The Fates Divide : Book #2 by Veronica Roth - Book Review (no spoilers)

I honestly don't even remember much about this book anymore, despite having finished it only a few days earlier. It was an unremarkable, expected, unsurprising ending, but satisfying, for what that's worth.

The beginning of this book is a lot like the middle part of Divergent. Slightly boring, repetitive and with forcefully added couples scenes. Unlike the first book, which picked up right from the beginning, the author has taken her time in this one to establish the setting and describe the scenes.

In Part 1 of the book, the characters spend most of their time aboard their space ships, flying through the "vast, dark expanse of the universe", with "nothing but inky black around them", and with few people for company in their routine lives, with shifts for navigation and sleeping, and whatnot. It started to feel very repetitive after a few chapters.

The author has also added two more points of view in the second book, which made it boring more than anything. More POVs just help write short stories in a longer way. She sent some of the characters off to enemy ships, some on friendly planets, and some travelling in between, to write the same events from different angles.

Some of the new characters, or some of the side characters who became more important in the second book, made the book interesting, but most got tiring with their exaggerated personalities. There were a lot of characters and all of them had confusing, similar-sounding names, Ara, Aza, Ava and Ylira, Yma, Yessa; after a while, their names just blended together and left me with a half-read book and thoroughly baffled brain.

In the course of the entire book, there was only one storyline - to war or not to war. Both sides constantly changed their mind about this, and of course, some people on one side thought they should fight, the other half disagreed, and so on. 

In Parts 2, 3 and 4, the story became slightly more engaging. The author stopped constantly switching between POVs and completed an event in one person's world before moving on to the next. There were thankfully very little 'Cisi' (a character) chapters, and more about the happening world of Akos and Cyra. 

I do not remember much about Part 5 (I'm not even a hundred per cent sure if there was a Part 5), though perhaps it was just the after-ending and before-epilogue part of the story.

At one point of time when the story started to feel a little like Red Queen, I was just about ready to give up on it entirely, but fortunately, the author's writing style is much nicer and it made me want to see what happened at the end of the book.

I would recommend reading the Carve the Mark series, for many aspects of it are one-of-a-kind and they make it a great YA book to read.