Sound familiar at all?

“Divergent” is not simply a copycat “Hunger Games,” but its parallel themes — totalitarianism reducible to the lies of adults, teenage years presented as a blessed state providing unique access to Truth, hand-to-hand combat-training as a coming-of-age ritual — make it cut awfully close. Other points of distinction between the series begin to look cosmetic when examined closely. Worse, the book’s characters and themes are blunt, coarse things, with almost no nuance. What is compelling in Katniss, for example — her ambivalence about power, violence and romantic love — is entirely absent in Tris, who lives in a world of moral certainties. The regime’s overthrow is the only right thing to do, worthy of any kind of sacrifice; her companion, Four, is the man for her from the start of the books to the finish. In other words the thing is flat, flat, flat.

Curiously, it is the kind of flat that actually made me angry as I read it. I am not the kind of person who sniffs at “low culture.” Still, something like “Divergent” has been so hastily assembled, and then so cynically marketed, that I cannot help being offended on the part of the reading public. I know it sells, and God knows that publishing needs the money. But the pushing of this stuff is starting to make me feel as if we’re all suckers. Cruelly, the gilded age of young-adult literature threatens to suck the life out of the whole thing.

It isn’t hard to see what has brought us here. It’s money, plain and simple. I wouldn’t turn my nose up at cold, hard cash either (like Somerset Maugham, I often wonder if the people who speak contemptuously of it have ever had to do without). But let’s be clear that the chase of it guides people into all kinds of misadventures. In publishing, that means hunting down every young person with an aspiration to write a dystopian or fantasy epic. Even if they might not sell 450 million copies (as Scholastic claims Rowling has), the industry is certainly prepared to accept the consolation prize of the 65 million copies that “The Hunger Games” sold domestically.

Few are bothered by the costs of this excitement, though successful writers in the young-adult market do seem to have noticed the way the industry depends on them. John Green, whose (excellent, though non-epic) young-adult novel “The Fault in Our Stars ” will get its own film adaptation in May, explained his predicament to The Chicago Tribune last fall: “It’s a massive amount of pressure, and not just from fans, but from people whose jobs are on the line because of what you write.” And that pressure’s twin seems to be a blunt carelessness in selecting and editing new work for publication. Most of these Next Big Things appear to have escaped any serious redlining. It seems their “editors” simply pray to the gods of chance that the author lands on a critical featherbed, rather than being thrown to the wolves.

But the wolves are everywhere. Veronica Roth, the author of “Divergent,” recently told the press that she has been given a diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder. It was triggered, she said, by the amount of nasty Internet commentary her writing had generated. There were one-star reviews on Amazon, she said, and complaints that she writes like “a fourth grader.” And the tide keeps rising. One Goodreads reviewer wrote that the most recent book makes him question whether he’ll “ever [read] another dystopian trilogy.” Roth has written on her personal blog, too, about the effects of the “constant, abundant and very, very public” criticism she gets. (Of which I am, with this essay, now a regretful part.)