Sitting in a coffee shop in the basement of a bookstore in northwest Washington, my friend flipped around her phone screen on the count of three.  It read: “Erudite.  Abnegation.”

We looked at each other, and a smile crept across my face.  Slowly I set my phone down on the table and slid it over to her.  Her face lit up and we both began laughing as she saw the message written on mine:

The main reason for our breakfast meeting was discussing Veronica Roth’s book “Divergent.  In that world, people belong to one of five factions: Abnegation, Erudite, Amity, Dauntless or Candor.  Props to Roth for making the names of the factions describe the basic idea of each one.

The exercise my friend and I did was to write down which one we would pick for each other, and then also predict what the other person was going to say.  So if you were at Politics & Prose a few weeks ago and saw two people WAY too excited about showing each other their phones, it’s because we both gave the exact same answer about me (we picked a primary and secondary faction).

We initially slightly disagreed on my top choice for her, but after I explained my reasoning, she was on board.  The lesson here is that close friends are cool to have.  They get you.  She also pointed out a few specific things she flagged in the text, and of course one of them was one of just three things I had highlighted to that point:

“My father used to say that sometimes, the best way to help someone is just to be near them.”

Must have been the Abnegation trait in both of us that gravitated to that idea.

Kids grow up in one faction, but at a certain age take a test that’s supposed to identify where they really belong.  Then they choose.  The main character, Tris, starts in Abnegation but opts to join Dauntless.

Of course, it’s hard to singularly define humans, and as Tris discovers, the various factions have strayed from their original mission/definition.  Dauntless is supposed to be about “ordinary acts of bravery” and “the courage that drives one person to stand up for another.”

But Tris finds a faction led by people who push recklessness and doing whatever it takes — often at the expense of others — to get ahead.  She likes the way Dauntless is supposed to be, and while those around her may not care, she decides to not let the current state affect her behavior.

“No matter how badly the leaders have warped the Dauntless ideals, those ideals can still belong to me.”

In the course of her Dauntless training, Tris becomes kind of a badass, leading to one of my favorite lines from the book:

“The bullet hit him in the head.  I know because that’s where I aimed it.”

If that’s not confidence in what you’re doing, I don’t know what is.

I’ll leave out any potentially spoiling details for those who haven’t read and either plan to or see the forthcoming movie.

Now to finish the trilogy.

One more thought:  Can we find a way to say to skip seeing movie trailers if we PROMISE we plan to see the movie?  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve scrambled to change the channel in the past few weeks so I could avoid any possible spoiler before I finished the book.  Also, I’m apparently reading every book in which Shailene Woodley will later play the main character in the movie.