Matched, by Ally Condie. Read-a-thon # 4

[rachelmanija]

A YA dystopia in which a computer arranges marriages for everyone. Since I spent much of my childhood in India and my own culture invented the yenta, the concept of the arranged marriage, despite being obviously horrible if non-consensual, does not exactly spell out “terrifying dystopia” to me.

Comments

[tool_of_satan]

Well, phooey. I voted for this in the hope it would be amusingly awful, as you say. But I suppose I shouldn't begrudge you the pleasure of reading something decent. :)

[cicer]

I love YA-lit dystopia stories, so I may have to give this one a look. Thanks for the heads-up that it's not awful; I'm often skeptical about the quality of stories like this. When they're good, they're good, but when they're bad...blech!

(By the way, I've been meaning to ask: what's the story behind that icon of yours?)

[rachelmanija]

It's a quote from my memoir, the one I'm signing in this icon, spoken quite seriously by a very, very strange person who lived on the ashram I grew up in. When someone pointed out that sex was necessary to create babies, he retorted, "They can go into the forest and pluck them from the trees!"

[smillaraaq]

...just like in The Twelve Kingdoms!

[lady_ganesh]

Yeah, I think this was a free giveaway for Kindle and I skipped it 'cause it looked not so good.

[lady_schrapnell]

Well, hunh. I came across this book just last night at the end of Across the Universe, and after finishing that, went straight into Jazz in Love, which continues the theme of arranged marriages (although she gets to pick from a list drawn up by her parents).

Annoying about the lack of conclusiveness, but this still sounds worth checking out.

[sarahtales]

I thought the book was well written also, but was futilely hoping that in a world full of mandated heterosexual marriage, the issue of 'some people are gay' might come up. There were the Singles I guess? But other than that, alas no.

[rachelmanija]

I was assuming that any form of non-straight sexuality was banned, including the mention of its existence. But yeah, I would have liked to have seen it come up.

[sarahtales]

I would've loved a side plot of some people trying to cope with that taboo-ness alongside 'behold this forbidden heterosexual romance between white people!' *daydreams*

[rachelmanija]

I read The Carbon Diaries a while back, but didn't review it. I liked it but wasn't blown away. It made a nice comparison with the better-written and far more emotionally devastating, but less realistic and hopeful Life as We Knew It.

What was the comparison you were thinking of? Carbon Diaries, if I recall correctly, had a rather realistic state of neither extremely over-controlled nor extremely chaotic, but of an ordinarily orderly society sliding into breakdown.

[rachelmanija]

I didn't think Matched was great, but it was much better than I had expected.

I didn't believe in the orderliness either, but it's funny how we always find very orderly societies unbelievable when they do exist in real life, albeit to a lesser degree. For instance, if I have time today I'm going to read the semi-autobiographical West Point novel, which I imagine will also depict an incredibly orderly society, in which everyone does indeed have all their work time, free time, study time, food, clothing, manner of dress, etc decided for them.