Here is the recipe for literary success: Add segregation, tribulation, war, and romance; subtract individuality, consciousness, and the accepted male role. Time the release for a date when the last "big thing" is beginning to fade. Let it sit through the initial criticism, and then you have the next New York Times bestseller. Young adults today are fascinated by these trends in either current or futuristic dystopias. In order to accommodate the sudden surge in this literary genre, authors have experimented over the past decade with various combinations of these ingredients. There were Harry Potter and Twilight. Recently, the most significant has been Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games series. However Divergent by Veronica Roth is closely following it. By comparing Katniss's Hunger Games experience with Tris's initiation process, we can see the progression and sophistication of the recipe in satisfying the current audience/readers' appetites; this is important because it reflects a better understanding of young adults' mindset.
 
When Prim's name was drawn during the reaping, Katniss stepped forward to take her place in the Seventy-fourth annual Hunger Games. She was given a minimal amount of time to train for the ordeal before she was thrown into the arena and forced to fight for her death. Fortunately, she had many things going in her favor. She already knew how to trap and forage for food. She could climb trees to get out of the reach of other tributes. Most importantly, she had exceptional aim with a bow. Except for the fact she did not want to kill anyone, she was an ideal competitor for the Hunger Games. There was only one thing she did not expect: she was pretending to be in love with Peeta Mellark. This was initially a rouse to gain the attention of the Sponsors, but it grew into genuine affection by the end of the Games. At one point near the end, they share a kiss in a cave. Katniss says, "This is the first kiss where I actually feel stirring inside my chest the first kiss that makes me want another." (The Hunger Games 298)

Tris's situation was not as much of an extreme battle, but it was easily just as fatal and possibly as much of a psychological challenge. The city was divided into five factions, much as Panem was divided into twelve Districts. Instead of being divided by labor, however, they were divided by ideology. Her first challenge was an aptitude test to tell her which faction of the city she belonged in. She was attached to a machine and presented with scenarios. Her results showed her as being Divergent, meaning she could adapt to more than one faction. Unfortunately, it also meant people would be willing to murder her to remove the nonconformity (Roth 257). At the choosing ceremony, she picked Dauntless, which meant leaving her home of Abnegation and taking on a completely different personality. Her first test was to jump off a moving train to reach the Dauntless compound. Then she had to jump off the top of a building into a hole leading underground. After this, the real training began. It was divided into three stages. First was combat training. Not only did she fight the other initiates, she also learned to shoot a gun. She states, "There is power in controlling something that can do so much damage -- in controlling something, period." (Roth 79) The second stage was similar to the aptitude test. She was hooked back into the machine and forced to face her most horrible fears. This was to teach her to overcome panic. Fortunately, being Divergent, she was able understand it was not real and overcome the simulation. Finally she had to go through a fear landscape. It was a three dimensional simulation where she went through all of her fears. This was overseen by a panel of the Dauntless leaders. While these stages seem like training, there was more to it. At each stage a certain number of initiates where sent away. The Dauntless would only take ten new initiates. (Roth 71) Anyone else became factionless, the equivalent to impoverished. It was highly competitive, to the point a few initiates tried to kill their primary competition. One, Peter, even tried to have Tris thrown into the chasm running beneath the Dauntless compound. Like the Hunger Games, it became a competition of survival.

Upon first looking at these two young heroines, one may easily assume that Roth copied Collins' idea for a strong female character. However, this is not the case so much as she extrapolated upon the qualities in Katniss. She removed a lot of the weaknesses, while building the strengths. When she was done she had created Tris. Although a strong female character, she was still believable. One way Roth improved upon the character was by giving her a stillness of mind. Tris thinks through her situations in a more analytical way and controls her emotions. In her second Hunger Games, Katniss has a breakdown when hearing the jabberjays scream like her family and friends (Catching Fire 339-345). Tris, on the other hand, is forced to face all of her fears at the same time in the fear landscapes. By using reasoning, she is able to overcome all of them. Fortunately, one thing these young women have in common is they both protect their loved ones. Katniss takes Prim's place in the dreaded Games, whereas Tris turns and faces a bullet rather than shoot her family in the fear landscape. Their attitudes are also different. Katniss continually focuses on what she cannot do and how things could go wrong. Tris acknowledges her weaknesses; then she uses her skills to her advantage. When the Erudite, another faction, and the Dauntless form an army to overthrow the existing government, she demonstrates this prowess. She is forced to face her tormentor Peter, who is now a guard in for the revolutionaries. "I can't win a fight, but if I can move fast enough, I won't have to fight." (Roth 462) With two strikes, she brought him to his knees and held his own gun to his head.

Both Divergent and The Hunger Games series are classified as young adult fiction. The present fascination with dystopias is both a reflection of young adults' current concerns combined with older adult's worries for the future. Adult authors are realizing what young people yearn for in literature and working to meet that demand. Michael Pryor, another author of young adult fiction, speculates why dystopias are presently so popular. He says this literary form reflects the desire of teenagers to be liberated from authority and fend for themselves. He mentioned that an unfortunate side effect of this mentality is to remove the parents from the storyline (Pryor). Katniss's father died in a mining accident, and she has a dysfunctional relationship with her mother. At the beginning of Divergent, on the other hand, Tris has both of her parents; but she leaves them when she chooses Dauntless. At the end of the novel, they die violently as well (Roth 443, 471). Besides this aspect, the more recent young adult fiction has taken place in a world similar to our own. Neither of the series in question have mythological creatures -- they consist of believable people. Mark Fisher makes this point when he says " and it is tempting to see the shift from wizards and lovelorn vampires to teenagers fighting for their lives in a state-organized spectacle as indicative of general change in the cultural temperature." (Fisher 27) Collins led this trend when she set her story in Panem, a North America many years in the future. Roth followed this pattern even more closely, by placing her novel in a futuristic Chicago. This is even easier for young adults to relate to, because they can imagine the specific location. Fisher also brings another factor to mind. Katniss is almost willing to give up, because she does not see the Capitol as being defeated (Fisher 30). Tris, contrastingly, is prepared to fight for her freedom when the Dauntless army is formed. This swift reasoning is a definite improvement upon Katniss, who lacked this courage throughout the majority of her involvement in the Hunger Games. One final thing that both books had in common was classification. Meghan Cox Gurdon, while reviewing several recent books, mentioned this about Divergent: " the whole story is really an extended metaphor about the trials of modern adolescence: constantly having to take tests that sort and rank you among your peers " (Gurdon). Examples from the book are the aptitude test, Choosing ceremony, and the rankings throughout initiation. Similarly, The Hunger Games involves the reaping ceremony and the rankings of the individual contestants as projected winners by the Game makers. Having compared all these characteristics from both novels, it is more applicable to see Tris as a projection of Katniss, not the clone most reader assume her to be.

When writing a young adult fiction novel, an important detail is to reflect the struggles and mindsets of the audience. Teenagers are at an age where they want to be independent from their parents. They want adventure in a setting similar to the one they know; it generally involves a "What if this were the case?" factor. They struggle with being compared constantly to everyone else. Suzanne Collins may have captured this essence in her The Hunger Games trilogy, but Veronica Roth refined it. In Divergent, she put Tris through as similar set of trials to the ones Katniss experienced. The result, however, was the creation of an even more heroic character and a much more relatable novel. Collins may have had the ingredients for success, but Roth had the proportions of the recipe down to a science.


