This book is a collection of four stories about the character Four from the Divergent series, plus several short chapters at the back that didn’t fit within the timeline of the main stories being told. This book serves as a bit of a prequel but I would NOT recommend reading it before the series because it includes scenes from Divergent in it, just from a different perspective.
That being said the book only covers the first book in the trilogy so you could, in theory, read Divergent, then this, then finish out the series. Whichever way, I would just not read this first.
I really love the character Four. I got excited when I found out about this book and recently got my hands on it. I read it in about 3.5-4 hours. It isn’t super long and it flows very quickly so it isn’t a huge commitment.
It goes a lot into his father’s abuse and his fear landscape, much more so than the original Divergent book did. Please keep that in mind if you are easily triggered by those kind of scenes