It’s the spookiest time of year again, which means more Goosebumps here at BBGT and me avoiding any situation where I’m required to wear a costume. Now that I’m too old to trick or treat, blogging is the only way I want to celebrate Halloween, damn it. [Matthew says: Although thanks to the archival power of the internet, you can revisit a time where Ariel and I had a really cool group Halloween costume, and where How I Met Your Mother didn't suck.]

I still have such distinct memories of reading this one as a kid right along with Night of the Living Dummy. This one didn’t scare me the way Night of the Living Dummy did. Instead, it seemed to instil in me this sense of adventure, of going into basements even when people told you not to, and then (somewhat ambiguously) saving the day against the evil lurking in the basement. [Matthew says: I don't remember this one at all, and now feel absolutely terrible for making my parents buy all these books for five-year-old me when I clearly didn't read any of them.]

Chapter 1

Margaret and her brother Casey feel that something is off with their once loving father who now refuses to throw frisbees or call Margaret “Princess” anymore. Nothing saying sinister like a lack of nicknames and refusing to fall prey to the charms of throwing a frisbee.

Dad hadn’t been the same to her, either. In fact, he spent so much time down in the basement, he barely said a word to her.

I am immediately suspicious about these basement ongoings. Does he have a laptop down there with him? Nothing says stay out of the basement like a porn addiction.

We get witty banter between the siblings, a staple in all Goosebumps stories.

She made a diving latch for a wild toss, rolling over on the manicured lawn and raising the Frisbee above her head triumphantly.
“Show off,” Casey muttered, unimpressed.
“You’re the hot dog in the family,” Margaret called.
“Well, you’re a dork.”

Thus establishing the same characters that show up in each tale. I guess you kind of have to write the same characters over and over if you want us to believe that they do things like bring dumpster dummies home, continue to break into abandoned houses and take photos with a very clearly evil camera, and refuse to heed warnings about staying out of basements.

We learn two equally important facts this chapter:

1. Everyone calls Margaret Fatso in her family because she’s so thin. HILARE.
2. Ever since dad got fired and started working at home…in the basement…with his plants and “weird machines”, things have been tense in the family. [Matthew says: And remember, this was the 90s, so not even in a "oh god, we're financially ruined" way.]

The kids head inside the house, and seeing that the door to the basement is slightly ajar, they decide to head down and see what their dad is up to. Too bad he immediately intercepts them and is like, “Stay the fuck out of the basement forever, seriously. No matter what.”

Chapter 2

Mom is going away to visit her sick sister in the hospital, conveniently setting up a situation where the children are home alone with their very clearly evil father and basement. What could possibly go wrong!

This line pretty much sums it up:

“I’m not worried about you kids,” Mrs. Brewer said, glancing nervously at her watch. “I’m worried about your father.”

Yes, that’s exactly the kind of reassurance you want from your mother before she’s like, “Kbye, hope your father doesn’t kill you or something. Stay out of the basement xoxo.”

Dad drives Mom to the airport, so the kids are home alone with their friend Diane. Almost immediately, they decide to go into the basement. [Matthew says: You kids had ONE job!]

There’s no harm in taking a peek.
So why was her heart pounding? Why did she have this sudden tingle of fear?

Again, I ask, what could possibly go wrong?

Chapter 3

The kids discover that there is a ping pong table in the basement and lots of plants:

The plants, in fact, resembled jungle plants — leafy vines and tall, treelike plants with long, slender tendrils, fragile-looking ferns, plants with gnarled, cream-colored roots poking up like bony knees from the soil.
“It’s like a swamp or something,” Diane said. “Did your father really grow these things in just five or six weeks?”
“Yeah. I’m pretty sure,” Margaret replied, staring at the enormous red tomatoes on a slender, yellow stalk.

Well, the cover of the book has an evil looking plant!hand, but that plant!hand could easily be playing ping pong, so I’m undecided about the source of evil for now. [Matthew says: That's okay, Ariel, because as we discover at the halfway-point tomorrow, the book is also undecided about what's actually evil.]

Casey and Margaret notice that one of the plants appears to be breathing. Instead of getting the hell out of there, they continue to investigate. Casey touches some glass booth that’s connected with wires to another glass booth (this is a children’s book, and I’m struggling to understand what it’s talking about right now), and begins to get electrocuted!

Chapter 4

Not! Casey’s just fucking with us. What a goofball. [Matthew says: As you might recall from the last two years, the first scare-cliffhanger in every Goosebumps book is a kid pretending he's being mortally injured. This is... a really weird recurring theme.]

The girls start to berate Casey when they’re distracted by more weird noises coming from the plants:

The free-for-all was brought to a sudden halt by a low moan from across the room. All three kids raised their heads and stared in the direction of the sound.
The large basement was silent now except for their heavy breathing.
“What was that?” Diane whispered.
They listened.
Another low moan, a mournful sound, muffled, like air through a saxophone.

Diana, the voice of reason, responds to this by saying, “Plants don’t cry and moan.” Just when you thought someone couldn’t have a dumber reaction, Margaret is like, “These do.”

I hope their entire friendship is exactly like this. “Mushrooms don’t taste good.” “These do.” “Size 5 jeans don’t normally fit me.” “These do.”

Everyone agrees this basement is weird, but they can’t seem to agree on this:

“Your dad is weird,” Diane said, reaching the doorway.
“No, he isn’t,” Casey quickly insisted. “He’s doing important work here.”

I literally cannot think of anything the world needs more than moaning plants. Can you?

Diane leaves and Dad’s car pulls into the driveway. Casey and Margaret discuss whether he’ll figure out they were in the basement or not. Casey realizes that when he got hot down there he took off his shirt…and left it down there! Awwww shit.

Chapter 5

Dad gets stuck talking to some annoying neighbour, so Casey runs down to get his shirt quickly. Except he doesn’t come back up, so now Margaret has to go looking for him. I kid you not, that’s all that happens this chapter.

What’s everyone doing for Halloween? Are any of you like massive fans of dressing up for Halloween or do you hate it like I do?

Welcome back to our third year of Goosebumps coverage in celebration of Halloween, everybody! Hope everybody is enjoying our first Goosebumps without Greg and his terrible decision-making skills vis a vis cameras with demonic powers. Hahaha, that Greg! What an idiot. [Ariel says: I miss that time you realized he was played by a young Ryan Gosling.]

Chapter 6

Speaking of idiots, we rejoin our heroes Margaret and Casey, who has just run down into the basement to retrieve his shirt he somehow didn’t realize he wasn’t wearing for a couple hours. Suspense was high at the end of the last chapter, because Casey had to retrieve his shirt before their suspiciously-acting dad got back in the house. Naturally, this is a great time for Casey to slowly continue investigating the basement.

The tree seemed to lean toward the T-shirt, its long tendrils hanging down, loosely coiled on the soil around its trunk.
Casey took a timid step into the room.
Why am I so afraid? he wondered.

[Ariel says: I also just want to point out what an abrupt shift this is. This was very clearly in Margaret's perspective before. It's like they knew Matt was taking over for this chapter!] Casey discovers all is not as it seems with the kind of revelation that only R.L. Stine can write.

Hey — wait.

Casey begins to examine the strange mystery in the basement more thoughtfully, also in the way that only R.L. Stine can write.

The breathing.
There it was again. Steady breathing. Not too loud. Not too soft, either.
Who could be breathing? What could be breathing?
Was the big tree breathing?

Wait, guys, I forget. What’s the current mystery about the basement again? [Ariel says: Something to do with the ping pong table I think.] 

Margaret shouts down from the top of the stairs for Casey to hurry up, and Casey grabs the shirt… AND GETS GRABBED HIMSELF.

Two snakelike tendrils swung out at him.
“Huh?” he cried out, paralyzed with fear. “What’s happening?”
The tendrils wrapped themselves around his waist. [...] They didn’t squeeze him. They weren’t trying to strangle him. Or pull him back.

Casey is scared! The plant is… nonplussed?

The plant uttered a loud sigh.

Margaret has to run downstairs to help him escape from the clutches of the sighing plant – which is a sentence I’ve written on this blog – but don’t get back upstairs before…

Standing at the top was their father, glaring down at them, his hands balled into tight fists at his sides, his face rigid with anger.

Pretend it’s just the part of the gif where the baby is scared. Nobody has just made a gif of just a scared baby, for some weird reason.

Chapter 7

Weirdly, their dad acts like a normal person by asking if they’re okay and then just saying he’s disappointed.

“Dad, what’s with those plants?” Casey asked.
“What do you mean?” Dr. Brewer asked.
“They’re — so weird,” Casey said.
“I’ll explain them to you some day,” he said flatly, still staring at the two of them.

He leaves to go back to work, not grounding them or explaining anything further. Casey summarizes how much the plot has developed in the first six chapters.

“I can’t believe that plant grabbed me,” Casey said thoughtfully

Even Margaret is bored with this book so far.

“Just don’t think about the basement,” Margaret advised. That’s really lame advice, she told herself.

The next day, Margaret calls her mom on the phone to have the exact same exposition scene from the beginning of the book, for some reason.

“How’s your father doing?” Mrs. Brewer asked. “I spoke to him last night, but he only grunted.”
“He doesn’t even grunt to us!” Margaret complained.
“Your dad has a lot to prove,” Mrs. Brewer said. “To himself, and to others. I think he’s working so hard because he wants to prove to Mr. Martinez and the others at the university that they were wrong to fire him.”

Margaret also tells her mom about new strange behavior from her father, even though she’s seen him exactly zero times where she could have learned this.

“He’s wearing a Dodgers cap. He never takes it off.”
“Really?” Mrs. Brewer sounded very surprised.

HOLY SHIT, A DODGERS CAP? GUYS, THIS IS HUGE.

Margaret sees her dad eating out of a bag. After a couple pages of her staring at him intently, wondering what he’s eating (because suspense?), he throws out the bag and leaves. She investigates and discovers that it’s a bag of plant food, much like how in Breaking Bad Hank finally discovered that Walt was the bad guy by finding his copy of How to Cook Meth.

In other news, I’m only this far in Breaking Bad, and if anyone posts spoilers in the comments, so help me god, the blog is over.

Chapter 8

She felt sick. She couldn’t get the disgusting picture out of her mind. How could her dad eat mud? [...] As if he liked it.
As if he needed it.

[Ariel says: That sounds like it could be the start of a sexy R&B song. Not the mud part, but the last two lines.] Margaret tells Casey about this, weighs the evidence, and determines that maybe their father is turning into a plant, because I guess we’re just cutting right to the chase now.

“Watching him gulp down that disgusting plant food, I — I had this horrible thought that he’s turning into a plant!”

What’s weird is that this is actually one of the more rational jump to conclusions we’ve seen in a BBGT book.

Margaret and Casey go hang out with Diane, and have, uh, another infodump scene entirely with information we already know?

“The university told him he had to stop whatever it was he was doing, and he refused. He said he couldn’t stop. At least that’s what my dad heard”

Just in case we completely forgot what the book was about, I guess. Again.

“Hey, Dad!” Casey called. “Catch!” He tossed the Frisbee to his father.
Dr. Brewer turned around a little too slowly. The Frisbee glanced off his head, knocking the Dodgers cap off. [...] In place of hair, Dr. Brewer had bright green leaves sprouting from his head.

Man, it’s a good thing we learned he was doing weird experiments just before learning this, otherwise this wouldn’t have made any sense!

Chapter 9

Just like the last time Margaret and Casey discovered something weird and incriminating about their father, he responds to it by… sitting down with them and calmly reassuring them that everything’s alright.

“I spoke to your mom on the phone this morning. She told me you’re upset about my work. [...] I guess you two think your dad has gotten pretty weird, huh?”

Somehow these scenes are right on the border between terrifying and like a tender The More You Know PSA.

He explains that the leaves are a side effect and he’ll have his normal hair again soon, and that he’s trying to build a new kind of plant.

“Let’s say we were able to isolate the [...] gene that enabled [a] person to have such high intelligence. And then let’s say we were able to transmit it into other brains. And then this brain power could be passed along from generation to generation. And lots of people would have a high IQ. Do you understand?”

Wait, this explanation has absolutely nothing to do with plants. Why are we doing this.

“I’m doing something a little more unusual. I really don’t want to go into detail now. But I’ll
tell you that what I’m trying to do is build a kind of plant that has never existed and could never exist. I’m trying to build a plant that’s part animal.”

Why didn’t we just skip to that? Is… is the IQ thing important?

He explains that he’s doing this with “two glass booths connected by a powerful electron generator”, which is children’s book science for “because electricity”. After their talk, Margaret is happy their dad actually explained things to them, but realizes that they still don’t really know much about all the weird stuff going on.

Later, Margaret sees his father replacing a bandage on her hand and notices that his blood is green! Because plants!

Chapter 10

Margaret lays awake, unable to sleep, the green blood revelation having thoroughly terrified her (apparently “there are leaves growing out of my father’s head” didn’t set off any serious alarms). She goes to the kitchen where she finds Casey, who couldn’t sleep either, when they suddenly hear  a cry coming from the basement. So they each go back to bed, because I guess we’re not far enough in the book yet to bother just figuring out what’s going on.

The next morning, Margaret decides to ask her dad more questions, and discovers his bed is full of dirt and worms, which I guess is a more subtle way to learn he’s turning into a plant than finding him eating a bag labelled “PLANT FOOD”.

Question of the post! Do you think we’re actually in for a scare this year, or is Margaret’s dad going to continue to weirdly but not-particularly-villainously turn into a plant?

Previously, Marcus refused to tell Tris his Super Secret Special Secret of Secrets.

Chapter 6

If you thought not finding out what Marcus secret is was bad, wait till you get a load of the problems Tris is facing in chapter 6. Tris really wants to hook up with Tobias, but she has to go to laundry. This is by far the most interesting sub-plot to date.

Tris goes back to her room to get ready, and Peter is waiting for her. Just when we thought this day couldn’t get any worse and confrontations couldn’t be any less productive.

Peter doesn’t get why Tris is responsible for guarding the hard drive with all the important data (code) [Matthew says: lol, maybe. The novel is super inconsistent about what's actually on this hard drive.] on it. Well, Peter, may I remind you of what a complete and utter shithead you are? Nah, Tris has got this one

“You think if you deliver it to the Erudite, they’ll forgive your indiscretion and let you back in their good graces.”

I believe it, but Peter denies this, saying he doesn’t want to be controlled by anyone. He can be an evil douchebag on his own thank you very much.

Tris quickly realizes that the bulge in Peter’s pants isn’t because this conversation is thrilling, but because he’s already swiped the hard drive. A battle immediately ensues, attracting the attention of a bunch of scandalised Amity folks. Tobias also shows up and retrieves the hard drive from Peter’s pocket.

Some of the Amity point out that Tris has violated the terms of their stay by being violent, so they lead her to a room called the CONFLICT ROOM. Um, if I recall correctly, Peter has also violated their terms by 1) stealing, and 2) fighting, but no one seems to be escorting him to the CONFLICT ROOM.

Hinges creak behind me. I look over my shoulder—the older man is fumbling with something on a counter behind me.

“What are you doing?”

“I am making tea,” he says.

“I don’t think tea is really the solution to this.”

“Then tell us,” the younger man says, drawing my attention back to the windows. He smiles at me. “What do you believe is the solution?”

Quick, Tris, now is your time to say burritos! You deserve one, girl.

Amity ask Tris what she thinks the solution is, and she starts to tell them all the evil things Peter has done and that they should kick him out. So the Amity inject Tris with a serum because that is everyone’s solution to everything in this series. [Matthew says: And you thought it was about people making choices instead of constantly being controlled.]

“How do you feel?” the younger man says.

“I feel …” Angry, I was about to say. Angry with Peter, angry with the Amity. But that’s not true, is it? I smile. “I feel good. I feel a little like… like I’m floating. Or swaying. How do you feel?”

You know, I’m not surprised that Amity is so peaceful all the time because they’re high, I’m surprised that Matt and I didn’t make a joke about this before it was revealed as fact. [Matthew says: I had Hufflepuff jokes to make.]

“Can you tell me where to find Tobias?” I say. When I imagine his face, affection for him bubbles up inside me, and all I want to do is kiss him.

“Four, I mean. He’s handsome, isn’t he? I don’t really know why he likes me so much. I’m not very nice, am I?”

“Not most of the time, no,” the man says. “But I think you could be, if you tried.”

“Thank you,” I say. “That’s nice of you to say.”

How would this man even know what Tris is like “most of the time.” Also, isn’t everyone at Amity aware that she’s just seen most of her old faction, including both of her parents, get killed? Wouldn’t that make most people a little quick to anger?

“I think you’ll find him in the orchard,” he says. “I saw him go outside after the fight.”

I laugh a little. “The fight. What a silly thing …” And it does seem like a silly thing, slamming your fist into someone else’s body. Like a caress, but too hard. A caress is much nicer. Maybe I should have run my hand along Peter’s arm instead. That would have felt better to both of us. My knuckles wouldn’t ache right now.”

I take back everything I’ve ever said about Amity. They’re the faction I would choose. They are literally just on ecstasy, playing banjos, and eating food. What a faction!

The book suddenly starts to make more sense when Tris is high. Or at least express self-awareness.

“Four!” I call out. Why am I calling out a number? Oh yes. Because that’s his name. I call out again, “Four! Where are you?”

Yes, book, yes! His name is stupid.

Tris finds Four, and he tells her she’s acting like a lunatic. He takes Tris to Johanna who realizes that Tris has been given too much of the “peace serum.”

“The peace serum,” Johanna says. “In small doses, it has a mild, calming effect and improves the mood. The only side effect is some slight dizziness. We administer it to members of our community who have trouble keeping the peace.”

Well, that’s certainly one way to keep a faction in line. [Matthew says: In a intriguingly on point and completely unintentional metaphor about the law of diminishing return behind actual drug abuse, Divergent has already gone from its plot being driven by "DRUGS" to "TOO MANY DRUGS".]

Four argues with Johanna a bit about how the peace serum is wrong (hey, man, chill out, don’t be a square), and if she could she’d probably use it on everybody. Johanna is like, “Well, yeah, I totally would and then we’d avoid war.” It’s true, if everyone was high like Amity all the time, war would probably not be a major concern. Unless it was a war for the last Abnegation muffin, but that’s a war I’m sure anyone would be proud to fight in.

Four criticises Amity’s decision to remain peaceful, and Johanna implies that she disagrees with the decision but there’s nothing she can do (obviously she is not Divergent as fuck.) Four then tells Johanna they’ll be leaving in a couple days but that Peter isn’t coming with them, so she’ll have to kick him out separately.

Before Four and Tris leave, Johanna has a useful heads up for them:

“Four,” she says. “If you and your friends would like to remain … un-touched by our serum, you may want to avoid the bread.”

I knew there was something not-quite-right about the bread! All the signs and foreshadowing and endless mentions of bread made that pretty clear.

So what would you guys do? Would you eat the Amity bread or be a total Four about it?

Chapter 7

Tris recovers from the happy drugs that the Hufflepuff hippies gave her. [Ariel says: I would have preferred if she had to save the day under the influence of this serum.]

“Why couldn’t I fight the peace serum?” I say. “If my brain is weird enough to resist the simulation serum, why not this one?”

A person has a genetic predisposition to be incapable of making a personal choice that most other people do which coincidentally also grants her immunity to robot drugs that do one thing, but is surprised when it does not also give her immunity to plant drugs that do a different thing. The science of the Divergent series, everyone. [Ariel says: Yeah, this line stuck out to me too. I don't understand why Tris would assume that no serums work on her when it seemed oddly specific to simulations involving hallucinations/virtual reality or whatever it is. The peace serum is the only serum we've seen so far that actually seems like it could be real, so it makes sense the power of Tris' mind wouldn't be able to fight this one.]

Tobias comes up with a similarly sciencey answer.

“Maybe in order to fight off a serum, you have to want to.”

Say what you will about the dystopian, Buzzfeed quiz future of Divergent, but I bet these guys cured cancer like that.

Next, there’s a thrilling scene where Tris climbs an apple tree, sees a bunch of Erudite cars, tries to climb down it, and starts to fall but doesn’t. And I wonder why this book is 545 pages long.

It bends, but holds. I start to lift myself up, to put the other foot down, and the branch snaps.

I gasp as I fall back, seizing the tree trunk at the last second. [...]

I don’t allow myself to think; I just put one foot down, then the other, so fast that bark peels off the branches and drifts towards the ground.

We’re at the part where we’re waiting to get to the part where something happens. Why is there this much suspense and action already?

Tris dramatically runs back to the Amity camp and Abnegation refugees to tell them what she saw. Susan asks why they’re so concerned, because they totally already said Amity is a safe house, no takesies-backsies. Tris and co tell her that’s stupid, and then come up with their conversely not stupid plan.

“Wait,” I say. “I have an idea. [...] Disguises. The Erudite don’t know for sure that we’re still here. We can pretend to be Amity.”
“Those of you who aren’t dressed like the Amity should go to the dormitories, then,” Marcus says. “The rest of you, put your hair down; try to mimic their behavior.”

So. The plan is for the smaller group of people dispersed throughout a larger group of people to continue to do that. And for everyone who isn’t already doing that to… continue to not do that? [Ariel says: Not, you know, change their outfits? Also, I guess mimicking Amity is just pretending to be really stoned?]

Tris runs back to the dorm with the others who aren’t dressed up like the Amity in order to change clothes (a significant improvement on how this plan was originally worded, to be fair)[Ariel says: I'm glad they followed my advice above.], and comes across the hard drive that previously contained the Erudite’s simulation data, but not its program, and apparently now also surveillance footage. The one that Tris and Tobias have been protecting to… keep it safe from the wrong hands? Keep it as proof? Well, whatever, the book can’t figure it out either and decides it doesn’t matter anymore, because Tris anticlimactically destroys it.

I don’t want to just hand over the attack simulation again. But this hard drive also contains the surveillance footage from the attack. The record of our losses. Of my parents’ deaths. The only piece of them I have left. [...]
I bring the lamp down again, and again, and again, until the hard drive cracks and pieces of it spread across the floor

[Ariel says: This drives me nuts! If she was just going to destroy it this easily why the fuck did they even need to save it in the first place? They've been making such a big fucking deal about it like it's going to be really important to the plot, but no.] Tris leaves behind a now completely meaningless plot point to meet up with the disguised Tobias and Caleb.

[Tobias] wears a red collared shirt [...]
“It was the only thing that covered up the neck tattoo, okay?”

Because the neck tattoo is how the police are most likely to identify a man who physically attacked their leader after being classified as the most dangerous type of person in society.

Tris and co hide with the Amity group again when the Erudite arrive, escorted by Dauntless soldiers wearing blue armbands signifying their allegiance to Erudite, causing Tobias to imply they’re still under mind-control. I think. I have no idea what counts for logic in this book anymore. For some reason, Tris is concerned about her cunning ruse, and inspects the Abnegation pretending the be Amity.

It is amazing how pretending to be in a different faction changes everything

Yes, the Divergent Faction transfer would certainly never have observed this phenomenon before.

The Erudite talk to Susan, and she announces to everyone that they’re looking for Abnegation members, Dauntless members, and a former Erudite initiate, and that she’s told them that they moved on, because I guess we’re also not even gonna pretend that whole safe house thing was ever going to hold any narrative weight. The Erudite/Dauntless begin to search the compound, and it immediately goes to shit.

“Your hair is pretty short for an Amity,” she says. [...]
“It’s hot,” [Tobias] says.
The excuse might work if he knew how to deliver it, but he says it with a snap. [She] pulls back the collar of his shirt to see his tattoo.
And Tobias moves.
He grabs the woman’s wrist, yanking her forward so she loses her balance. She hits her head against the edge of the table and falls. Across the room, a gun goes off

And we didn’t even have to read two pages of Tris trying to climb a tree!

Four takes the Dauntless woman’s gun and holds her as a human shield to shoot down the Dauntless gunman at the other end of the table, because I guess the book just realized it was only doing the “mindless” part of “mindless violence.” Another Dauntless soldier aims a revolver at Tris, but she freezes up and Caleb takes Tris’s gun and shoots him in the leg, which is an interesting development, because apparently Caleb can move at super speed now. An Erudite woman takes a shot at Peter, but Tris pushes him out of the way. Yay. Peter is still in this book.

“Put the gun down,” says Tobias, pointing his revolver [...] “I have very good aim, and I’m betting that you don’t.”

During the standstill, Tobias announces to all the Abnegation that they’re going to run now, because I guess it was possible to have a worse plan than “stay where you are and pretend to not be you”. When they get to the cornfield, they split up, because I guess it was possible to have a still worse plan than that.

There are screams everywhere, to my left, to my right. Gunshots. The Abnegation are dying again, dying like they were when I pretended to be under the simulation. And all I’m doing is running.

When the main characters make it a safe distance away, Tobias yells at Tris for freezing up during the gunfight, because I guess we’re getting to the part of the Divergent series where the kickass strong female YA character begins losing all her agency.

“We were probably the only ones they were after,” [Tobias said,] “apart from Marcus, who is most likely dead.”

“Marcus, who is most likely dead” would be a kickass title for a story, incidentally.

I don’t know how I expected him to say it – with relief, maybe, because Marcus, his father and the menace of his life is finally gone. Or with pain and sadness [...] But he says it like it’s just a fact

Question of the Day: Are you remotely convinced that Marcus is dead?

Margaret begins to suspect her father is turning into a plant, which is a major turning point for most girls that age. This really isn’t a tale of horror so much as a tale of growing up in an uncertain world where at some point we all must realize our fathers are plants. [Matthew says: Goosebumps was not only important as many a child's introduction to the horror genre, but also in learning that their fathers are actually plants. Hard-hitting social analysis from Bad Books, Good Times.]

Chapter 11

Margaret and Casey go into the backyard to have a serious talk over orange juice about their father. The frequent mentions of this glass of orange juice that Casey is too anguished to drink makes this scene feel more like brunch than a moment where children come to frightening terms with what’s going on in their house.

Finally, he set the orange juice down on the lawn and said, “What should we do?” in a voice just above a whisper.

Margaret shrugged. “I wish Mom would call.”

“Would you tell her everything?” Casey asked, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his baggy shorts.

“I guess,” Margaret said. “I don’t know if she’d believe it, but — “

“It’s so scary,” Casey said. “I mean, he’s our dad. We’ve known him our whole lives. I mean — “

“I know,” Margaret said. “But he’s not the same. He’s — “

“Maybe he can explain it all,” Casey said thoughtfully. “Maybe there’s a good reason for everything. You know. Like the leaves on his head.”

I am really struggling to come up with a scenario where the kids would be completely satisfied and not at all horrified by the father’s explanation for this. “Well, kids, I have a rare form of cancer that causes leaves to grow out of my head. I also must sleep on piles of dirt and bugs now.”

Margaret relays Diane’s advice which is to call the police because “there’s got to be some kind of law against being a mad scientist.” To tell you the truth, I’m kind of surprised there isn’t a law against this given the kinds of dumb laws there are out there.

The kids come back inside, and dad has a surprise – he’s made lunch! A green, goopy mess of a lunch.

Margaret and Casey are immediately suspicious not just because the “soup” looks and smells disgusting, but because dad never makes lunch. “I sure was suspicious about the way he was acting, the leaves growing out of his head, the dirt and the bugs in the bed, but making lunch for us? Something isn’t right.” [Matthew says: They don't notice that something's up because their plant-dad is impatiently demanding they eat something that is very transparently not safe to eat, but because he's being rude about it. Goosebumps protagonists, folks.]

Dad starts getting more and more upset the longer it takes the kids to try his nasty soup. The chapter ends with Margaret and Casey lifting the spoons to their mouths…

Chapter 12

The doorbell rings, and the kids are super relieved when their father leaves to answer it. Quicker than you can say, “My father is turning to a plant and possibly trying to poison me,” they dump the stuff into the trash and go to see who’s at the door. [Matthew says: Because when you're trying to hide something from someone who really, really wants you to take it, putting it where you put every other unwanted item where it will stay for a couple days is a pretty good tactical decision.][Ariel says: One of the other titles for this book they considered using was Stay out of the Trashcan, but that just didn't quite have the same effect.]

Turns out it’s Dad’s old boss coming to see how his work is coming along. Apparently this Mr. Martinez had always believed in Dad, and it wasn’t his decision to let him go.

Mr. Martinez and Dad head down the basement, and the kids decide that the next chance they get, they need to also go down to the basement. So no one can stay the fuck out of  this basement at all.

Chapter 13

Dad goes to help a neighbour “install a new sink” which is definitely a euphemism for “evil plant business.”

Margaret and Casey go to sneak down to the basement, but the door is locked! Luckily, Casey’s friend just taught him to pick a lock.

Margaret obediently found a paper clip on her desk and brought it to him. Casey straightened the clip out, then poked it into the lock. In a few seconds, he hummed a triumphant fanfare and pulled the door open.

“Now you’re an expert lock picker, huh? Your friend Kevin is a good guy to know,” Margaret said, shaking her head.

Kevin sounds like the sort of guy you’d want with you to go down into a basement that you were explicitly told to stay out of. It’s a shame Diane was the friend that showed up in this book, she’s totally useless.

There seem to be even more plants in the basement than before, and they hear more moaning and sighing from the plants who are definitely getting it on with each other. Oh, come on, we were all thinking it.

Casey is suddenly grabbed by a plant! Or is he fucking with us again?

Chapter 14

Casey isn’t tricking Margaret, but he wasn’t grabbed by a plant.

“Casey, it’s a squirrel!”

“What?” His voice was several octaves higher than normal. “It — it grabbed my ankle and — “

“Look,” Margaret said, pointing. “It’s a squirrel.

Look how scared it is. It must have run right into you.”

“Oh.” Casey sighed. The color began to return to his ash-gray face. “I thought it was a . . . plant.”

To be fair, I also would have assumed one of the creepy plants grabbed me rather than jumping to the conclusion that a squirrel had gotten into the basement.

For some reason, a couple pages are dedicated to the kids chasing the squirrel out of the basement. Once that very important piece of the story is resolved, [Matthew says: Thank God! Squirrels are usually always the first characters to die in a horror story.] they hear a loud thumping coming from the supply closet. Casey also finds something disturbing: Mr. Martinez’ suit jacket and tie. It soon dawns on them that they never actually saw him leave yesterday, but before they can say any more, they hear footsteps upstairs and decide to hide.

Chapter 15

The kids escape out an open window in the basement, and go to talk to their dad. They try to pretend they were outside the whole time, but he points out that the basement door is wide open.

They come clean and ask about Mr. Martinez, and he explains the man got hot and took off his jacket and forgot it. Seems reasonable! Dad doesn’t really seem all that mad about the basement, but before he heads off again to finish helping the neighbour out (he just came back to get more tools), he’s like, “Seriously, don’t go in the basement you could get hurt.” He’s the most lovingly evil father ever.

My question of the week is, what do you think was in the soup dad made for the kids? And what would it have done to them if they’d eaten it?

Ready to finish this year’s Goosebumps? Depends… ARE YOU IN FOR A SCARE?

Chapter 16

Margaret is hanging out with Diane (the only other character in this book) when her father (the mad scientist who is turning into a plant person – I dunno, maybe you forgot?) announces that he’s leaving to pick up her mother from the airport. After Diane leaves (thanks for reminding us you’re in this book too, Diane!), Carey and Margaret decide to pass the time by flying kites, which sounds totally innocuous, but quickly reveals that these kids aren’t paying any attention to what’s going on in this book.

“Are they in the garage?”
“No,” Casey told her. “I know. They’re in the basement.”

Of course they are.

The plants seemed to bend toward them, to reach out to them as they walked by. Margaret tried to ignore them. [...] Casey, down on his knees, started pulling boxes off the bottom shelf. Suddenly, he stopped. “Whoa — Margaret. [...] Look at this” [...]
Margaret saw that he was holding a pair of black shoes. And a pair of blue trousers.
Blue suit trousers?
His face suddenly pale, [he] reached into the back pocket and pulled out a black leather wallet. [...]
“It belongs to Mr. Martinez,” he said, swallowing hard. He raised his eyes to Margaret’s. “This is Mr. Martinez’s stuff.”

I guess Mr. Martinez didn’t heed the warning on the front of the book either.

It’s right there! In the title! HOW HARD IS THIS?

Chapter 17

Confronted with this evidence, Carey realizes a terrifying truth with egregious consequences.

“Dad lied,” Casey said

Oh. See, I would have led with, “Oh, shit, dad murdered someone”, but lying is bad too.

They determine they have to tell someone what’s happening, but don’t know who, which is when the groaning plant conveniently groans again. And a loud banging noise comes from a closet. And the groaning plant’s “leaves clapped against each other softy, quietly”. Okay, what is the groaning plant’s deal? I’m way more disturbed by this thing than mad scientist plant-man dad.

 “Do you think we should open the closet?” Casey asked timidly.
A plant groaned as if answering.

They spent some time getting the door unlocked, and then GOOSEBUMPS-STYLE CLIFF HANGER, Y’ALL.

“Huh?” Casey dropped the hammer.
They both squinted into the dark closet.
And screamed in horror when they saw what was inside.

Chapter 18

Hopefully you were able to handle the suspense from the previous page, because the contents of the closet are revealed to be…

They both gaped at the weird plants that filled the closet.
Were they plants?

Well, that wasn’t helpful.

Margaret’s eyes darted around the closet. To her horror, she realized that several plants seemed to have human features — green arms, a yellow hand with three fingers poking from it, two stumpy legs where the stem should be.
She and her brother both cried out when they saw the plant with the face. Inside a cluster of broad leaves there appeared to grow a round, green tomato. But the tomato had a human-shaped nose and an open mouth, from which it repeatedly uttered the most mournful sighs and groans.

OH GOD I TAKE IT BACK THIS IS ACTUALLY CREEPY AS HELL NOW

“Margaret — let’s go!” Casey pleaded.
“No. Look. There’s someone back there” [...] Ignoring the moans, the sighs, the green arms reaching out to her, the hideous green-tomato faces, she plunged through the plants to the back of the closet.
“Dad!” she cried.
Her father was lying on the floor, his hands and feet tied tightly with plant tendrils, his mouth gagged by a wide strip of elastic tape.

Casey raises a really good question.

“No — stop!” Casey cried, and pulled her back by the shoulders. [...] “It can’t be Dad! [...] Dad is at the airport — remember?”

Oh snap! You mean the real dad was being impersonated by doppelganger plant-dad this whole time?!

Margaret turned her eyes to her father’s head. He was bareheaded. No Dodgers cap. He had tufts of green leaves growing where his hair should be.
“We’ve already seen that,” Margaret snapped. “It’s a side effect, remember?”

Or, uh, part of this whole time? Wait, so are there two vaguely-evil dads?

“I’m so glad to see you,” Dr. Brewster said. “Quick! Untie me.”
“How did you get in here?” Casey demanded, standing above him, hands on his hips, staring down at him suspiciously. “We saw you leave for the airport.”

I’m glad that in my time of confusion, there’s at least Casey paying zero attention to the plot to help me out.

He explains that he’s been locked down there for days, and that the other Dr. Brewster is a “plant copy of me”, and asks that they untie him, as well as the also abound-and-gagged and not-dead Mr. Martinez. Understandably unswayed by the man with leaves growing out of his head’s assertion that he is not that plant doppelganger, Casey demands to know how he’s telling the truth. Dad says that there’s no time, which is good enough for Margaret.

Margaret and Casey both gasped as he picked up an axe.
He spun around to face them, holding the thick axe handle with both hands. His face frozen with determination, he started toward them.

If you all turn into plant-people, Margaret, just know that this is where it all went wrong.

Chapter 19

Suddenly, the other Dodgers-cap wearing Dr. Brewster shows up with the kids’ mom, and discovers that, once again, fucking everybody ignored his request to stay out of the basement. Who’s the real victim of this story, really?

He glared accusingly at Margaret and Casey. “What have you done? You let him escape? [...] I’m your dad!” the Dr. Brewer at the doorway bellowed. “Not him! He’s not your dad. He’s not even human! He’s a plant!” [...]
“You’re the plant!” the bareheaded Dr. Brewer accused, raising the axe.

Shit, this is like the best episode of Maury ever.

Chapter 20

The two Dr. Brewsters continue to accuse the other of being an imposter, while Margaret and Casey’s mom has her priorities in order.

“Kids — what have you done?” Mrs. Brewer cried

Margaret decides that her real dad would never threaten to murder someone with an axe, which is pretty optimistic logic.

Margaret leapt forward and grabbed the axe from the imposter’s hands. [...] “Get back! Both of you — stay back!” she warned.

But then the dad she found locked up in the closet calls her princess, which she realizes only her real dad would do! So, spotting the bandaged hand on each dad and remembering the incident earlier, she goes with Plan B.

“Casey, there’s a knife on the wall over there [...] Get it for me”
She stepped over to the man from the supply closet and pushed the knife blade into his arm.

OH SHIIIII-

Chapter 21

Supply closet-dad bleeds red blood, which Margaret decides is enough evidence to conclude he’s the real dad.

“He’s our real dad,” she told Casey, sighing with relief. “Here, Dad.” She handed him the axe.
[T]he man in the baseball cap cried in alarm. “He’s tricked you! He’s tricked you!”
The capless Dr. Brewer moved quickly. He picked up the axe, took three steps forward, pulled the axe back, and swung with all his might, [cutting] easily through [the Dr. Brewster in the cap's] body, slicing him in two.
A thick green liquid oozed from the wound.

Well, I guess I’ll never have a better opportunity to use this.

“Princess — we’re okay!” Dr. Brewer cried, flinging the axe aside. “You guessed right!”

GUESSED? GIRL, YOU HAD AN AXE.

By dinnertime, things had almost returned to normal.

I feel like it might take me a little more than the time between two meals to recover from finding my dad bound and gagged in a closet in the basement with a plant growing out of his head and then watching him murder his doppelganger with an axe, but that’s just me.

Mr. Martinez gives Dr. Brewster his job back. Dr. Brewster explains that he cut his hand while working on the super plant, accidentally mixing in his DNA, resulting in the plant doppelganger. Which apparently affected him too, giving him leaves on his head, because of a “strong chemical reaction”. Man, kids will accept any old fake-science, huh?

Dr. Brewster destroys the horrible, suffering part-human-plants, transplanting a few of the normal ones in the garden, and life goes back to normal. OR DOES IT?

On Sunday, Margaret found herself standing in back by the garden, staring up at the golden hills.
It’s so peaceful now, she thought happily. [...]
She looked down to see a small yellow flower nudging her ankle.
“Margaret,” the flower whispered, “help me. Please — help me. I’m your father. Really! I’m your real father.”

This is simultaneously the stupidest and greatest open ending I’ve ever read in my life.

Question of the Post: What are you doing for Halloween? It is my first Halloween in New York City and I am going to a party! I am terrified.

Previously, things happened.

Chapter 8

Having just fled the Amity compound, Tris, Four, Caleb and Susan follow train tracks towards “the city.” If there’s one thing that the Dauntless can always rely on, it’s train hopping, so Tris suggests they hop on a train coming towards them.

On the train are a bunch of armed factionless people because I guess it’s time we get to know a rag tag band of misfits! [Matthew says: You know, the ones who aren't the misfits from Divergent we've already been following around.]

The factionless man with the gun looks familiar [Ariel says: Celeb factionless man! Do you think he's the guy from the simulation?]. He wears tattered clothes in different colors—a black T-shirt with a torn Abnegation jacket over it, blue jeans mended with red thread, brown boots. All faction clothing is represented in the group before me: black Candor pants paired with black Dauntless shirts, yellow dresses with blue sweatshirts over them. Most items are torn or smudged in some way, but some are not. Freshly stolen, I imagine.

Omg such symbolism I have never before beheld!

The mystery of who the familiar man is is immediately resolved:

“They aren’t Amity,” the man with the gun says. “They’re Dauntless.” Then I recognize him: he is Edward, a fellow initiate who left Dauntless after Peter attacked him with a butter knife. That is why he wears an eye patch.

…Okay I understand how it can take a second to register who someone is when it’s out of context, but this sort of makes it seem like just because he’s wearing a hodgepodge of clothing from various factions made it hard to peg him down. It wasn’t like Edward was only mentioned once, the whole scene where he gets stabbed in the eye made him pretty memorable to the audience and Tris. In fact, Tris fucking mentioned him a few chapters ago when she’s talking about how horrible Peter is!

The factionless are basically like, “Get the fuck off our train,” but for some reason when Tobias says who he is, it changes everything. [Matthew says: OMG. You guys. MORE SECRETS. There are so many secrets I can't keep track of what I actually know.]

The effect of the name on the people in the car is immediate and bewildering: they lower their weapons. They exchange meaningful looks.

“Eaton? Really?” Edward says, eyebrows raised. “I have to admit, I did not see that coming.” [Matthew says: I did, but probably not for the same reason.] He clears his throat. “Fine, you can come. But when we get to the city, you’ve got to come with us.” Then he smiles a little. “We know someone who’s been looking for you, Tobias Eaton.”

Hasn’t Edward literally been factionless for like fucking 2 weeks? I swear to god, he got stabbed in the eye, and then 1-2 weeks later was initiation and then immediately shit went down. How has he become this hardened, in-the-know guy in such a short period of time?

Tobias apparently knows who’s looking for him, but is like, “Uggg I’ll explain later. Whatever. I can’t even right now.” Tris speculates who it is that might be looking for Tobias. Results are inconclusive.

I’m not sure who could know Tobias among the factionless. It could be Drew or Molly, who failed Dauntless initiation—but they didn’t even know Tobias’s real name, and besides, Edward probably would have killed them by now, judging by how ready he was to shoot us. It must be someone from Abnegation, or from school.

But why would he have killed them if they were also factionless…? THE SENSE IT MAKES NOT!!

I’d tell you where they go next, but I can’t possibly describe it as eloquently as Tris can:

We are in a factionless storehouse, and the factionless, who are supposed to be scattered, isolated, and without community … are together inside it. Are together, like a faction.

In other words, “Faction. Faction faction. Factionless. Faction? Less? Factionless.” [Matthew says: So in other words, you could skipped the first book, turned to this page, and you'd be pretty much caught up on all the major themes at play, here.]

Tris continues to act like zoo visitor who is amazed that monkeys display similar behaviour to humans. She makes astute observations about how the factionless are living together and, I shit you not, making jokes and “speak to each other quietly.”

Edward explains that the factionless used to be scattered, but once Abnegation started giving them food they joined together and bided their time until something like this happened. [Matthew says: So... something that happened before these books actually started, so we've literally always been familiar with this changed circumstance. Dramatic.] They take Tobias to see his mystery friend and it’s…

I realize that he and the woman have the same nose—hooked, a little too big on her face but the right size on his. They also have the same strong jaw, distinct chin, spare upper lip, stick-out ears. Only her eyes are different—instead of blue, they are so dark they look black.

“Evelyn,” he says, his voice shaking a little.

Evelyn was the name of Marcus’s wife and Tobias’s mother. My grip on Tobias’s hand loosens. Just days ago I was remembering her funeral. Her funeral. And now she stands in front of me, her eyes colder than the eyes of any Abnegation woman I’ve ever seen.

Woah. A character who I barely remembered was supposed to be dead is actually alive?! I am supposed to have feelings about this I think!

Evelyn and Four argue vaguely about how Four could still join her and how choices can be made again. Blah mysterious tension blah.

“What makes you think I’m interested in spending time anywhere near you?” he demands. I hear his footsteps stop, and slow down so I can hear how she responds.

Because I’m your mother,” she says, and her voice almost breaks over the words, uncharacteristically vulnerable. “Because you’re my son.”

“Uncharacteristically vulnerable”? She has been a character for less than a chapter! She can’t be doing anything uncharacteristically. Shut the fuck up, book.

Anyway, she tells Four he should take her and the factionless seriously because they’re double the size of Dauntless now and are going to play a big part in determining the future.

Four also explains that his mother sent him a coded message about a year ago, but that he wasn’t all that thrilled with her considering she left him alone with his abusive dad. He also mentions she had an affair, and he doesn’t blame her for doing that. Just the whole leaving alone with Marcus thing, which I think is a super justified reason for being mad. But one million dollars says she’s like, “OMG I had to give you a choice to switch factions/couldn’t make you factionless/it was for your own good/I love you son.”

Did you even remember Four’s mother was supposed to be dead? Why the fuck did they have a fake funeral for her? Did she fake her own death? Ug. I don’t get it.

Happy Actual Halloween! Since we read it on Mondays and Tuesday, we don’t have a Goosebumps for you on the holiday we read it in honor for. So here’s the scariest gif I have.

You have no idea how long I’ve been holding onto that for, waiting for the perfect moment. Turns out it’s really hard to find the perfect moment for a gif of a running giant pink dildo thing.

Chapter 9

Tris, Four, and co are in the factionless hobo camp, reunited with Edward and filling him in on what’s up. Tris judges him, and then immediately tells him that judging people is bad.

“You ditched your family to become Dauntless?”
“You sound like the Candor,” I say irritably. “Mind keeping your judgments to yourself?”

We learn about the remaining factions’ initiation tests, and that Erudite’s is an intelligence test, and Abnegation doesn’t even have one. I can’t figure out which is more obvious. We also learn that most of the factionless are from Dauntless, for… reasons…

“You’ve got one of the worst initiations, and there’s that whole old-age thing.” [...]
“Once the Dauntless reach a certain level of physical deterioration,” he says, “they are asked to leave. In one way or another.”

Details like this I actually really like, because I was wondering why there weren’t any old people around in Dauntless. I like finding out it’s because the book has an actual reason for it, rather than that Dauntless is just the Hot Topic of post-apocalyptic Chicago. I mean, it still is, but now it’s a little more believable about it! Although this does mean that there’s still no explanation for where baby Dauntless come from aside from…

The book then retcons Edward into having provoked Peter’s attack, because I guess the book really needed to have Edward deserve getting a butterknife in the eye.

Like vast majority of the fifth of Insurgent that we’ve read so far, the chapter is basically an infodump, so we also learn that:

• Half of Dauntless fled to Candor headquarters, but half remained with the Erudite.
• What’s left of Abnegation is with the factionless, which raises a question of how exactly they were all that different in the first place…

And then in the middle of the night, Tris wakes up and overhears an infodump conversation with Tobias and his mother, so we also learn that:

• Caleb was sort of right about the factionless population counts, but they weren’t all the factionless – just factionless Divergent.
• Also, there are factionless Divergent
• The factionless want to use the Divergent for their own simulation-resistant army to overthrow Erudite, because, seriously, all that Divergence is really useful for in this book is resisting mind-control drugs

Don’t get me wrong, it’s important to learn these details, and it’s kind of hard to do it without just pouring it all out in conveniently expositional conversations. But it could be a little less obvious about it?

“I don’t understand. Why-“
“Why would the factionless have a high Divergent population? [...] Obviously those who can’t confine themselves to a particular way of thinking would be most likely to leave a faction or fail its initiation, right?”
“That’s not what I was going to ask,” he says. “I want to know why you care how many Divergent there are.”

“Sorry to interrupt you with the wrong information the reader didn’t know. Let me explain the correct other information the reader didn’t know.”

“We want to usurp Erudite,” she says. “Once we get rid of them, there’s not much stopping us from controlling the government ourselves.”
“That’s what you expect me to help you with. Overthrowing one corrupt government and instating some kind of factionless tyranny.”

Wait for it.

“We want to establish a new society. One without factions.”
My mouth goes dry. No factions? A world in which no one knows who they are or where they fit? I can’t even fathom it.

Tris cannot fathom a world where no one knows who they are or where they fit, having apparently forgotten that the entire first book was about not knowing who she was or where she fit.

Despite also having been previously established as 100% skeptical of the faction system, Four is skeptical of a world without a faction system too. Although he has better reasons, once his mom explains their plan and it’s exactly like The Hunger Games it’s exactly like the bad guys’ plan.

“I imagine it will involve a high level of destruction.”

So what’s the non-entirely-convincing arbitrary reason that they need Four’s help?

“We will need Dauntless’s help. They have the weapons and the combat experience. You could bridge the gap between us and them.”
“Do you think I’m important to the Dauntless?”

I mean, he was one of three Dauntless authority figures in the first book. And he’s the hottest. So by the rules of Young Adult Fiction…

“What I am suggesting,” she says, “is that you become important.”

SPOOKY HALLOWEEN QUESTION FOR HALLOWEEN! What’s your favorite scary movie? Or, if you hate scary movies, what’s your favorite candy? Or, if you hate candy too, because you’re some sort of monster, what’s your most hated candy in the whole world? Look, please just answer one of my spooky Halloween questions.

I know we’ve all been desperately missing all of the interchangeable Maddox brothers, but fear not, tomorrow we’re diving back into the Disaster series that now seems to have turned into the Beautiful series instead. I guess so we’re like, “Oh damn. Not every title has the word disaster in it. WHOLE NEW STORY, BRAH!”

I’m going into this book completely blind. [Matthew says: Aside from reading the other two, presumably identical books.] Before copy/pasting the summary here, I couldn’t even tell you what the premise was.

The Beautiful Disaster and Walking Disaster phenomenon continues in the first [Matthew says: Subtle reminder that you bought the same book twice] heart-pounding new adult romance in The Maddox Brothers series.

Fiercely independent Camille “Cami” Camlin [Ariel says: You may remember her from her completely unmemorable appearances in the Disaster books] [Matthew says: So unmemorable we just called her "Baby Doll"] gladly moved on from her childhood before it was over. She has held down a job since before she could drive, and moved into her own apartment after her freshman year of college. Now tending bar at The Red Door, Cami doesn’t have time for much else besides work and classes, until a trip to see her boyfriend is cancelled, leaving her with a first weekend off in almost a year.

Trenton Maddox was the king of Eastern State University, [Matthew says: Aside from Travis Maddox, the other king of Eastern State University] dating co-eds before he even graduated high school. His friends wanted to be him, and women wanted to tame him, but after a tragic accident turned his world upside down, Trenton leaves campus to come to grips with the crushing guilt. [Ariel says: This sounds like an easy way to just copy/paste most of Travis lines and characteristics from the first book while adding in a mysterious "tragic accident" to make the story seem different.] 

Eighteen months later, Trenton is living at home with his widower father, and works full-time at a local tattoo parlor to help with the bills. Just when he thinks his life is returning to normal, he notices Cami sitting alone at a table at The Red. [Ariel says: On her one weekend off...she goes to where she works? Bull fucking shit.]

As the baby sister of four rowdy brothers, Cami believes she’ll have no problem keeping her new friendship with Trenton Maddox strictly platonic. [Ariel says: Wait, we're not even going to pretend we're not recycling the plot of Beautiful/Walking Disaster? Please tell me there's a contrived bet that gets Cami and Trenton living together by the second chapter.] But when a Maddox boy falls in love, he loves forever [Ariel says: Some might say psychotically]—even if she is the only reason their already broken family could fall apart. [Matthew says: We're on page zero of the book and the guy's behavior is already the woman's fault.]

In the first installment of the Maddox Brothers books, readers can experience the rush they felt reading Beautiful Disaster for the first time, all over again. [Ariel says: Because it's the same exact story but in a slightly different package.]

Tune in tomorrow for the start of this beautiful train-wreck!

Matthew says: To celebrate returning to the Beautiful/Disaster world, we lowered the prices of our Disaster-themed mugs! Get the pigeon mug or the double-sided cardigans 4 ever mug while they’re shamelessly promoted hot!

Because you just know this book is going to be full of them, I’m starting a Crossover Count. Every time there’s a mention of a character from one of the previous books (obvs that isn’t Trent or Cami), I’ll make a note of it and/or drink.

Crossover Count: 0

Chapter 1

Cami is on the phone with her boyfriend T.J. who is suddenly unable to go away with her for their weekend getaway because he was called into work. It’s very clear that T.J. is going to be an inexplicable barrier for the True Love of Trenton and Cami. Like the Blando that came before him. I’m sure T.J. is going to be completely unlikable, boring and long overstay his welcome in the book. [Matthew says: If he can ever be bothered to show up, that is. Way to oversell your blandness, Blando 2.]

We also meet Beautiful Oblivion’s version of America – Cami’s roommate Raegan. She’s the BFF who’s like, “Let’s get sexy and go get drinks because your man let you down.” [Matthew says: I'd like to invite you (the reader!) to pause for a moment and think about all of America's defining characteristics, so as you read this post, you can fully appreciate just how many of them are exactly the same.]

Twenty minutes later, Raegan and I were on the opposite side of town, strutting across the gravel lot of the Red Door, slowly and in unison, as if we were being filmed while walking to a badass soundtrack.

A surefire way to make something seem as badass as an episode of Full House is to describe it like this. It’s also worth noting that it takes editing to slow those walks down to play along with a “badass soundtrack”, you don’t actually walk that way unless you want people to stop and stare for the wrong reasons.

Once at the door, one of their coworkers asks to see their IDs and there’s lots of sassy banter about this. Kody the bouncer also seems confused as to why Cami is there since she’s supposed to be away this weekend. This is an appropriate question as if you ask to have the weekend off and then show up to party at your place of work, it seems like kind of a dick move to the people who had to work your shifts for you. Also, seriously, when you have time off, why the fuck would you want to go to where you work!

Turns out, not only is Raegan the America of this book, but this Kody character is Shep! After their sassy banter about IDs, this happens.

“Kody opened the oversize red door, and Raegan smiled sweetly. “Thanks, baby.”
“Love you. Be good.”
“I’m always good,” she said, winking.
“See you when I get off work?”
“Yep.” She pulled me through the door.
“You are the weirdest couple,” I said over the bass. It was buzzing in my chest, and I was fairly certain every beat made my bones shake.

Really why did he need to see their IDs?? He works there and one of them is his girlfriend. Oh my god I hate this book so much already. But it’s a really comfortable, warm, familiar hatred. [Matthew says: What about this exchange makes them a weird couple? Not to mention The Weirdest, as in more weird than every other couple EVER? That they joked about not knowing each other, and then stopped acting like that when the joke was over? Yup. That's definitely the weirdest behavior of all possible weird behavior.]

Once seated at a table, Cami takes the time to tell us how beautiful and sassy Raegan is while Cami herself is just the girl-next-door and is suuuch a tomboy because of her older brothers. Cami, I can’t wait till you meet Trenton Maddox and realize that actually every man in the entire world wants you so badly, but you just can’t see it yet! A real life One Direction song!

Also if Cami has a bunch of brothers…does that mean there are going to be a bunch of spinoff books about them?

Just to prove how sassy and tough Raegan is, some girls come over and start telling them to leave their table, but Raegan is having none of it and throws the girls beer on the floor and tells her to “fetch.” If only we could all have BFFs like that.

YOU GUYS IT’S TIME FOR OUR FIRST CROSSOVER!

“Oh, look. Megan’s here,” she said, pointing to the blue-eyed, crow-headed beauty on the dance floor. I shook my head. She was out there with Travis Maddox, basically getting screwed in front of everyone on the dance floor.

“Oh, those Maddox boys,” Raegan said. [Matthew says: First retconning of "Oh, that Travis Maddox!" into "Oh, those Maddox boys!" as the school's resident notorious manwhore. We did it, guys. We're there already.]

So this must put the timeline at…who fucking cares. Also, “Fuck off Philbert.” [Matthew says: I'm guessing from the one scene in Walking Disaster where Travis talked with Trenton about Cami not being interested in him that at some point in this book we'll get to see Travis crying about Abby not being interested in him. Because fan service means writing the same story three times.]

Raegan goes to get some drinks, and Cami guards the table.

When I turned around, a boy was sitting in Raegan’s chair. At first I thought Travis had somehow made his way over, but when I realized my mistake, I smiled. Trenton Maddox was leaning toward me, his tattooed arms crossed, his elbows resting on the table across from me.

I love how the Maddox brothers blur together for even characters in the books. They could definitely pull some crazy switcheroos.

Trenton doesn’t remember Cami even though they apparently went to school together and she seems to know his life story. He flirts with her, but, you guessed it, she’s already sworn she won’t just be another girl he sleeps with.

In case you hadn’t had your fill of interchangeable brothers yet, for some reason 3/? of Cami’s brothers show up along with her cousin. What’s really strange is that Cami talks about how her brothers are younger than her, but in the summary of this book it definitely says she’s the baby of the family. Even the people who were tasked with summarising this book couldn’t make sense of this shit! [Matthew says: Dear Atria Books, Let me extend a standing offer from BBGT since you guys are apparently in need of an accurate summary-writing service.]

Just like the Maddox family, for some reason all of the kids also start with the same letter name, leading me to believe that Jamie McGuire believes that this is some sort of legal requirement.

It’s also made very clear to us that even though they’re all red-heads (except one of them or something) they’re very “tall and chiseled.” They’re definitely getting their own series. McGuire sspecialises in writing about interchangeable groups of sexy brothers. It’s a fucking weird niche.

Along with Cami there’s Chase, Clark, Colin (the cousin) and Coby. It’s like McGuire wants to make my and Matt’s life more difficult. How are we meant to even try to keep these people straight?

One of Cami’s brothers gets really mad that her boyfriend cancelled on her, and he wants to fight him. This is a great time for Cami to let us know that T.J. is “lethal.” So everyone get ready for a Trenton VS. T.J., and if we’re really lucky Travis will get in on that too.

Trenton returns with more drinks and one of the brothers inexplicably believes this is the guy who cancelled on Cami even though a few minutes ago they were talking about T.J. like they all knew him. But this is just a chance for Travis to show up and things to almost get out of hand so Cami can shut it all down:

“I stood. “Coby! Sit your ass down!” I said, pointing to his chair. He sat. “I said it wasn’t him, and I meant it! Now everybody calm the fuck down! I’ve had a bad day, I’m here to drink, and relax, and have a good goddamn time! Now if that’s a problem for you, back the fuck off my table!” I closed my eyes and screamed the last part, looking completely insane. People around us were staring.
Breathing hard, I glanced at Trenton, who handed me a drink.
One corner of his mouth turned up. “I think I’ll stay.”

What a crazy ride! I wish more authors used the strategy of just adding tons of male characters to a scene, like a crazy clown car. Then having these characters be brothers so they would fight to the death for each other about nothing. It adds so much drama with a lack of so much reason.

Crossover count: 3

I can’t remotely pretend I’m excited about actually reading a Jamie McGuire book again. But I am excited that Ariel and I are both reading the same one this time, so I only have to write up half of it! [Ariel says: A surge of joy went through me when I was reading the second chapter and realized I didn't have to write a whole post on it.] 

Casual reminder that right now you can get the pigeon mug or the double-sided cardigans 4 ever mug for a special lower price before we realize what an awful mistake we’ve made starting a new Jamie McGuire book!

Chapter 2

Returning to the Disasters world of Jamie McGuire is like running into an old friend who immediately reminds you of everything you hated about them when you last hung out. Like their aggressive text messages with weirdly incongruous abbreviations yet correct punctuation.

My phone chirped for the third time. [...] It was a text from Trenton.
“Get up, lazy. Yeah, I’m talking to u.”
[...] Damn it. What was I thinking, giving him my phone number?

I have no idea either, and now we’ll never know why she did this thing that doesn’t make any sense. I mean, we could infer alcohol, but we could also infer a contrived way to get them together that conveniently doesn’t have to be explained. [Ariel says: Knowing that Trent = Travis, I'm guessing he was just really persistent and she couldn't be fucked to keep arguing when she wanted to go home and pass out.]

So, uh, I guess that’s how we’re picturing Jamie McGuire now?

While Abby Cami wakes up, her BFF America Raegan and her boyfriend Shep Kody are there too, to be invested in her love life. Also to… feed his ginormousness?

“Who’s blowing up your phone?”
“None of your business.” I said [...]
Kody chuckled, and then he began banging around pots and pans in the kitchen, probably getting ready to feed his ginormousness.

Just in case this isn’t confusing enough, keep in that that Raegan’s boyfriend’s name is Kody, and Cami’s brother’s name is Coby. I will 100% get this right in every summary.  [Ariel says: I'm so glad you pointed that out, I was convinced Coby was actually named Cody, and was vaguely relieved two letters were different in the name. Or one and a half since K is pretty close to C in this situation.]

We also take this opportunity for Cami to tell us about her apartment, which she’s lived in for three years and Raegan’s been in for one, and that it isn’t particularly furnished, isn’t the nicest property in town, but is in a neighborhood with more young professional families and fewer loud college kids. [Ariel says: She also went on about this Pottery Barn gift card Raegan had. Because we were all wondering what to get her for her birthday next year.] And once that exposition is over, Cami exchanges a few text massages with her boyfriend T.J.

“You went out last night?”
“You expected me to stay home and cry myself to sleep?”
“Good. I don’t feel so bad, now.”
“No, keep feeling bad. It’s really okay.”
“I want to hear your voice, but I can’t call right now. I’ll try to call tonight.”
“k.”
“K? Seems like a waste of a text.”

I’m more confused why she put a period after “k”. [Ariel says: To make it look extra bitchy! Every passive aggressive-savy woman knows this.]

After a few more texts ends the conversation on a slightly higher note, Cami gives us more exposition about the history of her relationship with T.J., and then about her life because nothing says engaging start to a book like telling instead of showing! And here I thought that Ariel would get stuck with all the infodumping in the first chapter, but NOPE – IT GOES ON. [Ariel says: I skipped so much info dump about Cami's fucking car and the fact that T.J. does some mysterious statistical analysis job which is just vague enough to seem important. There, now you're not alone in the info dump today, Matt.] I’m just gonna go through all this information for you with a bullet point list, because it’s basically how this reads in Beautiful Oblivion. I just put the bullet points in. It’s okay, Beautiful Oblivion. I get you.

• They’ve been dating for six months
• Three months in, T.J. was assigned to a new, big assignment that was great for his career, but meant long-distance for them
• Cami doesn’t really get what his job is [Ariel says: To be fair, I don't think McGuire has any idea either.]
• T.J. is an overachiever and a perfectionist
• Cami would rather live anywhere else but in the smallish college town she does

Cami wanted to go to Eastern State University forever, but moved out of the dorms after her first year because of “the ridiculousness of dorm life”, and living independently caused “difficulties”, so she dropped a few classes, and instead of graduating this year, she’s only a sophomore. I think we’re supposed to sympathize with her here, but it honestly sounds like she fell two years behind in school because living in a dorm was too “ridiculous”.

Raegan goes into Cami’s room for an incredibly Disasters-y reason.

Really.

“God, he eats like a horse.”
“He’s the size of a horse. Everywhere.”

After that totally realistic dialogue between friends, Raegan assures Cami that she totally saw the look on Cami’s face when Trenton gave her a drink. GUESS THEY’RE STAR-CROSSED LOVERS NOW. More importantly, Cami really hates eggs.

Kody had spent enough nights here that he knew I despised eggs, but since he made me an alternative breakfast, I forgave the putrid egg smell that filled up our apartment every time he stayed the night.

I guess Cami has a character now.

And it is not this one.

“You’re both acting like I was all over him. We talked.”
“He bought you four drinks. And you let him,” Raegan said.
“And he walked you to the car,” Kody said.
“And you traded phone numbers,” Raegan said.
“I have a boyfriend,” I said [...]
“Who you haven’t seen in almost three months, and who’s canceled on you twice,” Raegan said.
“So, he’s selfish because he’s dedicated to his job and wants to move up the ladder? [...] T.J. was honest from the beginning about how demanding his job could be. Why am I the only one not surprised?”Kody and Raegan traded glances, and then continued eating their disgusting chicken fetuses.

I realize this is technically Cami talking and not Jamie McGuire (death of the author and intentional fallacy and all that English major stuff), but, um, Jamie McGuire does know that eggs sold in grocery stores are unfertilized, right? Like, not every egg that comes out of a chicken will automatically become a chicken. This might sound like I’m getting too hung up on a basic scientific misunderstanding, but I’m genuinely concerned that Jamie McGuire has lived her entire life in terror of a carton of eggs left in her fridge too long will suddenly explode into a dozen chickens.

Kody is meeting Reagan’s parents today, which somehow becomes a reason to give a completely different, minor character from the previous books an entire origin story. You guys remember Brazil? [Ariel says: Literally only because he was the other character besides America who was named after a country.]

Jason Brazil wasn’t a bad guy, we just pretended that he was. We all went to high school together, but Jason was a year younger. [Raegan and Jason Brazil] decided to seal the deal before she went to college, hoping it would solidify their relationship. [...] Not long after Jason began his own freshman year at ESU, the wonders of college, joining a fraternity, and being Eastern State football’s star true freshman kept him busy, and the change spawned nightly arguments. He respectfully broke it off, and never once spoke a bad word about her. But he took Raegan’s virginity and then didn’t keep his end of the bargain: to spend the rest of his life with her.

Let’s think about what a terrible and unhappy world this would be if everyone stayed with the person they lost their virginity to. Forever. On the plus (?) side, Ariel can add Brazil to her character count! [Ariel says: We're at 4 now!!! DRINK DRINK DRINK. Also I just have to say, it's realllly dumb they hold such a grudge about him when Raegan is with someone she loves now...it would be fine if she wasn't over him, but they've already said he was totally nice to her, and she and Koby are pretty serious so...why.]

After four more lines of dialogue, it’s back on the exposition train! Raegan’s parents have a dysfunctional relationship and her dad yells a lot and doesn’t like T.J., so I can’t wait to see how this book awkwardly shoehorns in him liking a Travis Maddox clone. Speaking of…

My cell phone pinged. It was Trenton again.
“This is new. I’ve never had a girl give me her number n then ignore me.”

It gets more obnoxious.

“Did we make plans to eat?”
“You don’t eat?”
“…yes?”
“K, then. You plan to eat. I plan to eat. Let’s eat.”

Time to get back on the Exposition Train to I’m-Not-One-Of-Those-Girls Station!

From the second [Trenton] got his driver’s license, he had made his way through high school classmates and Eastern State coeds, and I swore I’d never be one of them. Not that he’d ever tried. Until now. I didn’t want to be flattered, but it was hard not to be after being one of the few females Trenton and Travis Maddox had never attempted to sleep with.

And then on the Exposition Train to Tragic Backstory Junction!

Less than two years before, Trenton’s life changed. He was riding in the passenger seat of Mackenzie Davis’s Jeep Liberty on their way out to a spring break bonfire party. The Jeep was barely recognizable when it was hauled back into town [...] Swallowed by the guilt of Mackenzie’s death, Trenton couldn’t concentrate in class, and by mid-April, he’d decided to move back in with his father and drop all his classes.

We couldn’t have learned this in any other way? Like, maybe from Trenton? Or in a conversation about him? The best way to convey this key bit of character information was  to be told in an infodump about how he was a creepy womanizer now consumed by guilt, when every scene that actually shows him shows… a creepy womanizer?

Trenton Maddox stood in the doorway, holding two white paper sacks.
“Lunch,” he said with a smile. [...]
“How did you know where I live?”
“I asked around,” he said, walking past me.

We immediately take the Exposition Train back to Tragic Backstory Junction to learn that Trenton’s mom died of cancer, because when you’re telling your reader that someone important to a main character died and it defined who they are as a person, you want their reaction to be, “Again?”

Just like Travis did in the books before him, Trenton acts obnoxiously, presumptuously, and oddly childishly as he ignores all the female character’s protests. Or, in a post-Twilight-world, romantically.

• “I hope you like Cherry Coke, baby doll, or we can’t be friends.” [Ariel says: OMG, Matt, you remembered this "baby doll" nonsense from the first book. Now we can all start arguing about which we hate more - Pigeon or baby doll. It's a tough call for me.]
• Trenton held up a Spaceballs DVD. “I know you said you were studying, so if you can’t, you can’t, but I borrowed this from Thomas the last time he was in town, and I still haven’t watched it.”
• “Do you always surprise attack a girl’s apartment with food?”
  “No, but it was time.”
  “Time for what?”
  He looked at me, blank faced. “For lunch.”

Awkward dialogue is awkward.

“I have a boyfriend.”
Trenton wasn’t faxed. “Then he’s not much of one. I’ve never seen him around.”

Guess how many times this exchange happens throughout the book?

“I have the weekend off.”
“Awesome, me too. I’ll swing by later to get you. [...] See you at seven!”
I rushed into my room [after he left] and grabbed my cell phone.
“Not going anywhere w u. I told u, I have a bf.”
“Mmk.”

Cami at least observes while Trenton “really wasn’t going to take no for an answer”, that this is “rude”. But then she ends the chapter determined to evade his manwhore advances and just be friends, because apparently she wants to be friends with him now.

There was absolutely no trick Trenton Maddox could play that I wouldn’t be ready for.

Question of the Day! So I guess we’re about to see this book’s version of the “Abby dresses down to meet up with Travis, but it doesn’t diminish his interests” scene. What scenes from Beautiful or Walking Disaster are you waiting to see see again exactly the same but with different names? Trenton buys Cami a plot gerbil? The students without Hulu? Tell us in the comments!

While talking about returning to the world of Beautiful Disaster and Walking Disaster in the series’ first spin-off, Beautiful Oblivion, Ariel and I joked that it would be like reading the same book for a third time. And then we wondered how much it would be the same book. So we made you this. You’re welcome.

Ariel and I brainstormed all these spaces over Skype and laughed, but that sort of horrified laughter knowing that we’re probably going to get quite a few bingos over the course of the book. So play along with us! Maybe you’ll get bingo multiple times over the course of the book! Maybe you’ll get bingo in one chapter alone. [Ariel says: At the end of each post, I'd love to know how many spots you think applied to each chapter even if you didn't get bingo. Also bonus points if you go back to the first two posts and play.] Keep this with you as you read the book with us, and post in the comments how you’re playing, and if you get bingo. Enjoy!

And if you want to make your own bingo boards, share them here! Somehow. Upload them somewhere and post a link in your comment? I don’t know internet.

I got confused about what post I was working on and accidentally titled this post Introducing Plot!Child: Insurgent Chapter 10. So spoilers for everyone reading our Beautiful Oblivion posts. [Matthew says: It's not what you think. It's stupider.]

Chapter 10

I found this chapter really odd in terms of structure. It starts with a really long scene where Tris and Susan realize there’s no privacy in the factionless bathrooms, so they take turns holding up a towel for each other. I mean, that’s all well and good, but it doesn’t exactly seem like this is some sort of epic bonding moment for Tris and Susan, nor does it seem like she’s going to play an important role in the book. [Matthew says: I've already forgotten who Susan is]

Sure, it gives Tris a brief moment of reflection about the life she and Susan could have led together if she’d stayed in Abnegation except…this would have all happened anyway, and they wouldn’t be raising kids next door to each other because Erudite still would have used Dauntless to attack Abnegation. It also isn’t effective in making us long for Tris to have a life like that because Susan doesn’t even manage to make that life sound idyllic. [Matthew says: Which I guess is a difficult job to ask of her since we just came from banjo farmer happy-drug land, so I don't know why it's the self-effacing and emotionless Susan's job to show Tris the idyllic existence she could have had. Golly, it's almost as if nothing in this book is conceptualized completely.]

We then abruptly shift gears to Tris vs. Mrs. Four’s mom Evelyn, which jumps right into Evelyn revealing Big News to Tris:

“I was Erudite before I was Abnegation.”

“Oh,” I say. “Guess you couldn’t keep up with a life of academia, then?”

She doesn’t take the bait. “Something like that, yes.” She pauses. “I imagine your father left for the same reason.” I almost turn away to end the conversation, but her words create a kind of pressure inside my mind, like she is squeezing my brain between her hands. I stare.

“Your father was born in Erudite,” she says. “His parents were friends with Jeanine Matthews’s parents, before they died. Your father and Jeanine used to play together as children. I used to watch them pass books back and forth at school.”

I know this is supposed to be a big deal, like when we found out Mrs. Tris’ mom was from Dauntless, but this doesn’t feel like it should…shock Tris to her core if that’s what this scene is even trying to convey. I’m not really fucking sure what this reaction is all about. “Squeezing my brain between her hands”?

Tris finds this hard to believe, but then she breaks it down for us:

The idea is so ridiculous to me that I half snort, half laugh. It can’t be true.

Except.

Except: He never talked about his family or his childhood.

Except: He did not have the quiet demeanor of someone who grew up in Abnegation.

Except: His hatred of Erudite was so vehement it must have been personal.

Wasn’t Tris always so frustrated because she couldn’t live up to her father who was the poster child for Abnegations everywhere? We never even had a chance to see any of these alleged dead giveaways that he wasn’t born into Abnegation. Sure, not talking about family or childhood is weird, but wouldn’t Tris have encountered this issue with both her parents? She didn’t wonder about her father sooner than this after finding out her mother was originally from Dauntless? Also, it seems like Erudite was giving everyone in Abnegation a reason to vehemently hate them.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is, if Tris suddenly found out Susan’s dad was originally from Mars, I would be equally as uninterested and uninvested.

Evelyn then reveals that Jeanine and Mr. Tris’ dad used to hang out a lot because their families were friends.

Still my reaction

Who the fuck cares? I feel like this is all leading to her father having helped create the evil mind-control code or something, but he’s dead so what consequences would that even have? Tris would be shocked/upset for five minutes and then…continue onwards. Unless it fucking turns out that Jeanine is Tris’ real mom, there really isn’t anything too groundbreaking that could come from this that I could think of.

Basically, what I’m trying to say is, if Tris suddenly found out Peter’s dad had played on the same little league team as her father during the annual faction little league tournaments, I would be equally as uninterested and uninvested.

[Matthew says: As a counter-argument, I don't think it's necessarily meaningless to reveal secrets about a character after they've already been killed off. De-sainting Dumbledore after his death not only forced uncertainty upon the characters' goals and direction in the last Harry Potter novel, but even made his character much more interesting. And if Dumbledore is an example where post-death reveals shake up the series' foundation, there are also characters like The Comedian in Watchmen where we know nothing about them before they die, but slowly unraveling who they were and why drives the bulk of the story for the characters left behind. I don't think Tris's father gets particularly close to either of these examples in terms of how he functions in the narrative, but I don't think he's an inherently hopeless case just because he's dead. Although, as Ariel points out, it's a completely different case when his story is dead too.]

For those of you familiar with our Crossfire posts, this scene soon becomes extremely similar to all the scenes where Eva confronts Gideon’s mother. Matt’s mentioned before how this serves to take away agency from Four and Gideon, and I just have to add that it continues to irritate me to no end that these scenes also serve as a way to make our protagonist seem really strong.

“Listen carefully,” I say, lowering my voice. I check over her shoulder for Tobias, to make sure he isn’t listening in. All I see is Caleb and Susan on the ground in the corner, passing a jar of peanut butter back and forth. No Tobias. “I’m not stupid,” I say. “I can see that you’re trying to use him. And I’ll tell him so, if he hasn’t figured it out already.”

“My dear girl,” she says. “I am his family. I am permanent. You are only temporary.”

“Yeah,” I say. “His mom abandoned him, and his dad beat him up. How could his loyalty not be with his blood, with a family like that?”

After this boring exchange of Making Tris Seem Like One Tough Cookie, Caleb tells Tris he’s going to accompany Susan to a safe house where more Abnegation are staying before meeting up with Tris and Four on their journey to Candor headquarters. Because we haven’t had enough of those guys yet!

Tris and Four go to Candor headquarters where lots of Dauntless guards are…guarding? [Matthew says: They didn't really figure out division of labor in this post-apocalyptic dystopia.]

“A Dauntless soldier with an arm in a sling approaches us, gun held ready, barrel fixed on Tobias.

“Identify yourselves,” she says. She is young, but not young enough to know Tobias.

The others gather behind her. Some of them eye us with suspicion, the rest with curiosity, but far stranger than both is the light I see in some of their eyes. Recognition. They might know Tobias, but how could they possibly recognize me?

Turns out they’ve been instructed to arrest Tris and Four upon their arrival for some reason that I’m sure is super fascinating.

Yesterday in Insurgent, Tris and Four get captured. Again. [Ariel says: Just another wacky adventure for our heroes.]

Chapter 11

Arriving at the headquarters of the series’ other totally neglected faction (which amazingly makes Insurgent charity for itself), Tris and Four find themselves arrested despite expecting to meet the friendly half of their divided faction.

Every faction is supposed to have holding rooms for those who make trouble, but I’ve never been in one before.

…you were just in one. Like, five chapters ago. [Ariel says: Tris isn't taking Amity's happy pills seriously enough!]

Tris tries to think about what they could have done that would make Candor and the “good” half of Dauntless treat them like an enemy, and eventually realizes that maybe it’s because she shot Will during the simulation.

I shot Will. I shot a number of other Dauntless. They were under the simulation, but maybe Candor doesn’t know that or doesn’t think it’s a good enough reason.

Man, if only they had some recorded evidence on a hard drive or something that would help them get out of this jam. IF ONLY.

They’re taken to Candor leader Jack Kang, whom Tris also describes as handsome, like basically every other character in this book. What the hell kind of apocalypse happened in Divergent that humanity only has the attractive genes left?

“They told me you seemed confused about why you were arrested,” he says. His voice is deep, but strangely flat, like it could not create an echo even at the bottom of an empty cavern. “To me that means either you’re falsely accused or good at pretending.”

To me, this book either has a plot or just has characters constantly talking about the plot.

Jack explains that Four is accused of crimes against humanity and Tris is accused of being his accomplice, which is an accusation they can make because, incredibly unsurprisingly…

“We saw video footage of the attack. You were running the attack simulation,” says Jack.
“How could you have seen that footage? We took the data,” says Tobias.
“You took one copy of the data.”

Jack explains that the footage was sent to all the computers throughout the city, so “all we saw was” Four running the simulation and then kicking Tris’s ass until – in a genuinely but probably unintentionally amusing moment where the novel’s actual adults desperately try to live in this inexplicable young adult fiction world – they “stopped [and] had a rather abrupt lovers’ reconciliation”. So Jack wants to interrogate them under truth serum, because Divergent is all about really, really easy ways to solve its problems.

[Ariel says: My immediate thought was, yet again, why is this happening if it's not going to add anything to the plot? I know Matt made a really good point yesterday about how introducing a fact about a character after they die can be really significant to the plot, but this series gives me 0 confidence that plot points occur or "important" information is revealed in order to lead to something that is actually significant and meaningful. When a book reveals something supposedly shocking about a character or has a major misunderstanding where the main characters are arrested/thought to be evil...it should feel important! I never thought I'd say this, but at least Crossfire filler is more amusing than this.]

“One possible reason [you stole the hard drive] is because the simulation was over and you didn’t want us to get our hands on it.” [...]
“The simulation didn’t end,” I say. “We stopped it, you-“
Jack holds up his hand. “I am not interested in what you have to say right now. The truth will come out when you are both interrogated under the influence of truth serum.”

Why are we even doing this? What are the stakes here? We’re waiting for our reliable first-person narrator to be forced to say what we already know will help them.

So since this new circumstance itself isn’t an actual source of narrative tension (Pro Writing Tip: don’t do that), there are three things that this plot mechanism is actually doing.

1. Teasing that Tris’s big secret (that she’s… divergent) will come out under the truth serum. But it won’t (or won’t matter), because the Divergent series has not yet actually been about divergence. It’s about mind-control drugs.
2. Teasing that Tris’s other big secret (that she killed Will) will come out under the truth serum. So Tris and Four will clear their names of crimes against humanity (like we know they will), and the book will return to the exact same boring status quo it was at before, except now Christina will be totally mad at Tris. [Ariel says: That'll teach Christina not to steal credit for winning capture the flag ever again.]
3. Promising that even though we already know the truth will (quite literally) set them free, actually getting there will be a long, circuitous process that will meaninglessly and meanderingly inflate the tension for just a little bit longer for the sake of tension, because, hey, we have 500 pages of YA to get through.

Speaking of Christina and tension for the sake of tension:

Christina shoves her way past the others and throws her arms around me. [...] Christina will be there at the interrogation. She will hear what I did to Will. She will never forgive me.

Unless I fight the serum, swallow the truth – if I can.

Christina asks Tris if she heard that Will died in the attack, and Tris covers up for now by saying that she saw him get shot on the monitors. But Tobias notices this.

He knows I didn’t see Will in the monitors, and he didn’t know that Will was dead.

Because apparently Tobias remembers everything he saw Tris seeing while he was under the influence of the mind-control simulation that made him not see things correctly.

Christina, the last of Tris’s original band of friends [Ariel says: Hey, let's not forget about Peter, the beloved asshole who is your asshole, so you let him stick around], tells us that the rest of the B-string A-Team of Uriah, not Uriah, and also not Uriah are still alive and well. Really, if I wrote their names, would you remember who you are? I’m already waiting for someone to write a comment asking who Uriah is.

Christina brings them to the interrogation room, where subtle subversive symbolism happens.

Most of Candor and the remnants of Dauntless are already gathered. Some of them sit on the tiered benches [and] the rest are crowded around the Candor symbol. In the center of the symbol, between the unbalanced scales, are two empty chairs. [Ariel says: It's a really slow day at Candor. Candor is basically like the dystopian version of the Students Without Netflix.]

There, a man named Niles administers the truth serum to Tobias.

Question of the Day! If you could get any animal in the world as a pet, but you had to name it after a character from a book we’ve read on this blog, what would it be and what would you name it? And why?

Previously, Trent said he was going to take Cami out to dinner. Cami is plotting ways to avoid this because those Maddox bros just don’t take no for an answer. One of their many many charming and shared characteristics.

Chapter 3

Cami informs Raegan that the plan is to tell Trent she isn’t there when he shows up, and she’ll hide in her room. Great plan, girls. You two should consider coming up with even more plans that lead to wacky hijinks and mayhem. Think Oceans 11, but for idiots. [Matthew says: ...I would actually watch the shit out of that movie.]

Just when Cami thinks Trent isn’t coming, the doorbell rings.

I was just beginning to relax as the obnoxious voice of Family Guy prattled on when the doorbell rang.

I’d like to draw your attention to “the obnoxious voice of Family Guy” portion of that sentence. Jamie McGuire, if you are going to try to show the “new adults” (side note: this term is real and it’s the worst) that you are hip to the max, please understand the difference between a character and a whole television program. [Matthew says: I like how she couldn't even bother to make her factually incorrect sentence grammatically correct. It should be "the Family Guy". Except it shouldn't, because that's not the character's name.]

Raegan turned the bolt lock and the knob, and then I heard her muffled voice. After a short pause, another voice that was much deeper hummed through the apartment. Trenton’s.

I know I’m being insanely nitpicky this chapter, but why is McGuire being so weird about voices in the span of a page? We know and expect that Trenton is coming over, so why not just say “Trenton’s voice hummed through the apartment”? Even the least astute reader in the world knows that it would have only been surprising if it wasn’t Trenton’s voice, you know, humming through the apartment. [Matthew says: And we already know it's not the voice of another character from Family Guy because apparently Family Guy is the only character on Family Guy now.]

Almost immediately, the plan is cast aside just like Abby’s cardigans were after the first chapter of Beautiful Disaster. Oh the good old days! Raegan comes into Cami’s room and tells her that Trenton “fights dirty.” Cami goes into the living room and sees a little girl standing next to Trenton.

She was breathtaking. Her enormous green eyes were like telescopes, disappearing behind her long, dark lashes every time she blinked. Long, platinum hair cascaded down her back and shoulders.

For a hot minute I thought Cami was going to be struck with jealousy. You can’t blame me; it’s the only reaction female protagonists in these books seem to have when encountering other females in the wild, especially when they start their observations off with “She was breathtaking”, which is also a fucking weird way to describe a little girl.

I’ll let you in on a little secret. I had way more fun reading this chapter when I started imagining plot!child as Honey Boo Boo.

I promise, it makes everything so much better.

Trenton nodded to the tiny, perfect person [Ariel says: *tiny, perfect plot!child*] next to him. “This is Olive. Her parents bought the house next door to my dad’s two years ago. She’s my buddy.”

Oh my goodness gracious why on earth are her parents letting her hang out with this fool? Whoever is responsible for placing the call to the ASPCA about plot!puppy, can you please also call child services to report gross negligence on the part of plot!child’s parents?

But how exactly does this child earn her title of plot!child? I’ll allow her to explain.

“Twent said he would take me to Chicken Joe’s, but we can’t go until yow weddy.” She blinked, but didn’t smile. She was serious, and she was seriously holding me accountable for every second longer she had to wait.

I hope you all have your bingo boards at the ready. PLOT CONTRIVANCE TO GET THEM TOGETHER ALERT. The emotional manipulations of the Maddox bros has reached strange, new heights. [Matthew says: Because sequels and spin-offs always get better once you introduce an adorable, irritating child character.] How could Cami resist such blatant, and also idiotic, emotional manipulation?

He pulled the seat belt across his chest and clicked it into the latch, and then looked at me expectantly.
“Click it or ticket,” Olive said from the backseat.
“Oh,” I said, turning to grab the seat belt and repeating what Trenton had just completed.

Two things here:

1. This would have been the appropriate place to mention Trenton’s past car accident without it being awkwardly shoved into the second chapter.

2. That is officially the weirdest way to describe putting on a seat belt ever. In case we were like DID CAMI PUT HER SEATBELT ON LIKE TRENTON? If not, they aren’t soul mates. Or in case we weren’t sure that Cami was up for the insurmountable task of putting on her seatbelt.

At Chicken Joe’s (which is essentially McDonald’s with an arcade [Matthew says: Ariel, that's Chuck E Cheese. You need to come spend some time in America again. And not go to Chuck ECheese.]), plot!child runs off to play some games, so Cami finally has a chance to call Trenton out on his tactics.

“Exploiting a child is not a good first date. [Matthew says: Never forget this is a real sentence in this book, btw.] That’s not exactly a memory you want to share later.”
“Who said this was a date? I mean . . . if you want to call it a date, that’s cool, but I thought you had a boyfriend.”
I nearly choked on my own spit, but that was still preferable to blushing. “Forgive me for thinking coercion was something you didn’t do for just anyone.”

I don’t think whether or not he’d do this for anyone has any bearing on whether or not this is a date – it’s the fact that you have a boyfriend, Cami, and you have also expressed nothing but disinterest in Trenton.

Why can’t Cami at least have a different attitude towards Trenton than Abby did towards Travis. I get that some people adored the shit out of those books, but wouldn’t even diehard fans want to feel a little bit like it was a different story? [Matthew says: Aren't we ignoring Cami's character that was already established in Beautiful/Walking Disaster? Wasn't she a badass bartender stock character with finger tattoos that spelled out "BABY DOLL"? Why have those tattoos never been mentioned IN HER OWN STORY, where she instead acts exactly like Abby?]

While discussing food options, Cami notices a dad yelling at his son. My notes in my ebook are very astute, worrying that Trent is going to start something with this dad because of course he will.

“Why do I even bother bringing you to places like this?” he yelled.
“I was thinking the same thing,” Trenton said.
The father turned around, two deep horizontal lines in the center of his forehead.
“I mean, you don’t really act like you want your kid running around, playing, or having fun in general. Why would you bring him here if you just want him to sit still?”
“No one asked you, asshole,” the man said, turning around.
“No, but if you keep talking to your son like that, I’m going to ask you to step outside.”

Let’s pause for a moment to think about how we’re supposed to perceive this and how we should actually perceive this exchange. It’s pretty clear we’re meant to be on Trent’s side because Jamie McGuire has a massive boner for the Maddox family. But say this dad is actually a really nasty human being and is a genuinely abusive father instead of just stressed out or something. What the fuck would Trent stepping outside with him to fight accomplish? In fact, I would bet the father would just take his anger and humiliation out on his kid again later, not be forever reformed and remorseful because of Savior Trenton.

I also don’t imagine the kid would look fondly back on that time someone beat the shit out of his dad in the parking lot of Chicken Joe’s. Trenton is not Batman. Okay? He’s just not. This kid will not grow up remembering him as a hero. Instead, it sounds like a horrific backstory that someone on an episode of American Horror Story would have to explain why they go on murder sprees at Chicken Joe’s around the country. It’s just weirdly stupid enough to work on that show.

But just when you thought this scene couldn’t get worse, it does, but for different reasons. Because not only does the book seem to want us to believe Trent is a hero, it also wants us to believe he’s an angel.

The man faced us again, began to speak, but something in Trenton’s eyes made the man think better of it. “He’s hyper.”
Trenton shrugged. “Hey, man, I get it. You’re here by yourself. It’s probably been a long day.”
The lines above the man’s eyes softened. “It has.”
“So let him burn off some energy. He’ll be worn-out when he gets home. Kinda silly to bring him to an arcade and then get yourself all worked up when he wants to play.”
Shame darkened the man’s face, he nodded a few times, and then he turned around, nodding once to his son. “Sorry, buddy. Go play.”

Because whatever that man saw in Trent’s eyes was life changing. [Matthew says: It was love. And machismo.] And then when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, for some reason we have to learn this man’s entire backstory.

After a few awkward moments of silence, Trenton started a conversation with the man, and they began chitchatting about where they worked,  Christopher, and Olive. Eventually we learned that the man’s name was Randall, and he was a newly single father. Chris’s mother was an addict and living with a boyfriend in the next town over, and Chris was having trouble adjusting.

Trenton may be working part time at a tattoo parlour, but really his dream is to be a therapist. A therapist WHO WEILDS DUAL GLOCKS LIKE A BADASS MOFO!

When it was time for them to leave, Randall held out his hand, and Trenton shook it. Christopher watched both men, grinned, and then took his dad’s hand. They left, both of them with smiles on their faces.

And thus Trent has set a new course for this family with the power of…something in his eyes.

Afterwards, plot!child wants pie. So multiple pages are dedicated to pie, which is slightly preferably to the previous scene.

Trent drops Cami off at home and tries to convince her to make this a weekly thing. She says it isn’t a good idea, but she tells Raegan how much fun she had once she gets inside. The chapter ends with T.J. calling because plot!child can’t steal all of plot!boyfriend’s thunder, damn it.

Question: What do you think of the term “new adult fiction“? Should it die a violent death or are you cool with it? [Matthew says: Didn't we already have a term for that? I think it was called "fiction".]

That didn’t take long. [Ariel says: Matt, I read the title of this post before I read the actual chapter and immediately ticked off the "things moving too quickly" space on the Bingo Board because I'm going to argue the Chicken Joe adventure did count as a first date, and why the fuck is Trenton already declaring they're going to fall in love?]

Chapter 4

Cami goes to hang out with her coworkers at the bar before opening, even though she doesn’t work that day. We’ve gone to the bar Cami works at twice now, and she hasn’t even had a shift yet, because everybody who works at this bar never goes anywhere else, apparently. Speaking of everybody who works at this bar, the Beautiful and/or Disaster series continues its penchant for writing insanely unappealing characters. We’re introduced to:

• Jorie, whose first sentence describing her is “If it was possible to flirtatiously chomp on a piece of gum, she was doing it”, so that’s Jorie. She’s also dating:
• Hank, who “was responsible for the end of at least a dozen marriages in our little town” and “was notorious for paying attention to barely legal young women just long enough to dip his stick”, so he sounds lovely. [Ariel adds: Matthew, you completely forgot the epic romantic backstory of Jorie and Hank that is defo going to get it's own fucking spinoff. Jorie refused to date Hank who is, like, 12 years older and a total manwhore like 60% of the men in this town based on what we know about this place. Anyway, Jorie decided to date Hank once he changed for her, which is the foundation of at least 40% of all relationships in this town.]
• Tuffy, who was a bouncer, but got fired, and then was rehired as a DJ, until he got fired again after his third divorce, and is now on his fourth wife and got rehired checking IDs at the door, and now we know who the most insanely depressing character in this series is. And also how seriously nobody is ever not going to this stupid bar.
• Gruber, who is on the football team [Ariel adds: There is a really long part of this scene dedicated to explaining how Kody call's him Booby, and how it used to be funny, but now it's not. Also, Kody played football too until he busted his knee. Then he couldn't be the start of the team anymore, and Gruber gives him shit. SO NOW YOU KNOW.]
• Rafe, who is a DJ and, fuck it, it’s not like we’re going to remember who any of these interchangeably awful characters are

Lastly, we meet Blia, who returns us to what’s really important: how big a deal it is to literally every person in this town that Cami and Trenton are totally gonna bang.

“Holy shit the bed, Cami! Debra Tillman told my mom that you were at Chicken Joe’s with Trenton Maddox!” Blia said.

Oh, Blia, you’re already my least favorite character. [Ariel says: Forget the Students Without Netflix, it's all about the Coworkers Without Netflix this time around. Whooooole new book, guys!]. And Travis technically counts as a character in this book, so that’s pretty impressive. Cami explains that Trenton brought a little girl he was babysitting and coerced her into going, which prompts Jorie to ask if TJ knows and if that isn’t awkward.

Raegan sat down on a stool, and Kody stood next to her. “I can’t find my damn keys. I’ve looked for them everywhere!”
I leaned forward. “Seriously?” Our apartment keys were on that key ring.

Now, this would seemingly be the most obvious hint ever that Trenton stole the keys in what the novel will inevitably misconstrue as a romantic gesture, but it’s actually way stupider than that. [Ariel says: Oh my god, I'm so happy you said that, because I wrote, "Quick, change the locks, Trent's a' coming! In my notes as soon as this happened.]

We all sucked in a collective gasp when TJ appeared. He was holding up a set of shiny keys. [...]
“What are you doing here?” I whispered.
“I felt horrible.”
“That’s sweet, but what are you really doing here?”
TJ sighed. “The job. [...] I can’t stay. My plane leaves in an hour. [...] I debated whether it would be worse to only see you for a second, or to not see you at all.”

TJ leaves literally as soon as he got there, making his first actual appearance about two pages. When Ariel and I made the “arbitrary love triangle is arbitrary” joke on the Bingo board, I didn’t think it’d be this transparently arbitrary. (Don’t forget the bingo board! This is a great chapter to play it with!) [Ariel says: I'm sorry I linked to it at the start of this post already, but whatever, click it twice; it's worth it.]

Of course, this is a Jamie McGuire novel, so everybody is a disgusting human being. (I’ll get into this more later.)

“If you ask me,” Hank said, crossing his arms over his chest, “that little bastard rushed home to piss on you real quick.”

This is a reference to how animals urinate on things to mark their territory, but the book doesn’t really make it clear that this is a metaphor, so it just makes it seem like TJ is into some really weird stuff.

Everybody keeps asking Cami about how WEIRD it is that TJ isn’t threatened by Trenton. Just in case we’re being too subtle, it’s WEIRD.

Blia rested her cheek on her hand. “Holy shit balls, Cami. Your whole situation is complicated.”

Oh dear God, that’s her catchphrase? We’re going to have to read some crude derivation on “holy shit” that doesn’t even make sense multiple times throughout this book? Holy shit sandwich! See, I can portmanteau two sayings both vaguely involving shit too. It only makes both of them sound stupider. [Ariel says: Holy shit the bed, I never ever thought that I'd find Anastasia Steele's use of "holy shit" to be preferable to another characters'. To be fair, though, I say holy shit balls, but definitely not 'holy shit the bed' and definitely not within the same hour.]

Later, Trenton shows up uninvited at Cami’s apartment in the rain, because romance. [Ariel says: And excuses to take clothes off. I can't believe that wasn't on the bingo board! "Male protagonist finds excuse to remove clothes and show off muscles" it was right under our noses!]

My cell phone buzzed. It was Trenton.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Open your door, loser. It’s raining.”

What about not opening a door for someone you don’t know is there make you a loser? Why is calling someone a loser supposed to be flirtatious? Why does Trenton sound like Regina George?

But seriously though.

Cami offers Trenton a dry change of clothing, because obviously.

“Think Kody will mind if I go commando under his sweats?”
“Yes, and so will I,” I said.
Trenton feigned disappointment.

The book does not acknowledge that offering your roommate’s significant other’s clothes to someone without their permission is kind of a dick move, but whatever, Trenton getting naked around Cami wasn’t going to shoehorn its way into this novel so soon otherwise. Holy shit butt naked! (See? Still stupid.) [Ariel says: Kara, roommate of the century, would never have stood for this bullshit.]

Trenton explains that he’s there because Raegan told him Cami was alone and bored, which is a good thing to tell to a notorious womanizer whom your roommate has expressly stated they have no interest in. Trenton continues to have no other character outside of being an obnoxious, presumptive, testoterone-driven asshole:

“[Olive] is fucking adorable. I’m going to have to kill at least one teenage boy one of these days.”

He turns on a football game on the TV, and is surprised when Cami expresses disappointment not in the game, but how much the Forty-Niners suck this year, because women, ya know? Holy shit sportsball!

I looked over to Trenton when I realized he was staring at me. “What?”
“I was just thinking now was as good a time as any to acknowledge that you’re perfect and it wouldn’t suck if you fell madly in love with me anytime soon.”

True. I guess if we’re being so transparent about how little the narrative structure matters to this book, only 16% of the way into the book is pretty literally as good a time as any. [Ariel adds: Holy shit cliches, I can’t express how much I hate the whole “female protagonist makes vaguely knowledgable comment about sports. Is labeled perfect immediately” trope.]

Amazingly, Cami’s reaction is pretty blandly emotionless:

“I have a boyfriend,” I reminded him.

Opposite of amazingly, Trenton’s response continues to be obnoxious and presumptive.

He waved me away. “Speed bump.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s a pretty hot speed bump.”
Trent scoffed. “You’ve seen me nearly naked, baby doll. You long-distance boy doesn’t look anything like this.”
I watched as he flexed his arm.

Just in case you were wondering if Trenton would ever treat Cami as anything other than an object any time soon, the book answers with a resounding, deafening “no”:

“Everyone knows about the Maddox brothers.”
“Especially,” Trenton said, standing up on the cushions and putting one foot on one side of me, the other he wedged between me and the arm of his couch, “this Maddox brother!” He began bouncing and, at the same time, flexing his muscles in different poses.

I’m not even mad about the disgusting levels of heteronormativity and machismo in this book anymore. Now I’m just really confused about I’m even reading. [Ariel says: I am actually impressed this book turned me off in ways I didn't even know were possible. I thought Travis and Gideon and Christian had covered all of those bases, but I was missing Trenton Maddox.]

This turns into sexy play-fighting before this absolutely priceless exchange happens:

“We’re not doing anything wrong.”
“Yeah, it’s kind of wrong. If I was your girlfriend, would you think this is okay?”
“Hell yeah. I’d expect this shit to be a nightly event.”
“No. I mean with someone else.”
Trenton’s face fell. “Definitely not.”

For fuck’s sake, what’s he acting all offended about? He’s doing this exact same thing that he’s just declared isn’t okay behavior as an absolute. This is the shit I hate about this series. The men in it act so fucking entitled, but then also deeply offended that people would ever consider acting so dishonorably, which would be as dishonorably as they do, literally all the time.

Case in point:

“Cal said that he’s for sure going to need someone at the desk. [...] He said, and I quote, ‘Someone hot, Trent. Someone with nice tits.'”

I’m trying to imagine what mindset you have to be in to write a character who uses lines like this to get the girl, never changes from this “by golly, if this doesn’t get a girl wet, bitch just can’t take a compliment” attitude, and is a character the reader is supposed to be rooting for. [Ariel says: And falling in love with. There are women out there who want to marry a Maddox brother.] Holy shit personality.

“Every girl’s dream job.” [Cami said.] Answering phones and handing out waivers while being ordered around by a sexist asshole.”
“He’s not an asshole. Sexist, yes, but not an asshole.”

It’s nice that there are romantic dreamboat men like Trenton to mansplain that sexism and asshole-ism are mutually exclusive behaviors for the rest of us.

You guys already know about this one, right?

I’d like to go on a brief tangent about unlikeable characters for a moment here, because I just recently started reading Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist (go read it!), which has an essay on unlikeable characters in fiction that really got me thinking. In the essay, titled “Not Here to Make Friends”, Gay describes how:

In literature, as in life, the rules are all too often different for girls. There are many instances in which an unlikeable man is billed as an antihero, earning a special term to explain those ways in which he deviates from the norm, the traditionally likeable. [...] When women are unlikeable, it becomes a point of obsession in critical conversations by professional and amateur critics alike. Why are these women daring to flaunt convention? Why aren’t they making themselves likeable (and therefore acceptable) to polite society? [...] A reader [is] here to make friends with the characters in a book and [doesn't] like what she found.

This got me thinking about my complaints on this blog about characters like Abby’s friend America, or anyone from House of Night. I frequently criticized America for being the world’s worst best friend, and railed against Zoey’s selfishness, racism, homophobia, and lack of self-awareness. In my defense, I criticize male characters in these books just as much, if not more (although that may be because unlike Anastasia Steel, Christian Gray actually has a character to dislike), but this is a very, very partial defense, partly because of feminist literary theory (I’ll probably get into this more at a more relevant time), but also partly because of the unlikeable character as a concept. So what if I don’t like these characters? Male or female? The point of reading stories isn’t, as Gay explains, to make friends. Maybe Trenton Maddox is an antihero – that really mucks up my argument, huh?

[Ariel says: In my opinion, you don't have to defend yourself at all, Matt. I don't think we're necessarily are hating on these women because they're daring to flaunt conventions...for me, a massive part I hate them is precisely because we're constantly told they're flaunting conventions but they're not. It's because they're such poorly drawn, awful characters that are unfortunately the product of incredibly lazy and shitty writing. To be fair, though, I personally like Aphrodite, Kara, and even Tris has her moments where I'm a big fan. Not lately. But when I read the first book!

You can write an unlikable character that is interesting and compelling (and maybe even likeable in some ways), but none of these characters have that, and that's the difference. For instance, I love Buffy but there were times I hated her, that she infuriated me, but it didn't make me hate the character (or the show) as a whole. Your friends aren't perfect, and you don't always get along with them, but for me that's one of my favourite things about a story. I mainly come to make friends. Just not friends with these bozos.]

In a later essay, “How We All Lose”, Gay further defends unlikeable characters, this time (somewhat unexpectedly) with an example about a womanizing man:

This is fiction, and if people cannot be flawed in fiction there’s no place left for us to be human.

This insight kicks ass, and yet I complain about unlikeable characters a lot on this blog. But I don’t feel like I’m particularly wrong. And defending my criticism with “but they’re supposed to be likeable, though!” isn’t relevant, because the book is what it is regardless (AKA the intentional fallacy). But instead of the “fiction” part of Gay’s statement, maybe the answer is in the “human” part. We’re all familiar with the expression “To err is human”, but none of the erring we see from the Trenton Maddoxes and Christian Greys (or Zoeys) of the literary world feel very human. If the point of flawed, unlikeable people in fiction is to provide a place to let the reader feel that side of humanity, I think it’s fair to criticize those qualities when the air in that place is too thin to support human life.

ANYWAY, back to our smut.

Cami doesn’t begin considering taking the job until, suddenly, an arbitrary reason for her to raise money appears! Holy shit sin of convenience!

“I’m a little behind [on car payments," Coby texted me.] “I was wondering if you could spot me some cash.”
My blood ran cold. The last time Coby got behind on his bills, it was because he was sinking his entire paycheck into steroids. [...]
“Are you using again?”
“Really, Cami? Goddamn…”
“Really. Are you using?” [...]
“Yeah.”

Surprise! A minor character suddenly has a drug problem out of nowhere that exists primarily to make the main character look like a great person. Wait a second, this sounds oddly familiar…

Yes. Beautiful Oblivion has just The Room‘d us. This is the quality of the book we’re reading right now: It’s just lifted a narrative device from The Room, because it worked out so well that time.

[Ariel says: It also stole the plot of Beautiful/Walking Disaster…you know where Abby’s dad needed money, so he was like, “Okay, go gamble for me in Vegas becuz you stole all my luck. Thanks, bai.” 

Cami agrees to pay the bill if Coby enrolls in a program for his drug abuse.

But because Cami now needs the money to help out Coby,

she tells Trenton

that she

will take

the job. Holy shit oh hi Mark, you guys, it’s The fucking Room.

What a story!

Question of the day! What’s the best fake Blia-ism you can come up with? It’s super easy and it doesn’t even have to make sense, because it’s not like they do anyway. Holy shit on a hot tin roof! Holy shitcar named desire! See? Dead simple.

Members of Dauntless think Tris and Four were responsible for the Mind Control. Now, to get to the bottom of things, truth serum! Because if the book doesn’t feature serum in 95% of chapters, it’s not doing its job.

Chapter 12

The Dauntless interrogator, Niles, starts off with a few basic warm-up questions. You know, to ease them into the serum, which would be all well and good if this needed to be done for any of the other serums used in the series. “Now, let’s start off by making a choice that’s easier than knives vs. cheese. Who is your favourite Jonas brother?”

Niles makes it even easier and asks Four what his name is:

He scowls and squirms in the chair, and through gritted teeth says, “Four.”
Maybe it isn’t possible to lie under the truth serum, but to select which version of the truth to tell: Four is his name, but it is not his name.
“That is a nickname,” Niles says. “What is your real name?” [Ariel says: It’s not even just that it’s a nickname, because I get what Tris is trying to say in the stupidest way ever – it’s more than a nickname to him, it represents his independence, his freedom from his past, etc. Literally adding in one word to that sentence would have made it significantly less stupid. “Four is his name, but it is not his real name.”]
“Tobias,” he says.

Also, stop trying to make this more complicated than it is, Tris. Obviously it’s not about selecting the “version of the truth” it’s about actually believing what you’re saying…Four thinks of his name as being Four, so it’s the truth. Holy shit duh!

Niles then asks Four what his parents’ names are, and he’s like, “Why is this relevant?” Everyone gasps, and Christina takes this moment to offer up some helpful exposition:

“It’s extremely difficult not to immediately answer questions while under the truth serum,” she says. “It means he has a seriously strong will. And something to hide.”

OR THAT HE IS DIVERGENT AS FUCK! [Matthew says: Or that this book is making up its rules as it goes. As fuck!] Man, being Divergent is so much more boring than this series would like us to believe.

Eventually, Niles gets Four to admit he left Abnegation to get away from Marcus and everyone in the room whispers, “Thank you for your honesty” thus making Candor somehow the creepiest faction of them all. And Abnegation is pretty fucking creepy. What confuses me, though, is that it sounds like Dauntless is also whispering this? Which is even weirder. When in Rome, I guess.

“Is your allegiance with your current faction, Tobias?” Niles says.
“My allegiance lies with anyone who does not support the attack on Abnegation,” he says.
“Speaking of which,” Niles says, “I think we should focus on what happened that day. What do you remember about being under the simulation?”

Um, yeah, I would say you should probably focus on the thing that caused you to interrogate him in the first place. Can you imagine if an interrogation with a terrorist went like this. “What’s your name? How old are you? Tell me about your childhood. Wait…what were we doing again?” [Matthew says: But Ariel! How else will we hit the mandatory 500 pages of young adult trilogy book?!]

Then Four has a moment that actually surprises me by how much I enjoyed it. Basically, before Candor can accept him, and because a truth serum is a plot device that can’t go to waste, the interrogator asks Four what his biggest regret is, and he says it was choosing Dauntless. Gasp. Shock. Murmer murmer.

“I was born for Abnegation. I was planning on leaving Dauntless, and becoming factionless. But then I met her, and… I felt like maybe I could make something more of my decision.” [...]
“Choosing Dauntless in order to escape my father was an act of cowardice,” he says. “I regret that cowardice. It means I am not worthy of my faction. I will always regret it.”

That’s a real character regret that I can understand. Obviously, I don’t agree with Four, but this is absolutely something I think would eat at him. I also have to say that after spending a lot of time with the Maddox brothers again, I appreciate Four. Thank you for not being a total fucktard, Four.

I don’t mean to gloss over this too much, but Tris is interrogated next, and she finds that she can resist the serum if she wants. [Matthew says: Of course.] At first, she uses this to her advantage to skip over the fact that she killed Will during the events of the last book, and everyone is super impressed by her:

“Just to clarify,” says Niles. “Are you telling me that you were almost murdered by the Erudite … and then fought your way into the Dauntless compound … and destroyed the simulation?”
“Yes,” I say.
“I think I speak for everyone,” he says, “when I say that you have earned the title of Dauntless.”
Shouts rise up from the left side of the room, and I see blurs of fists pressing into the dark air. My faction, calling to me.

But she winds up confessing it when asked about her biggest regrets. To be fair, no one seems to give all that many fucks aside from Christina, which we figured.

Otherwise, it’s just not all that interesting because we already saw all of these events from Tris’ point of view, and her big revelation to herself is that she left Abnegation because she felt too selfish, and she wanted to be free. But we already knew both of those things!

Oh, yeah, Tris also confesses to being Divergent like Four. But it’s really not that exciting. [Matthew says: The single biggest deal in this series is unceremoniously discarded somewhere ambiguously in Act I of the sequel. Why do we care about anything anymore.] The one thing I really did like about her scene was this:

“He was going to kill me, but I killed him. My friend.” Will, with the crease between his eyebrows, with green eyes like celery and the ability to quote the Dauntless manifesto from memory. I feel pain in my stomach so intense that I almost groan. It hurts to remember him. It hurts every part of me.

And there is something else, something worse that I didn’t realize before. I was willing to die rather than kill Tobias, but the thought never occurred to me when it came to Will. I decided to kill Will in a fraction of a second.

I feel bare. I didn’t realize that I wore my secrets as armor until they were gone, and now everyone sees me as I really am.

We bitched about this in the past, that Tris killed Will so easily but not, say, Eric or Peter. I do like that the book addresses this and is kind of like, sometimes we just really fuck up when we’re in a shitty situation. And, I mean, we don’t actually know if Tris fucked up, it really might have been the only way out of that mess. [Matthew says: True. This is why I try not to criticize too much about main characters missing important things, because maybe the point is they miss it? And then they grow? So Insurgent surprised me here! The rest of the surprises are that nothing else is happening in this book.]

Anywho, my question is, do any of you watch Mad Men? I gave up on it awhile but, but gave it another go recently and fell completely in love with it. I still thought the first couple seasons were good but nothing special, but man it gets so freaking good!

It’s no secret that my favorite books are generally ones where nobody is happy and everything is depressing, so it’s actually pretty weird that Insurgent isn’t right up my alley by this point.

Chapter 13

“This point” being that Tris was just sort of forced to admit that she was sort of forced to kill Will. Which sort of undercuts the themes we’re trying to work with.

“He had a gun,” I say. “He was about to shoot me. He was under the simulation.” [...] the only words I can think of – I’m sorry – sound more like an insult than an apology. Sorry is what you are when you bump someone with your elbow, what you are when you interrupt someone. I am more than sorry.

It’s a little much, but Tris is going through a lot right now. Given the severity of the emotions, I can probably forgive some prose that’s less than-

“You killed him,” she says. Her words sound bigger than words usually do, like they expanded in her mouth before she spoke them.

Nevermind. I completely forgot what I was saying.

Depicted: a slightly goofier way to write that last sentence. Slightly.

Tris reunites with Uriah (the Dauntless-born Dauntless initiate that befriended Tris in the last book, unless you watched the movie, in which case he wasn’t important enough to be included). Uriah is much more understanding about Tris’s actions, reassuring her that she “did what you had to do” in order to “save us from being Erudite slaves”.

That only leaves us with Tobias’s reaction to Tris’s confession.

“We can talk about it tomorrow,” he says. Quietly. Quiet is dangerous, with Tobias.

Ah, the “dangerous” upset boyfriend trope. Good thing we always have male anger to fall back on as a barometer for happiness in a relationship in these books. People can’t just be upset with each other, but we have to reinforce that the woman has to be in danger to indicate she’s “in the wrong”. Yes, I have been reading a lot of feminist theory lately. Why?

[Ariel adds: I also can’t remember other times he’s been quiet before being dangerous specifically…Please remind me in the comments if you do.]

That night, Tris can’t sleep and wanders around, and symbolism happens.

I set my hands on the back of the chair. It’s plain: wooden, a little creaky. How strange that something so simple could have been instrumental in my decision to ruin one of my most important relationships, and damage another.

This is why people hate English majors. This right here. It’s a fucking chair. Trying a little hard to explain yourself, book. [Ariel says: The chair wasn’t instrumental at all! The chair had nothing to do with anything that happened in that room. It would be like if I was sitting on my couch when I found out that (god forbid) The Walking Dead was cancelled, and then I was like, “I have to burn my couch! It was instrumental in this horrific news.”] 

Except, amazingly, in this case it’s the other way around.

Tris dwells on her guilt over Will and “everyone else’s judgment as well as my own”, and Insurgent wants to make it really clear that you get what its message is on this particular page.

The Candor sing the praises of the truth, but they never tell you how much it costs.

To be fair, one of the major advantages of first-person narratives is hearing the main character’s insights and revelations as their story progresses, which often overlap with the work’s major themes. But I’m pretty sure that by this point – 29% of the way into Insurgent and with no sign of any direction whatsoever about where the narrative plans on going since the ending of the last book – the story is Tris’s insights and revelations. At a certain point, we don’t want to hear about the main character’s grand revelations about the themes of the book because she saw a chair or thought about the last book in the series; we want to read a goddamn book.

Speaking of the entire narrative consisting of Tris thinking about the narrative, Tris contemplates suicide. Maybe. I don’t really care. I don’t get what the stakes are. We’re still only 29% of the way into the book, so I’m pretty sure she’s not gonna jump despite her new revelation about revelations.

And then I think of Al.
I wonder how long Al stood at the ledge before he pitched himself over it, into the Dauntless Pit.
He must have stood there for a long time, making a list of all the terrible things he had done – almost killing me was one of those things – and another list of all the good [...] and then decided that he was tired. Tired, no just of living, but of existing. Tired of being Al. [...]
For the first time I feel like I understand Al. I am tired of being Tris. [...]
Another few inches [from the ledge] and my weight would pull me to the ground. [...]
But I can’t do it. My parents lost their lives out of love for me. Losing mine for no good reason would be a terrible way to repay them for that sacrifice

I’m torn. On the one hand, it’s a pretty raw scene and conveys how much shit is swimming through Tris’s mind by this point. On the other hand, barely any narrative has happened since the last “this point”. Everything that is happening is coming from a thing that came from a thing that came from a thing that came from an actual event. If I had to write a high-level summary of Insurgent thus far, I’d have nothing to say, aside from how we visited Hufflepuff, other Hufflepuff, and the Hufflepuff that’s so Hufflepuff it’s not even allowed in the same group as the other Hufflepuffs.

And then it feels like there’s something problematic about Tris assuming she understands Al’s suicide? [Ariel says: I didn’t read this so much as assuming she understands as projecting her own feelings onto the only person she thinks can understand her at this moment. I weirdly liked this scene. I think it would be really easy for it to feel overdramatic, but I can understand why in that moment she feels so alone and exhausted and tired of being herself that she would contemplate this. Like how many more times do I have to visit Hufflepuff! It’s the worst! But actually, if you write down everything that has happened to her in the past…however long it’s been…it’s pretty fucking shitty.] [Matthew adds: Yeah, I kinda wasn’t sure if it might read like this too, hence why I didn’t right a whole thing about this maybe problematic angle. It’s weird! It rubbed me the wrong way, but Tris’s feelings felt markedly genuine too.]

Anyway, hope you’re ready for a stark reminder that you’re (probably) not this book’s target audience, because it’s time for a teenage boyfriend/girlfriend fight! Albeit a fight about desperate actions taken during war, yet somehow still overshadowed by “these are teenagers”.

“You didn’t tell me,” he says. “Why not?”
“Because I didn’t…” I shake my head. “I didn’t know how to.”
He scowls. “It’s pretty easy, Tris-”
“Oh yeah,” I say, nodding. “It’s so easy. All I have to do is go up to you and say, ‘By the way, I shot Will, and now guilt is ripping me to shreds, but what’s for breakfast?’ Right? Right?”

FINALLY.

“I’m sorry.” [Four says.] “I shouldn’t pretend that I understand.”

Feel free to say this more often, Tobias. And every male love interest in every book we read. Don’t feel you have to limit yourselves when admitting you’re not experts of all things human condition. Good lord, am I sick of Tobias and his mansplaining.

Tobias says that he wishes Tris trusted him enough to tell him. She counters that he didn’t tell her that his mom was still alive. He claims that he was going to tell her eventually. Then… I don’t even know.

“I did tell you about Will!” I say. “That wasn’t truth serum; it was me. I said it because I chose to. [...] I could have lied [under the serum]; I could have kept it from you. But I didn’t because I thought you deserved to know the truth.”

If you’re currently thinking about how stupid it was that she suddenly and conveniently didn’t have to tell the truth under the truth serum but then chose to anyway because specialness of strength of character, don’t worry! It gets stupider.

“What a way to tell me!” he says, scowling. “In front of over a hundred people! How intimate!”

Okay, “sexy” and “intimate” aren’t the same thing, but neither are “intimate” and “hey, I need to tell you I was forced to shoot my friend in the face”

The fight ends inconclusively with neither of them sure what to say or do! Just like Insurgent.

Question of the Day: What’s a good scary movie that came out relatively recently? My friends from back in my hometown and I really liked The Conjuring and we’re hoping to find something kinda like that to watch when I meet up with them over Christmas. No, this question has nothing to do with Divergent; I’m basically just hoping at least one person reading this can do me a solid. [Ariel says: The Babadook is meant to be like that and very good. Allegedly has a good plot and is scary without relying on gore and such.] 

Full disclosure, I stayed up until 2 am last night finishing this book just to find out what the shitty twist at the end was. And, oh, was it shitty. I have so so many jokes written, I am dying to spoil it all.

Because I’m not going to spoil the Big Secret, what I can tell you is that Blando DOES show up in this book, and so does plot!puppy, and ‘bagged’ is still a thing for reasons that are beyond my ability to understand. Kara, alas, does not appear, so no fanservice for any of us.

Chapter 5

Cami goes to apply for the receptionist job at Skin Deep Tattoo where Trent works, which immediately leads to wacky misogynistic adventures:

“Jesus Christ, Calvin,” Trenton said. He was looking at the large Chinese mural on the wall, trying not to notice that Calvin couldn’t manage to stare anywhere else but at my breasts.

Meet Calvin, owner of Skin Deep Tattoo. He exists to somehow make Trent look less misogynistic. It’s also confusing to me why Trent is looking at the mural, pretending Calvin isn’t looking at Cami’s breasts, while he is yelling at him regarding staring at said breasts.

But more importantly, what is Trent wearing today?

Trenton’s red ball cap was on backward, and his boots were untied. On anyone else the look would have appeared sloppy and screamed douche bag, but somehow the look made Trenton even more appealing.

Meet Cami, the world’s most unreliable narrator. There’s no easier way to lose all credibility than to say something would have looked douchey on anyone else but Trenton Maddox. That’s like saying Trucker hats made Ashton Kutcher more appealing – they didn’t, and I’m still sort of bitter than non-truckers wore them unironically.

[Matthew says: Not to mention that, from a quality-of-writing perspective, this is sort of cheating? You can’t describe something by explicitly saying it’s not how you admit it’s likely to be interpreted. Let’s pretend other books were written this way…

• “A wizard is never late. He arrives precisely when he means to.” Gandalf said in a way that from anyone else would have sounded douchey, but somehow sounded wise.
• “You’re a wizard, Harry.” Hagrid said in a way that from anyone else would have sounded like he were batshit insane, but somehow sounded totally believable.]

Cami takes this time to tell us about her boob situation, which is crucial to our understanding of her as a character.

I didn’t have the most voluptuous chest in the world, but my slight frame made my small D cups seem bigger than they were.

SMALL D CUPS? That is like saying, “I climbed that small mountain…you know, Everest or whatever?” As a woman how does McGuire not know that D cups are widely considered big! [Matthew says: I bet you weren’t expecting another one of these so soon, but BUTWHATIFOTHERBOOKSWEREWRITTENTHISWAY?

• “I’ve lived in New York all my life,” Holden said. “And I know Trafalgar Square like the back of my hand.”
• “I’ll have a martini. Shaken. No foam on the top.”]

I hated to admit it, but they helped score extra tips at the Red, and now they could help me get a second job. It was a vicious cycle of not wanting to be objectified, and using the gifts God gave me to my advantage.

I’m not sure what I’m supposed to take away from that. Being a woman is so complicated :(? Cami’s real talk is sooo kewl? B00bz r awsome? [Matthew says: Unless they’re small D cups. Some girls are just unlucky like this :( ]

Cal hires Cami, but says she needs to get some tattoos because it’s bad business for the receptionist not to have any. I think we just figured out why Cami never mentions her one defining characteristic that was in Walking Disaster (her baby doll tattoo)…I SMELL AN ORIGIN STORY A’COMIN.

I got a little over-excited to Matt over Facebook chat when I figured this out. Then again I did the same thing when Blando showed up, so I must have been pretty tired. [Matthew says: I was wondering about this, since Trenton had been calling her “baby doll” throughout the book, and I even wrote about my confusion that Cami hasn’t mentioned she has that tattooed on her hand last week. WHOOPS. My bad for not assuming this wouldn’t be a direct copy of how the guy got the girl to get a tattoo exactly like in the other book.]

Some drunk guy calls to ask when they close, and Cami tells us how comfortable she is around drunk people, which is a really strange thing to say. Anyway, it’s not ’cause she’s a bartender, but because…~cue sad backstory~

I felt more at ease with drunks. My dad had popped the top of a Busch beer can every morning for breakfast since before I was born. The slurring, the stumbling, the inappropriate comments, the giggling, and even the anger was what I was used to.

Then, boy, Cami do I know the right guy for you to fall in love with!

Here’s what else happens on Cami’s first day. Classic McGuire infodump [Matthew says: It’s not a Jamie McGuire novel if we aren’t introduced to five new characters every other chapter. Seriously, this is like Cami’s sixth group of BFFs.]:

• We the meet Hazel who works there as a body piercer. Don’t worry, we immediately establish that Hazel is a lesbian, so her friendship with Trent is completely non-threatening.
• Hazel says if her ex-girlfriend calls to tell her to eat a dick. When she calls later, Cami follows through on this, thus establishing Friendship between Cami and Hazel.
• For some reason, this also makes her immediately ship Trent/Cami: “We’re going to get along just fine.” She pointed back with her thumb as she retreated to her room. “Land that one, Trent. She’s right up your alley.”
• We don’t meet Bishop who is another tattoo artist or something. Cal comes in to ask if he ever showed up at all, which you’d think he would know given only 4 people worked there before Cami started that day.
• Trent buys Hazel and Cami Chinese food. Cami says even though she’s seen scary sides of Trent all her life, it’s nice to see he’s just so happy to make them happy. Because nothing says heart of gold like free fried rice.
• Some drunk students come in, and when Cami turns down their money, one points out that since she also works at the bar, she must need extra money, winky wink.
• “Does she look like a whore to you?” Trenton seethed. I’d seen that look in his eyes before—right before he beat the shit out of someone. [...] “Do you want to die tonight?”
• The asshole’s girlfriend keeps making eyes at Trent even as he’s throwing her boyfriend out of the shop. Because those Maddox boys, amiright?
• The asshole throws Trent’s past in his face and says he’s “that psycho who got that girl killed”.
• After work, Cami invites Trent back to hers to get drunk because he is sad about what that mean boy said to him :(

While drinking with Trent at her apartment, Cami talks more about her ~sad backstory~ because the women in the Disaster/Oblivion/Maddox/Pigeon/Camlin books need to have dark pasts in order to be the Perfect, Amazing, Vulnerable, Strong, Independent, Desperately-needing-to-be-loved, Deserving-of-the-love-of-a-Maddox Protagonist.

“He’s old school. Don’t talk back. Don’t have an opinion unless it’s his. Don’t cry when he beats the shit out of my mom.”
Trenton’s eyes tightened.
“He doesn’t do it anymore. But he used to. Fucked with us kids, you know? That she stayed. That she could still love him.”

Mr Cami’s dad is such a delight, I can’t wait until you guys meet him.

They bond a bit more about the sad things in their past, and Trent hugs Cami. For some reason, right after hearing about Cami’s sad past, Trent speaks really fondly of how he and his brothers used to beat Travis up as kids…which seems like a really insensitive thing to tell the girl whose mother used to get beaten up by her dad.

“I have better things to do than watch Travis beat somebody’s ass. Again. Besides, he doesn’t have any moves I haven’t seen.”
“Right. You’ve taught him everything he knows, I’m sure.”
“One third of everything he knows. That little shit. We beat his ass so many times growing up, he picked up on everything to keep from getting pummeled. Now he could beat all of us . . . at the same time. No wonder no one can beat him.”
“I’ve seen you and Travis fight. You won.”
“When?”
“Over a year ago. Right after . . . he told you to quit drinking before you drank yourself to death and you beat him pretty bad for it.”

So you’re telling me that this wouldn’t leave a bad taste in Cami’s mouth at all? Because brother on brother violence is defo okay because neither is a woman? Because boys will be boys, and they’re sexy boys so it’s really okay?

Raegan and Kody come home fighting about something stupid. It’s basically just a scene that was lifted from America and Shepley. Search and replace really served McGuire well in this book.

At the end of the chapter Trenton affectionately tackles Cami, and I can’t get over the fact that they’ve hung out like twice, and it’s really creepy he’s acting this familiar with her. But it’s fine, I guess, because ultimately it’s Tru Wuv?

Have any of you read all of this book? Without spoiling anything in the comments, can you tell me how you felt about it?

Also did you find it super weird that Trenton was speaking almost nostalgically about beating Travis up to Cami at the end of this chapter or am I reading too much into that? [Matthew says: But Ariel, don’t you remember how Travis is the BEST FIGHTER EVAR? Who wouldn’t be nostalgic about getting a victory over on someone who learned how to fight by fighting his brothers a lot?]

Surprise! In anticipation of the new Hunger Games movie coming out this week, we’re running EXTRA CONTENT on top of our regular schedule! This is possible because I already wrote these posts, like, three years ago, on my personal blog. We ran the first Hunger Games about a year and a half ago, and with the third movie coming out, this seems like a good time to revisit these old posts for the second book, as a sort of recap of what’s just happened before the next movie comes out.

Two things to keep in mind are that, 1) I wrote these posts before BBGT was a thing, so they’re kind of a rough precursor to the blog as we know it today (and also might be dated… I might not even agree with all my old opinions in the post below) and 2) Ariel and I disagree about the quality of the Hunger Games sequels. Ariel liked these books, but I utterly despised them. Although I thought the Catching Fire movie was a FAR superior adaptation, the book itself… well, you’ll see.

Happy Hunger Games!

- – -

Just really quickly before we start, I want to recap my thoughts from the end of The Hunger Games, or, more specifically, about the idea of there being sequels. First of all, I’m somewhat opposed to it. As I said at the end of my reading, an open-ending where Katniss has the rest of a life full of an Orwellian government that sees her as a threat and pretending to be in love with someone she isn’t in love with ahead of her seems considerably more effective and haunting to me. Yet I also concluded that the one thing that could legitimize the existence of sequels would have been, which I realized somewhat shamefully, the love triangle, because there’s a lot of potential to manipulate that in a way that really draws the reader into the hellish world of Panem. Now, will the sequel actually do it right? I dunno. I haven’t read this book. Let’s go do that right now.

This book! Find a copy and let’s read it together? OKAY.

Chapter One

So what happens after Katniss undermines an Orwellian dystopia at their own game? Everything is awkward. Both of Katniss’s boys have been hurt by her and don’t really want to talk to her and there is young adult fiction drama. Peeta’s boyishly sheltering what’s left of his broken heart. Gale still doesn’t have any lines. In a way, little has changed. Like, very awkwardly little. The aftermath sort of makes sense in a “calm before the storm” way, but for the most part, it’s not very convincing that anything’s really happening. It’s back to life as usual, but only sort of, and it doesn’t feel anywhere near as tense as it should be, since the socio-political tension following Katniss’s act of rebellion should be much, much bigger than this. Definitely off to a slow start.

Chapter Two

Okay, things got better pretty quickly. During my reading of the last book, I criticized the portrayal of President Snow because it completely lacked any small amount of characterization. He shows up at the end (hell, he might even have been named for the first time at the end, I’m not sure. That’s how far from memorable it was.) of The Hunger Games, seems cold, and is apparently a horrible villain. I guess.

NOPE. THAT’S ALL OVER.

This scene is maybe the best thing that’s happened in the series so far. Snow is a fantastically cold and manipulative villain and he totally works. Even better, his dynamic with Katniss is flawless. It is mesmerizing how these two characters work together. The two are legitimate threats to each other and their weighted conversation is simultaneously so calculated and so effortless that this battle of the minds is almost more engaging than any physical battle during the hunger games themselves. I already want more of this.

And just when you thought this chapter couldn’t get any better, GOOD GOD YOUNG ADULT FICTION DRAMA. Apparently Gale kissed Katniss and Katniss just kind of didn’t feel like telling the reader this until now? I’m still very worried that this series will go all Twilight on us at the tip of a hat, but for the time being, I’m perfectly content with how unbelievably hilarious it is that the stability of the entire fucking Orwellian dystopia revolves around Katniss’s love triangle.

Chapter Three

So apparently in this book there’s this new thing that the Hunger Games do sometimes when it’s convenient for the plot where every twenty-five years they call it a Quarter Quell instead and they add some extra horrible twist to it and it’s like the Super Hunger Games? Actually, wait, I’m just going to call it “Super Hunger Games” instead of “Quarter Quell” for the rest of my reading, because “Quarter Quell” is a really stupid name. Happy Super Hunger Games, guys!

Actually, I’m kind of genuinely amazed there hasn’t been a major video game adaptation of this franchise.

But seriously, I’m wary about this because it seems kind of stupid. Plus, if they up the ante like this in book two, what’s left for book three? President Snow can’t die unless Katniss finds and destroys his horcruxes?

On the plus side, one thing I really like about this chapter is that there are clear signs of emotional growth from Katniss since the first novel. Even though she was already a very strong character in the first one, it’s a reassuring sign for the narration to see that her experience in a twenty-four person fight to the death has changed her perspective on life, in addition to her perspective on boy drama.

sometimes things happen to people and they’re not equipped to deal with them.

Like I said, I really like this. It’s a good sign that we can expect better from Katniss the narrator this time around.

“…every year they’ll revisit the romance and broadcast the details of your private life, and you’ll never, ever be able to do anything but live happily ever after with that boy.”
The full impact of what he’s saying hits me.

Goddammit, Katniss, I just vouched for you.

Chapter Four

Of course I could do a lot worse than Peeta. That isn’t really the point, though, is it?

This right here is why I’m tentatively okay with things getting a little Twilight-y. Because it’s not doing it because AW MAN THERE ARE JUST TOO MANY BOYS WHO LIKE KATNISS, but rather to make a point about how unjust the society they live in is. Katniss isn’t free to have young adult fiction drama, and that is not cool. This goes back to my point about how the love triangle legitimizes the idea of sequels (potentially) because, in the first place, the story gave us a legitimate reason to hear about young adult fiction love triangles.

I’m guessing that this novel’s going to be more about getting to see the dystopia Katniss lives in and, also importantly, what she’s done to it. I’m good with this, because we’re not going to care about two novels of rebellion (the only reason for writing any sequels to any dystopian novel, for the most part) if we don’t get to see what they’re rebelling against. Fortunately, it seems to be going okay so far. It mostly works because Katniss can’t help but make huge problems for herself, like when she accidentally makes an entire district start rioting.

“…I always respected [Thresh] … For his refusal to play the Games on anyone’s terms but his own.”

Yeah, Katniss, like that’s not going to cause any problems.

Chapter Five

So we have a legit revolt and shit is crazy and Katniss and Haymitch fill Peeta in on what’s going on with the government and the revolts and the young adult fiction and he gets legit pissed off and shit is crazy. As predictable as Peeta’s character is, it’s nice to see him finally get angry even if we all knew it was coming.

“Was that really the only time you kissed Gale?”
I’m so startled I answer. “Yes.” With all that has happened today, has that question actually been preying on him?

KATNISS, THE BOY FUCKING LOVES YOU.

I’m the one who suggests the public marriage proposal. Peeta agrees to do it but then disappears to his room for a long time. Haymitch tells me to leave him alone.
“I thought he wanted it, anyway,” I say.
“Not like this,” Haymitch says. “He wanted it to be real.”

KATNISS.

KATNISS, FOCUS.

So things just got incredibly depressing, between the nightmares and the drugs to help Katniss sleep but only make the nightmares worse and Katniss and Peeta sleeping in each others’ arms to help keep the nightmares away, which probably only makes Peeta’s nightmares worse. Like, “Hey, so I pretended to be in love with you on national television but don’t actually and it’s kind of unfortunate that you’ve literally always been in love with me, so, um, yeah, want to sleep in my bed platonically?”

This man deserves a fucking medal. [Update: Not that I mean to go through this and point out every instance where I changed my mind, but I’m kind of less critical about this point now than I was then. This still isn’t totally fair for Peeta, romantically, but for all I know, maybe the trauma they shared largely overrides this. ]

Chapter Six

So Katniss decides, after failing to convince President Snow of something that he already told her he knew wasn’t true four chapters ago, that the most logical course of action to take now is to get all of her friends and family and run away from an all-powerful Orwellian government into the woods. Sure, Katniss, because all of your other plans have worked out so well so far. And then President Snow and Katniss play more of their mindgames.

Oh, the fun we two have together.

What’s weird is that they really do. Their dynamic is far and away the best thing in this book so far.

Actually, now that we’ve actually gotten to know who’s in charge of this horrible Orwellian dystopia government that makes children fight to the death every year, I’m kind of feeling like it’s about time for us to get some more information about how it works. Like how is President Snow the president? Was there a president before him? If so, how did Snow succeed him? How will somebody succeed Snow? What exactly does “president” mean? I’m assuming he wasn’t elected, but how did he get to be where he is now? These are also important questions, because we have an actual figurehead here in charge of everything, and it would be nice to know them before we start fighting it.

So then there’s a huge banquet thing thrown by President Snow for Katniss and Peeta for their engagement to rub salt in the wound and there’s such a wide variety of much food there that people drink stuff that makes them throw up so they can eat more and this is what it takes for Peeta to decide that maybe encouraging rebellion would be the right thing to do. Not that he was forced to participate in a twenty-four person fight to the death as a teenager, but the bulimia drinks. Uh, okay, Peeta. At least you got there.

Anyway, after this happens, Katniss meets the new Head Gamemaker, Plutarch Heavensbee.

Plutarch has run his thumb across the crystal face of the watch and for just a moment an image appears, glowing as if by candlelight. It’s another mockingjay. Exactly like the pin on my dress.

I’ll bet anything that Katniss has already inspired a rebellion and now her mockingjay pin has become a symbol of some sort of secret resistance. Even more exciting, this suggests that 1) it already exists and is doing things beyond Katniss’s power, and 2) the new person in charge of the Hunger Games is in it. Of course, Katniss doesn’t catch on because KATNISS NEVER CATCHES ON TO ANYTHING, so who knows when we’ll get to find out more.

“I had a dream, though,” I say, thinking back. “I was following a mockingjay through the woods.”

Okay, don’t beat us over the head with the symbolism now.

Effie gives a little wave to two Capitol attendants who have an inebriated Haymitch propped up between them.

I love this guy.

HAYMITCH HAYMITCH HAYMITCH HAYMITCH HAYMITCH HAYMITCH HAYMITCH HAYMITCH
H A Y M… ITCH…
Man, nobody’s going to get that joke.

Chapter Seven

So Katniss has a conversation with Madge (Remember her? Apparently we’re supposed to.) about mockingjays and OKAY. WE GET THAT MOCKINGJAYS ARE SYMBOLS OF RESISTANCE. GOT IT.

More importantly, for all the fuss that Gale’s caused, this is the first time he actually has, you know, lines since the second chapter of the first book. Guys, this is a long time to not have any Gale. It’s annoying, but as much as I mock it, the series isn’t really pushing the young adult fiction love triangle as much as I’m constantly worried it’s going to, so it’s mostly annoying because he seems likeable and like he’s got a good grasp on what’s going on and, dare I say, is a bit more hit than miss so far as being charming goes, rather than it being annoying because we’re getting constant reminders that two boys love Katniss and Katniss doesn’t know how she feels about either of them.

His voice drops to a whisper. “I love you.”

Oh, goddammit.

I come up with what must be the worst possible response. “I know.”

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA okay, I can’t take this book seriously anymore.

It is a period of almost civil war, and things are kinda boring

Oh, and then Gale is immediately whipped within an inch of death by some new Peacekeeper, thus effectively taking the possibility of a supposed main character ever saying words out of the narrative again. Talk about playing hard to get.

Chapter Eight

Okay, nothing is happening in this book. I thought the narrative pacing in the last one was bad, but this is horrendous. Nobody has any idea what’s going on and they’re just biding their time until something does happen, and it is getting very boring. Like a character just nearly got beaten to death and the most interesting things that happen in this chapter are all young adult fiction and I hate everything.

“I didn’t even know Madge knew Gale,” says Peeta.
“We used to sell her strawberries,” I say almost angrily. What am I angry about, though?

Oh my God, is Katniss jealous that one character who never has any lines is secretly in love with another character that never has any lines? Young adult fiction, motherfucker.

It’s the implication that there’s something going on between Gale and Madge.

What the fuck, seriously? It’s been like two paragraphs. This isn’t rushed at all.

I touch parts of him I have never had cause to touch before.

I know that’s not what they’re talking about but snerk.

Chapter Nine

I remind myself that it was not Clove but Thread who gave me this wound.

Okay, in addition to how slow and young adult fiction this novel’s been so far, I just remembered how stupid all the characters’ names are. But seriously, everything that’s wrong with Catching Fire so far can be summed up with one sentence:

I really can’t think about kissing when I’ve got a rebellion to incite.

Katniss has no idea what the fuck is going on, is unable to do anything, and as a result every single event in the narrative has had something to do with young adult fiction. Things keep being incredibly boring and nothing happens and everything feels incredibly directionless and honestly I don’t feel like the rest of the chapter’s even worth talking about because this is so boring.

This is why I was apprehensive about the idea of there being a sequel to The Hunger Games, instead of it standing on its own. Sure, the story continues, but it’s a boring story. This is the boring part of rebellion, and I’m not convinced this is better or, most importantly, more haunting than just leaving The Hunger Games as a standalone narrative with an open-ending would have been.

It feels pointless to even try to make predictions about the rest of the novel, because one third in, we have no idea what direction this novel’s going in. Hell, I don’t even know if any fucking Hunger Games are going to take place. That is how misguided this narrative is: I’ve read 163 pages of it and have no idea if a major part of it is going to revolve around children killing each other. That is not a good sign.