WARNING YA FICTION SPOILERS
I was terrified Harry Potter was going to die.
I struggled with losing Dumbledore and spent several weeks in my adolesence thinking Gandolf was dead. Killing off paternal secondary characters is a right-of-passage in fiction. Even Luke Skywalker’s family gets axed in STAR WARS. But few authors pull the trigger (literally) on the hero.
Until Veronica Roth.
I finished the Divergent trilogy and it was a downer. The first two books hold up really well. The love story is a bit trite, but the characters are teenagers after all. So what if the world is about to blow up, they are busy fighting/making-out/fighting with their boyfriend or girlfriend. The last book fell apart with the same disappointment as M. Knight Shyamalan’s The Village. There just wasn’t enough structure to hold Roth’s convoluted society together. But I’ll save the plot holes for other reviewers.
I was simply disappointed, the main character, a girl named ‘Tris’ was killed. I felt the entire death scene was odd, not a grand, metaphor for personal growth and sacrifice. It was mostly just messy and unnecessary. Tris decides to spare her brother and complete a suicide mission herself. Dying from that would have been sad but moving. Instead Tris survives only to be shot moments later. It was a scene from a bad movie. Roth blatantly manipulated the reader’s emotions.
Accidental Author 
I killed one of my main characters in my new novel. No one has complained so far…