I gotta talk about Teresa

Two things to start off: 1. I’m sure this topic has been talked about before, I just wanted to share my thoughts on it and see if anyone else felt the same way. 2. Spoilers will be about all three of the main books as well as The Fever Code prequel.

With that being said, Teresa has turned me into a freaking rollercoaster of emotion. I’ve binge read all four of those books over the course of the last two weeks.

This whole series feels like one big deception, nothing you know or think you know is as it seems. I know that’s the intention, but with any series like that you need a couple of anchors to keep people grounded. Things or people that keep the viewer/reader coming back as a sort of rock of information.

In the first book Thomas is obviously the main anchor despite his past being somewhat mysterious and perhaps devious. Along with that you get the idea that Minho, Newt, and Teresa are rocks as well, just maybe not as much. I leave Alby out because he always had something going on that made me wary of him. Back to Teresa. She’s instantly set up as having a connection to our main rock and they sort of lean on each other throughout the book. Then she helps save everyone to get them out of the maze. There’s also an emotional connection between her and Thomas. All of that sets her up to be a character that we can really trust as readers, another anchor of the series.

Book two takes a definite turn in the beginning. She’s separated, her title is the betrayer, Thomas is supposed to be killed by Group B, etc. Regardless of that, she still seems to be an anchor. Thomas is left reeling with her loss and you can’t help but feel the same way. Then when you finally see her in that shack outside of the city, you finally get some “clarity.” She claims she’s resisting WICKED, she kisses Thomas, and she tries to be helpful. Even when she shows up with Group B, kidnaps Thomas, and beats the snot out of him, you still think she’s on his side because of what she did and said in the shack. Finally she kidnaps him for the second time, Aris and her beat him up, make out, etc etc. It honestly made me really angry, I felt like I had been betrayed because she seemed like someone I could count on to help Thomas. I had to stop reading for a bit because I was so upset. Then I come back and Teresa is trying to make it all better, trying to convince Thomas it was for his own good. Thomas couldn’t trust her and neither could I. It was really depressing. I pretty much despised her for the rest of the book.

Then book three had to come around and throw a wrench in my emotions again. She’s not trusted by anyone for the entire book, rightly so. But Thomas’s attachment to her and his desire to want to make things right really resonated with me. I slowly let myself believe that maybe she was good, and that she just made a mistake. And then at the very end she dies. Her death and the conversation about it took up like three paragraphs. I again found myself really upset, but more sad this time. I felt like she had sort of been getting better, finally redeemed herself for what she did in book two, and then her death is so sudden, so quick, and so emotionless. It was heartbreaking. You also realize that she would have been the final candidate if she had actually rebelled against WICKED and refused to kidnap Thomas. It made her situation that much sadder. She had gone through all of that heartache, put everyone else through all of that pain, and she could’ve avoided it the whole time. All my anger was just replaced by this deep sadness.

Finally that brings us to the prequel book, The Fever Code. I started out really struggling to read about Teresa. It was hard to spend more time with her after knowing what would happen in the other books. Then for a little while I forgot all about the other books and I just enjoyed the jokes and the jabs between her and Thomas, and it made me happy again. A sort of blissful ignorance to the rest of the series for a while. And then as I neared the end I was forced to remember what would happen in the other three books, and it brought all of that sadness back. But it was no longer anger or sadness because of what she had done, it was sadness at the fact that she would have to go through it.

Teresa might be my least favorite character out of any series I’ve read, and that’s exactly what makes her my favorite.