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You’ll recognize the name “Veronica Roth” from the Divergent YA series and the movies based upon them. Arch-Conspirator, a book aimed at adults, proved my first experience with Roth.

At just over 100 pages, Arch-Conspirator is a slim book based upon the play Antigone written by Sophocles. Roth’s version, however, takes place in a city of the future, a city that seems to be among the last in the world. However, the plot remains largely the same as the source material with some additional sci-fi elements thrown in. As far as I could tell, the character’s names even remained the same.

Which leads me to my only criticism, but it’s the issue that kept me from engaging fully with the novella. Though a futuristic rendition of the classic play, it never quite stood on its own merit. The names are a wonderful example to illustrate my point. We’re in the future and they store people’s DNA after they die in a lofty vault of sorts in order to perpetuate the human race, yet the ancient Greek names immediately pulled me from the future back into the past as well as the original work. And while the novella slightly deviated in terms of plot, it remained close enough that, again, I did not see it truly putting a fresh spin on a very well-established work. Arch-Conspirator struck me as a love letter to Antigone, to be sure, but it did not seem interested in truly stretching itself from an artistic standpoint.

Even with all of that being said, I found Roth’s writing to be very good. She was particularly apt with dialogue and description. I would certainly try another of her books, but Arch-Conspirator missed the mark with me.