissed at you for depriving me of my well-earned happy ending. Now go take a time out and think about what you’ve done, Missy (killing Tris, I mean, not the whole becoming-an-incredibly-successful-bestselling-author thing…I’m guessing you’ve already given that sufficient thought).