The Fates Divide by Veronica RothMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
Well, loyal Pinecones, the time has come for me to complete another Veronica Roth series, and while I'm not nearly as enamored with this duology as I was with the Divergent trilogy, I'm still at least reasonably satisfied with how The Fates Divide wraps things up. It's not without its problems, but it finally lets the ambitious visions of Carve the Mark see the light of day. Unless we're on planet Ogra, where the only light is bioluminescence instead of solar.
The world-building of the first book was seriously lacking for the grand scope Roth tried to go for from the start, but Roth does improve things a lot now in the second book. We actually get to see more of the other worlds of this solar system, besides Thuvhe, aka Urek. It's still a little strange that each planet is treated as its own nation when they'd feasibly all have multiple nations, and the only one that seems to have multiple is how the Thuvhesit and Shotet all live on the same planet. At least we also get some words of the in-universe languages too. Not too many - and as a bit of a language nut myself, it really peeves me that Roth keeps tying herself in knots half the time to not actually show words in Thuvhesit, Shotet, Ogran, Zoldian, etc. But finally, we actually get to imagine a little bit of the sounds of each language instead of having them 100% told instead of shown.
The languages are all, of course, pretty inextricable parts of cultures that are constantly at odds with each other. The Thuvhesit and Shotet and their endless war continues to figure into the story majorly, and remembering how their bigotry against each other led to the controversy about the first book being racist, I also have to point out that a lot of the arguments there really don't stand up to scrutiny. Yeah, it's easy to peg the Thuvhesit as white-coded because they basically started all the atrocities - and in this book, try to take things to the next level by colonizing Shotet territory and offering the Shotet full Thuvhesit citizenship if they turn against the Noaveks, which brought to mind Israel vs. Palestine. It's also easy to peg the Shotet as black-coded, Native-coded, Romani-coded, etc. because pretty much everyone else treats them like scum, whether it be because of their nomadic lifestyles or the brutalities of Lazmet and Ryzek Noavek poisoning their perception across the system. So, yeah, there's a lot of in-universe bigotry floating around. It doesn't help that one of the two new POVs in this book is Cisi, who right from the start casually tosses around anti-Shotet slurs. She does come around to a more enlightened frame of mind as the book continues, much more akin to Cyra and Akos, but it's still not at all pleasant to read. But the whole argument from last year or so about the Shotet being a perpetuation of the "dark-skinned aggressor" racist trope still falls flat when you remember that skin color is a virtual non-issue in this universe, and also that if anyone's the aggressors and villains, it's the light-skinned ones, specifically Ryzek and Lazmet, who are vile and barbaric and white as it gets.
I've done a lot of thought about this book in the last year or so, and I'm actually glad to have eventually seen Veronica Roth's own response. Naturally, a lot of people tore that apart, citing death of the author or black readers' opinion carrying more weight, or my personal favorite, Tristina Wright saying "intent doesn't matter." (Ironic that she came out swinging against Roth when her own book was eventually called out as racist and colonialist, and arguably a worse case because she wrote entirely in the POV of the colonizers...but I digress.) But I read that and realized Roth's explanations made a lot of sense. Really, it's such a sad irony that a book with strong anti-prejudice themes gets called exactly the opposite, which says more about the dreadful state of online discourse than anything else. Even a lot of my workmates, who are even more about social justice than I am, recognize this dreadfulness and try not to let it impact their critical thinking skills.
In terms of craft, Roth makes The Fates Divide one of her most experimental yet. She writes in four different POVs, representing each one with different combinations of verb tense and perspective so we can tell which is which. Akos' third-person limited past tense and Cyra's first-person past tense from the first book remain. We also get Cisi in first-person present tense, and Eijeh in first-person plural, representing the split state of his mind after Ryzek had his way and screwed around with all his memories. Perhaps because of the sheer weirdness of this style, harking back to Ayn Rand's Anthem of all things, Eijeh gets far fewer POV chapters than any of the others, which begs the question of why Roth even bothered in the first place. As grateful as I am for the expanded world-building, and that the book was shorter and faster-paced, there's still a lot of fat that could've been trimmed. Like Eijeh's POV chapters. Or, hell, even the Noaveks. They've got their big scary currentgifts, especially the body-controlling Lazmet, but most of the book, Lazmet's pretty much nowhere to be seen. He's more of a boogeyman than anything else, a villain told instead of shown, which kinda ruins his scare factor for me.
But there's still a lot more good in this book than in its predecessor. The moral greyness makes it a gripping read, especially when we get such contrast between Cyra and Akos and their quests for peace and healing, while Cisi's caught up in a cycle of war and vengeance. It's funny that there's been a lot of discourse lately about YA needing more canon f/f pairings, and hey, here's Cisi and Isae for you, but because they're anti-heroes if not anti-villains, that probably doesn't count for said discourse givers. Their relationship is still very sweet and loving, though, as is that of the m/f pairing of Cyra and Akos. Both of them have such significant cases of chronic pain - physical for Cyra, emotional for Akos, despite his insistence that he's reserved and not very emotionally expressive at all. But inside, he hurts so much. And as for Cyra, her physical pain may be a major obstacle, but the true purpose of it gets unveiled in this book, and given that Cyra's chronic pain is #ownvoices for Roth, I'd like to think of that as her way of providing a much-needed message of empowerment. They may not be quite as iconic as Tris and Four, but Cyra and Akos, I relate to them a hell of a lot. Even though Lazmet's storyline involvement is minimal at best, when he actually does show up and start interacting with Akos in particular, their scenes give me flashbacks to some of the scenes I wrote between Alex and Elijah in Red Rain.
Best of all, without spoilers, I'll just say that the ending is far less lethal and infuriating than that of Allegiant, and I say that as seemingly the only person who actually enjoyed Allegiant even with that ending. (Though there's a case of Roth making it look like she's gonna pull a Bury Your Gays - again, after Insurgent - but it's a fakeout, it doesn't happen.) Hell, the best death in the book is actually in the beginning - most unexpected, and most satisfying as hell.
To Carve the Mark and The Fates Divide, I now say anoshe, and eagerly await the day when Veronica Roth at long last writes the book truly worth standing in the pantheon alongside Divergent, Insurgent, Allegiant, and Four.
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