Kalliope

I didn't finish this. Similarly to The Road of Lost Innocence, I recognize that this is a good story. However, it was monotone and even and bereft of personality. If I cannot connect to the speaker as a person and not as words on a page, it is difficult for me to connect with the story. If nothing else, the book introduced me to the Hmong people and their strife during the late 1970s and 1980s in Laos.

I can see why this book is on so many favorites lists here on Goodreads! I really enjoyed this. Walls illustrates and expands her childhood world so broadly and fantastically that it indeed felt like fantasy. She wove the story of her childhood and adolescence like an adventure, when in reality it was stitched together with all the horrors of life–poverty, abuse, and unhealthy relationships. At times this book was very frustrating to read–not because of the writing style, but because of how horrific and sad the story was when it could have been anything else. Walls' parents were the most frustrating, yet fascinating, part of the story. They were larger-than-life in their selfish yet childlike and adventurous ways. They painted their experiences like a fairytale they were living in every moment, from petting a live cheetah to sitting hungry in a damp and freezing shack. Perhaps this is how they coped with the lives they led–making it a living story in the present. This is pretty much required reading for memoir lovers.

I'm pretty shocked at how much this book bothered me, considering how much I was entertained by the first one. Obviously I have to pull out a Hunger Games comparison. The second volume in that series is by far the best: incredibly action-packed from page one. Insurgent was action-packed in only a couple places, and then it completely plateaued again. Most of the book, in fact, was at a plateau. While Divergent was go-go-go all the time, Insurgent was pretty much dead on arrival. It relied a lot on dialogue and it also (misguidedly) trusted that the reader would recall countless four-letter-name characters from the first book, who pop in and out of the story randomly and add largely nothing. More than once I had to look up who characters were, because in the first book they honestly weren't interesting or important enough to bring back.
There were some fun scenes, but it seemed they were over immediately and suddenly the reader is back with the group of people we don't really know and pages of boring dialogue. Tris didn't grow any more interesting this time around, and while there was opportunity for Tobias' character to develop, it often took a backseat to Tris' mostly illogical inner diatribes. For someone who is part Erudite, she's a bit of a dunderhead. She really is Divergent in that she is erratic and violent one minute, and contemplative and mouse-like the next. Tobias was the same way. It was hard for me to follow these characters because it was like a switch was flipped in between the first and second book. Tris' switch had the label “BE TOTALLY USELESS AND CLUELESS” and Tobias' was “BE VIOLENT AND SHOUTY FOR NO REASON.”

Probably won't pick up Allegiant.