The Sixth Faction by Veronica Roth — Review | Is It Better Than Divergent?

Here is the bird’s-eye view before I get into what these changes did for me.

The Choosing Ceremony and Abnegation

Beatrice Prior expects to leave Abnegation for Dauntless. It’s what is written down in her test, and you can tell how much she loves the faction. Then Evelyn’s attack interrupts the Choosing Ceremony, killing someone from an Abnegation family she knows. When she makes her choice afterwards, grief and fear pull her towards family and the wrong choice (at least in her mind at first).

Caleb chooses Erudite; Beatrice stays in Abnegation.

Staying exposes a different side of her home faction, which is great for readers who love the series. We’re introduced intimately to the Memory Vault, which gives its leaders control over what people remember. With it, Andrew attempts to remove her memory of seeing Evelyn. Beatrice resists. Thanks to this horrible experience, she realizes earlier she needs answers and, with Natalie’s help, she leaves Abnegation and becomes factionless, taking the name Tris.

Life among the factionless

Tris enters the factionless community and trains to become a Fox. The Foxes are a group of rebels who steal, spy, and plot. In the meantime, Evelyn draws her into efforts to recruit Four. In his POV, we see the inside of a Dauntless that never recruited Tris. And learn much more about the pressures Four experienced.

Christina also becomes factionless after Peter injures her eye, introducing Tris and Christina again. Tris keeps trying to recruit Four as they discover how much their families and factions have concealed.

Meanwhile, Caleb’s chapters follow his Erudite initiation and growing involvement with Jeanine’s work. The siblings’ departures take them into different systems, with very different access to information and support.

Tris is able to join the Foxes after sneaking into Erudite, where she confronts her brother. This gets her one step closer to the answer she seeks: who attacked at the ceremony and why?

Tris is finally able to recruit Four after his confrontation with Eric. And they plan to meet Evelyn and get answers.

The attack and final confrontation

Jeanine’s simulation turns Dauntless initiates against Abnegation, while Evelyn pursues her own agenda which is intertwined with Erudite. Four never shows for Evelyn’s secret mission meetup, and Evelyn turns on Tris as she confronts her mother. It seems the adults in this version of the story are all holding secrets and willing to hurt just about everyone.

Natalie helps Tris escape but is killed as she tells her to fight on. Tris and Four become involved in stopping the simulation, and Caleb’s allegiance to Jeanine brings them into a final confrontation.

Caleb holds Four at gunpoint and has Tris put into a simulation. She escapes it and shoots Caleb to save Four. After another confrontation with Evelyn, Tris, Four, Andrew and Marcus leave by train towards Amity. That resolves the immediate crisis, but leaves the consequences—and the larger questions about this world—for the sequel.

The premise invites us to consider what happens if Tris chooses a different faction, setting a different set of events into motion. But her changed choice comes after Evelyn changes the circumstances by attacking at the Choosing Ceremony, meaning, these events were changed before Tris ever decided. Which wasn’t really the premise we were promised, to be nitpicky about it.

Tris’ motivation makes sense to me. Because Evelyn kills someone close to the Priors, Tris decides family is more important. What I’m still asking is why Evelyn attacks at this point in this timeline? What changed?

What didn’t change? Evelyn trying to recruit Four. In Insurgent, he reveals that she contacted him before the events we’re watching and tried to secure his help. He refused though. Here, we encounter her role sooner, and Tris eventually helps persuade Four to join this time. Which is his Choosing Ceremony moment, so to speak.

Something I would love in book two is this. I want to find out that something small Tris said or did in the opening chapter set the attack into motion. You know, like a detail that felt ordinary at the time and we missed. That would be incredibly satisfying.

The original trilogy brings Tris’s Dauntless and Abnegation together, and makes her hold them together to inspect them. She leaves the faction associated with selflessness, learns courage, and gradually discovers how those qualities can coexist. Brilliant themes.

Here, choosing Abnegation means confronting much earlier how poorly it fits her, so we get to see her branch out of the faction moulds much sooner. That, and the factionless insistence on not seeing things as “factions”, helps her discover her personhood in a way we didn’t get in the original series.

This is great character work that could set up a Tris who is less willing to sacrifice herself…or at least less willing to accept selflessness as an obligation or heroic trait.

My prediction is that individuality will become more central to this duology. Hence Divergence, and the new story could take that theme a few steps further to a satisfying conclusion that involves the reader more. You know. Like, we’re all divergent.

Natalie tells Tris to find her diary, which could give us access to her history and motivations differently this time and way earlier.

The diary existed in the original continuity, but Tris received her mother’s journal from David in Allegiant, after reaching the Bureau. Here, the instruction comes from Natalie herself, much earlier. I’m interested in what that changes about the information Tris receives and how she interprets her mother in a new way this time. After all, they actually spoke and learned about each other more this time around.

Their final exchange also feels totally different to me. Here, Natalie hands her weapons and tells her to fight, saying she will be right behind her. What Tris receives in that moment is an instruction to protect herself and fight back, alongside an expectation that her mother will follow. In the original, Natalie sacrifices herself for Tris without fully knowing how strong and capable her daughter has become, or without Tris understanding Natalie’s motivations.

This time around, survival and fighting, living even, could keep her mother’s sacrifice alive. It changes the conclusion Tris draws in the original series. By living, she can be the change, and her mother’s dream can follow.

Andrew attempts to erase Tris’s memory in this version, which changes the father–daughter relationship considerably.

In the original, he disapproves of her leaving Abnegation, but eventually helps her stop the attack and dies during the mission. Here, he survives and leaves with them towards Amity. But Tris no longer trusts him. He has betrayed her terribly by trying to wipe her memories.

Tris has one fewer parental death to wrestle with in this version. That could remove some of the pressure that drives her towards reckless behavior in Insurgent, which Roth notes is one of the reasons why she makes the choices she does. But she also has a living father whose idea of what should happen to her conflicts with her own. There’s going to be some head-butting for sure in part two.

Phew. This is the long one.

Caleb’s death is my biggest problem with The Sixth Faction. I know, I know. But the book made him more sympathetic to me, then didn’t give his death the emotional kick I needed to cry, feel horrified, or understand it.

You need to know two scenes for me to explain why. 1. Tris’s meeting with him in Erudite, and 2. the later confrontation where she kills him. Basically, in both scenes, Tris blames Caleb while overlooking what she knows about the people controlling him.

During the Erudite meeting, Tris resents Caleb’s faction choice because she feels it forced her into staying in Abnegation. I found that blame difficult to swallow. He is another young person trying to escape the same abusive upbringing; they were both taught to stay quiet, stay small and obey. Caleb choosing something for himself doesn’t make him responsible for what Tris chose afterwards, duh. She even says that Caleb got what he wanted a lot growing up and she didn’t. Which isn’t fair. Doing as he’s told more to avoid abusive punishment isn’t getting what he wanted.

Considering all the other mature choices Tris makes later, I find it hard to believe she wouldn’t see that.

He even talks about how badly Abnegation treated them… so he is fully aware that adults lie and manipulate, giving a good base to find a common understanding and reach him. If Tris tried.

Plus, Tris can see that his escape has taken him into another controlling system. Jeanine is already manipulating him, and Tris recognizes that he is beginning to interpret things the way Erudite wants him to.

Ding. Ding. Ding.

She absorbs enough of what is happening that I expected her to connect the dots, “this isn’t simply Caleb being Caleb. This is more manipulation. I better see if I can get him to see the truth.”

Even if she didn’t put this together, their conversation should have been more layered, either way. Tris knows more than Caleb does, and worse, she can see why he doesn’t know it. For one, their mother couldn’t visit him to give any explanation, and he’s basically alone. No friendships or the same help understanding what is happening.

Then Caleb asks whether their mother was different, and whether Tris noticed it too. He is questioning something. He senses something is off. She could have reached in and taken that moment to TRY and help explain it. Instead, she distances herself. She doesn’t give him the chance. Even without revealing divergence, she could have planted a seed of doubt.

His failure to help when she is taken away is still a betrayal. I understand her anger. But is it enough to kill?

And then we get a scene where all of this is supposed to pay off.

Caleb is trading Four’s life for their fathers, with little to no knowledge that his father is shady, that there is an uprising there to help them, or that there is… Divergence. And, before attempting to kill Four, Caleb tries to put Tris into a simulation so she won’t have to experience what he is about to do. It is a horrible, controlling version of protection, sure. But it is protection. He appears to believe his sister has been manipulated and lost, and that he is helping her. Which frankly, is more than she does.

As the reader, we can see how distorted his thinking has become. But we can also see that he still cares. That makes him harder to dismiss than the uncaring brother Tris seems ready to believe he is. It would work, I’d hate Caleb’s guts for her, if she didn’t then shoot him to death.

Once he is about to shoot Four, when she escapes the simulation, the situation is urgent. So, Tris acts quickly. By then it’s too late, I totally get that. My frustration is with the opportunities before that emergency, including on the train to the location.

I don’t need Tris to succeed in reaching Caleb. In fact, I needed her to fail harder.

She did have a chance. She let Caleb down. While making him the villain and not acknowledging that. Ouch.

Then it gets worse for me. Right before she shoots, Tris decides that Caleb’s Abnegation side never existed and that the people she thought she knew have turned out to be strangers anyway, so it’s totally justified.

Yet Four, whom she has known for a couple of weeks, is totally the guy she knows him to be.

So I guess he gets to live.

Why does her suspicion apply so completely to Caleb but not to Four? With the romance already feeling sudden, that contrast didn’t convince me. These aren’t the two dauntless teens who have had to live and die for each other for months. This is the couple who just decided to be together…that night.

Then she just… keeps going. Survival can delay grief, and perhaps book two will give us the fallout. Here, though, killing her brother feels strangely under-processed.

I also kept thinking about Tris’s aim. We hear repeatedly that shooting is her strongest skill. Could that have paid off through an attempt to disarm him or stop him without killing him? Just saying.

The original Caleb has a longer arc of betrayal, guilt and eventual willingness to sacrifice himself. We also have less access to his thinking. Seeing his manipulation happen in this version makes a difference…I understand him more, and feel his isolation more strongly. That changes his “betrayal”.

His death therefore feels like a way to remove the brother Tris might later sacrifice herself for. A plot convenience. And worse, Roth has already changed enough about Tris’s experiences and beliefs to make a different choice believable with Caleb still alive. He didn’t need to die to prevent her repeating the original ending.

And yes, part of me is still hoping she will put all of this together in the next book, that Tris making these mistakes is the plan all along, and it will go terribly wrong, and make her spiral, and give us more action and consequences. And I will be totally satisfied. It’s unfair for me to rest my hat and say I didn’t buy it when I haven’t even finished the series. So, for now, just for now, this death hasn’t earned its place for me.

Christina loses an eye and leaves Dauntless. In this version, Tris and Christina don’t work together against Peter in the way that builds their connection in the original, and I felt the absence of that shared experience.

A familiar character being present isn’t enough to reproduce the friendship we remember. We need the experiences played out for us, so we can feel how great they are together.

Peter is much less involved too. I suspect he may return in book two, but in this volume both characters contribute to my feeling that the supporting cast is…thinner.

These changes may be necessary for the new plot, and all the POVs. We may get more Christina in the next book, and for now she’s just being set up for us. They still affect how attached I feel while reading it, right now, today. Maybe we see more of them in the next book and get a better build-up of the relationships. Maybe they’re gone for good. If they are, that leaves Tris pretty alone with only Four to lean on.

We get more insight into the smaller actions that help Jeanine establish control, and this time she focuses less on Tris and more on Four. This makes me ask if Four will also take on more of the emotional burden that Tris once had…did have…AU version had.

Evelyn, meanwhile, has already been extraordinarily manipulative, like my gosh. She lies about working with Jeanine and threatens to kill Tris in front of Natalie and it’s book one. The factionless also guard the simulation machinery this time, making their involvement in coercion easier to be like, well..they’re not the good guys.

Evelyn’s plan is probably the same here, help overthrow other factions, then establish an authoritarian order of her own once Erudite is out of the way. Tobias in that version eventually persuades her to give up power and negotiate peace. Not sure how that would work this time around, so I’m excited to see.

One theory is that given what Tris and Four already know about Evelyn, leaving seems safer and I doubt she will come along with them. That could shorten the conflict inside the city and take the second book towards the world outside sooner.

They end this book on a train towards Amity. I think it could feel like a reasonably satisfying departure and end the story there…they leave the immediate conflict behind and head towards something unknown together. Why stay? Let them fight it out together, right?

For me, the unresolved emotional consequences make me want the next book. I want to know what killing Caleb means for Tris and what surviving, instead of Caleb, means for Four.

I think we could have used a cliffhanger, though, to be honest. Hear me out. Nothing too dramatic. See, readers newer to the series, without the knowledge I have, are probably less intrigued by what happens next. The simulation ends, they get on the train. They have already discussed living in abandoned buildings, so you know they have a place to go. The end. It’s quite closed for a new reader. Haha. Maybe we should have ended with Tris’s gun trained on Caleb. That would have caused a total riot though.

Four’s closing promise to ‘try to be worth what saving him has cost Tris’ made me stop and go… uh-oh. That’s the real line that makes me rabid for the next book.

Why? It puts a really bad vibe inside their relationship. I wonder if, this time, Four will become dangerous to himself, as Tris did in the original. Perhaps guilt will make him willing to sacrifice himself, or the story will at least put that possibility before him.

Tris might then have to talk him out of it, based on the knowledge she gains this time that she didn’t have in the original. That could close the sacrifice arc we’re all watching for. And mirror the original series while giving the argument to different characters in a way that would make sense.

My instinct is that readers would be reluctant to accept losing Four this time, too, so we won’t actually see a death. In my original argument about the series, I thought Tris’s death was important and well set up. I honestly saw it coming and wasn’t upset by it. This isn’t a romantasy with a HEA, after all. But some readers abhorred it. Like. Deeply. So I don’t think Roth will do it again.

In fact, Roth has talked about how the backlash damaged her relationship with her work and her sense of self-worth.

I still defend the ending of Allegiant, as I explained in my earlier piece on the return of Divergent.

Tris dies after taking Caleb’s place on a mission, surviving the death serum, and completing the mission to release the memory serum despite David shooting her. Her sacrifice completes the original exploration of family, courage, guilt, and love. It hurt, but I think it belonged to that story.

I also wonder how returning readers receive that ending now. As a whole, thanks to current events, our understanding of sacrifice, governmental violence, and the cost of resisting power has changed. I suspect some readers revisiting the trilogy as adults may see it differently, too.

My prediction is that this duology will put more emphasis on individuality and the power it gives us. Plenty of fans would welcome that.

What I would find less satisfying is Tris surviving simply because the world happened to her differently. I want her decisions to help create that outcome. I want what she learns about family, selflessness, and her own identity to matter.

That is why I keep thinking about Evelyn’s attack and my wish for a small detail in the opening chapter to explain the why. It could make the whole sequence feel more connected, while revealing that Tris helped create the circumstances that changed her.