Book Review: Veronica Roth – “Divergent”

In Beatrice Prior’s dystopian Chicago world, society is divided into five factions, each dedicated to the cultivation of a particular virtue—Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent). On an appointed day of every year, all sixteen-year-olds must select the faction to which they will devote the rest of their lives. For Beatrice, the decision is between staying with her family and being who she really is—she can’t have both. So she makes a choice that surprises everyone, including herself.
During the highly competitive initiation that follows, Beatrice renames herself Tris and struggles alongside her fellow initiates to live out the choice they have made. Together they must undergo extreme physical tests of endurance and intense psychological simulations, some with devastating consequences. As initiation transforms them all, Tris must determine who her friends really are—and where, exactly, a romance with a sometimes fascinating, sometimes exasperating boy fits into the life she’s chosen. But Tris also has a secret, one she’s kept hidden from everyone because she’s been warned it can mean death. And as she discovers unrest and growing conflict that threaten to unravel her seemingly perfect society, she also learns that her secret might help her save those she loves . . . or it might destroy her. (Source: amazon.com)

I started reading this book only because one of my best friends,  Sarah, told me about it while we were texting, said it was amazing. And I have to admit, when I read a sample – meaning the first two chapters of it -, I had mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, it sounded promising, on the other, there was something that didn’t quite convince me I should invest my money into it. Plus, it all sounded to me like a cheap version of “The Hunger Games”, a book series I absolutely adore. Then, after two weeks of stalling the inevitable, I downloaded the entire series – containing three books – onto my Kindle. Risky.

It was one of the best decisions on a book I have ever made.

I did not expect anything when I started the 1st book 3 days ago, because as I said, it seemed too similar to “The Hunger Games”. Young girl confused about who she is, growing up in a country where she’s kind of hidden of the real world, raised to pigeonholing…my thoughts were all over Katniss Everdeen. But Veronica Roth surprised me.

A first big plus about this series: the names. I mean, I absolutely love “The Hunger Games”, it’s by far my favourite book series, but the names just never grew to me at all, because obviously they’re all made up, there’s nobody in the world with the kind of names people are dealing with in the books. The names in “Divergent” are normal, which, for me, made it easier to get into the story itself. You can picture the life of the characters way more easily when you hear familiar names. That’s my thought, at least.

Also, the dystopian world the story is set in is not that far from reality as you might think, because I think a world where – as a punishment for things that happened decades ago – kids are put into a arena to fight each other to death is way less realistic than a world where a country is divided in 5 different parts with 5 different…”tribes”, as I started calling the factions in my head, with each “tribe” having their own principles, rules and own “infrastructures”.

Second plus: the protagonist, Beatrice Prior, is  lot like the usual girl. She’s insecure, she puts her family and friends before herself (even if it’s the education and the principles of her faction), and due to her not being very noticeable, she is an easy target. She has learned to duck instead of speaking up for herself. But during the story, she changes; she gets stronger, she starts thinking more of herself, if not all the time, but a lot more than she was raised to do. And for the first time she feels like home when she dives more and more into her new family, the Dauntless., and their traditions and rules.

Of course there is a love story, but I what I really like about this book is that it’s not being the most important thing, that unlike “The Hunger Games”, it’s not Beatrice’s love life that’s in the focus, but her struggles with enemies who only see her as a weakling, and struggles with herself about her decision to abandon her family. Even death finds its way into her new life, and although her strength, her will and her bravery is tested more than once due to that, although she’s being thrown on her back more than once, (including attempted murder, betrayal and suicide), she never gives up. Confusion is omnipresent with Beatrice, especially when it comes to one of her instructors, who everyone only calls “Four” – and whom she is attracted to, something the reader can feel from the first moment she meets him. Of course, at one point, the mystery about his real name and his past is put out in the open for the reader, and that is the only thing that kind of…not disappointed me, but definitely didn’t leave me in awe. I wasn’t surprised at all when Four reveals himself to Beatrice; to me, it was kind of predictable and I would’ve wished for Veronica Roth to be more surprising with that mystery. But that is only a little flaw in an otherwise flawless book, and it won’t be a reason for me to not read it again.

I really had difficulties to put this book away, I have to admit, especially during the middle and to the end of it, when the tension between Beatrice and her opponents – Peter, one of the other initiates and Eric, the youngest leader of the Dauntless, both ruthless and reckless through and through, – rise with every new day. And all the feelings Beatrice goes through – trust, mistrust, disappointment, shock, anger, the will to survive -, people can relate to easily, at least in my opinion. You might think this is a book for teenagers, due to the character’s young age, but I definitely don’t think so, because just as “The Hunger Games”, it’s quite cruel in some parts. And at the end, you just want to know how the story goes on now that Beatrice’s life has been turned completely upside down.

Thumbs up from me. If you haven’t read it yet (or struggle yourself with doing it, just as I did at first), my only advise: get over your fear of being disappointed (be Dauntless, so to speak) and let that book take you in. I promise, you won’t regret it.

5 Reasons why Leonardo DiCaprio deserves an Oscar

After having seen “The Wolf Of Wall Street” and once again being blown away by Leonardo’s outstanding acting talent and performance, I decided to do what has been long overdue – at least in my opinion. Let’s go (Please note: everything I say in here is totally MY opinion and it does NOT reflect the general opinion):

1. His Age
Leo started acting when he was only 19 years old. At this age, a lot of people don’t even know yet what they want to do with their life, yet he knew exactly who he wanted to be. He started to become a shooting star in the big world of Hollywood, and unlike a lot of his acting colleagues (like Macaulay Culkin or Drew Barrymore, to only name two) who became famous even earlier in their lifes, Leonardo never struggled with drugs or alcohol problems. And no matter how many movies were added to his filmography, no matter how many nominations for academy awards he got, he has always been down to earth – and I am not scared to put it out there that one of the reasons for that is probably the german blood in his veins, his grandmother in Germany who always kept him on his two feet.

2. His Variability
Whether as the son of an abusive father, a mentally handicapped young man, a penniless nobody, a soldier in a war-torn country, a delusional former police officer, an undercover agent, a family father who’s lost touch to reality, an adolescent fraud, a ruthless slave driver or a drug-addicted, multi-million dollar broker – there seems nothing that Leo can’t do, there seems no role that he isn’t capable to play. And no matter who he represents on screen: he always does it with total commitment to his job – something that the audience can easily pick on.

3. His facial expressions
There are barely any actors out there nowadays who have managed to pull off all the different emotions a movie or series character can go through with such perfection as Leo has. He can easily switch from a love-stricken man to a person in such rage that I could not blame anybody if he’d scare them to death. Again, Leo seems to have perfected how to pull off the movements and facial expressions of a drug-addicted person as much as a sad, destroyed person who has just lost everything that kept him going. Sue me, but there has been more than one occasion where I watched him in certain scenes and just wanted to go over and hug him. (Picture credit to someone on the internet who made these three)

4.His Hotness Level
Yes, you have heard right. I mean….just look at him! Back then, when he had his breakthrough with “Titanic”, when everyone was swooning over how cute his smile was, how good-looking he was…I have to admit, it was true, though I haven’t been attracted to him so much as I am today. Leo is one of the examples that men age with dignity and get more good-looking the older they get. He’s turning 40 this year, but hell, I don’t think he has ever looked as perfect as he does nowadays. You can see his life and his age and all of his roles in his face, and still, it doesn’t make him less attractive at all. George Clooney who?

5. He just deserves a damn Academy Award!
He really does. I don’t think any actor has ever been so underrated as he is. Seriously. I think he himself has stopped counting the many times he has been nominated for either a Golden Globe or an Oscar without being fully appreciated by winning one. As I said at the beginning: THIS ALL IS TOTALLY MY OWN OPINION. Me, personally, I am happy to no end he won a Golden Globe for “Wolf Of Wall Street”, because he was outstanding in it. And I think it’s time he finally gets his well-deserved Oscar. No other actor – for me – has so many facets as he does. And yes,  I will probably cry like a little baby on March 3rd, 2014 when he hopefully gets that little golden boy. My fingers will be crossed hard until there’s no blood left in them.

Book Review: Gillian Flynn – “Gone Girl”

After I have been so blown away by this book of Gillian Flynn a few weeks back, I decided to do a small review of it. Don’t read it if you haven’t read the book yet and/or plan on doing it somewhere in the future.

Nick Dunne is a douchebag. Sounds harsh, but it’s true. He’s the typical middle-aged man: married for 5 years straight, and after all the magic slowly faded over the years, he shows how much he really cares now. Every year his wife, Amy, does a small treasure hunt for him with little poems about the past year of their marriage – probably to keep it fresh and romantic, I guess. Fact is: Nick couldn’t care less. He never understands the hints to the next part of the treasure hunt that Amy gives him (on that, I can’t blame him – I mean: who understands little, somehow encrypted poems that could mean anything?!), and for that matter, he doesn’t care, because for him, at the end of the hunt there is some “prize” waiting for him that he doesn’t care about as much as his wife does.

Amy, on the other hand, is like the picture perfect wife. She supports Nick with everything he does – she even left New York, where she grew up, where she has built up her entire life, just so her husband can move back to his hometown to take care of his sick mother. Although she feels misplaced and lonely and unhappy at times, she does everything to show Nick her neverending love and support; she isn’t that kind of wife that expects her husband to treat her like a princess – instead, she tries everything to please her prince.

Then one day, everything changes. On their 5th anniversary, Amy disappears. Out of the blue. No one knows where to, how or why. Nothing makes sense to Nick, who believes that his wife never had any enemies, and everyone who knew Amy can’t say anything bad about her. The more time passes, the longer Amy is gone, the more evidence shows up that incriminate Nick to be the one who made her disappear. His behaviour doesn’t only leave the two detectives in charge in complete suspicion, but also neighbours, Amy’s family and even Nick’s own sister, Margo. Then it turns out that he has an affair with a younger woman, a former college student of his, for over a year and has already given up on his marriage, which displays in weird facial expressions and actions during the most inappropriate moments – like a press conference where he is supposed to beg for his wife’s return, ending it with a cruel smirk on his lips. And just when you think that it can’t get any worse for him, just when you already see him in jail with one foot, the story makes a turn that changes everything.

When it turns out that Amy played with Nick from the get go, I sat there, for a moment completely taken aback, mouth gaping open. When she tells the reader that the lovely Amy that was displayed for the 1st half of the book is only a fiction, it doesn’t make sense at all. The more she reveals her REAL diary to the world, the more cracks in her perfect little life appear. She had never been a wanted child, not as people might think. Her mother had a lot of miscarriages, and her parents’ initial wish of having a baby girl – that they named Amy – was the reason Amy Elliott Dunne was on this planet – at least in Amy’s eyes. She never forgave her parents to make her the second choice, to use her and her life for their own book series called “Amazing Amy” that helped them become quite wealthy . Her hatred for her parents resulted of the burden her parents put her on: always being “amazing”, being everyone’s darling, being the perfect daughter. That burden has turned her into a cold-hearted, calculating woman with two faces that has no other feelings but pity and condescension for others – including her husband, who, in her eyes, is nothing but a loser who seems to be willing to be a marionette in the hands of his wife without even noticing it. And finding out that her husband is cheating on her with a younger woman probably didn’t help much with that.

The more you get through the book, the more pity you feel for Nick. Yes, I was on the “Nick Dunne is such an asshole, he doesn’t even deserve Amy, let alone ANY woman, what a jerk!” front at first, because, hands down: I am a woman. To read about a man not caring about the little romantic and nice things she tries to keep their marriage and love fresh, a man who has stopped loving his wife a long time ago and just doesn’t have the balls to pack his things and leave, to give her the chance to find someone who deserves her, who makes her happy…that was against all you normally see in Hollywood movies. And against all that – despite my saying that I am not a romantic and never want to marry and have kids (ask anyone who knows me, I’m a helpless “anti-marriage-kids-house-tree-dog” person) – I kind of believed in, in a very narrow space in my heart. I know myself how it feels to be rejected when you think the other person feels the same for you, and it’s just not right. Somehow I think it’s a woman’s right to despise every man who is like that. And maybe send him to hell.  Nick gave up on his life with Amy a long time ago, so in some way people might say they understand her reasons, why she set him up with all her lies just to see him suffer, to have him going to jail, or worse – on death row for her murder. Because that was her actual plan: leading the police and everyone in her life to Nick as the perpetrator, and then – hello, big finale – killing herself.

It’s kind of shocking to hear a person talking about having long planned to kill herself as if she was talking about the weather. It’s also very interesting to read how someone is capable of sort of making her life nothing but a play, where the ones they love are their marionettes – simply because they don’t have the measure of that person at all. Amy has perfected this. By the middle of the book, you’ll hate HER instead of Nick. Because she’s a right bitch. You want to go to her, close your hands around her neck and strangle her until her lips have turned black. And then, you want to hug Nick, to stroke his head and tell him that everything’s going to be okay, that he’s not a bad person.

As you might see, I absolutely loved the psychological twist in this book that Gillian Flynn sends you onto. She makes you hate one character so much from the get go, and when you think you feel the hatred for that one boiling up inside of you, she opens the hidden door in her story and slams it right into your face. You’re left sitting there with a black eye, asking yourself how you couldn’t see that one coming, how you could be so blind. And I have to admit, there haven’t been a lot of writers who made me feel that way about a book. There are actually really few writers who impress me so much with their style that I feel the constant need to talk about it and read their stories over and over again. Plus, I always hated books that are written in the first person, but Gillian Flynn manages it to make me like it, with the constant switch between the storylines of Nick and Amy, present and past; throughout the entire book she never fails to keep it fresh. The reader feels the constant need to read the next chapter, because they want to know what happens – which made it absolutely impossible for me to put the book away for more than a few hours (which were only during work, where I obviously can’t read). All this left me in complete awe.

My resumé: Go read “Gone Girl” – if I haven’t deprived you now of it, due to basically revealing the entire storyline to you on here (you were warned). But as you also might have noticed: I have not revealed the end of the book. I think everyone should see that one for themselves. Because although, in some way, it was not what I expected, a bit disappointing, maybe, but then again, a genius last masterpiece to the puzzle that is “Gone Girl”. It’s worth every moment you spend reading it, every time you give it in your free-time. Gillian Flynn is massively talented, and I hope to read alot more books of her like that.