Veronica Roth's YA dystopian series Divergent has endured comparisons to Suzanne Collins's wildly successful The Hunger Games series since the first installment, Divergent, was published in 2011. However, in an interview with HuffPost Live, Roth insisted that she doesn't mind the comparison. "If you're going to be compared to something," she laughed, "it's not so bad."
Given the dystopian trend sweeping YA fiction in the past decade, it's no surprise that two of the most popular series in the genre have been frequently juxtaposed. The New York Times review of Divergent in 2011 even went so far as to break down the similarities between the series point-by-point. With the Hunger Games film series, which has broken box-office records, building toward the release of the next film in November, and the second Divergent film slated for a spring release, there are more opportunities than ever to compare the two series.
Roth, who sold Divergent while she was still a college student, admits that she finds it "scary" that her books are being compared to The Hunger Games, "simply because those books are incredible." But while she's wary of the comparison, she's appreciative of how it's benefited her own work, pointing out that "it's also helped the books and the movie to find an audience, in a really wonderful way."
Watch the rest of Veronica Roth's HuffPost Live interview here.