Condie, Ally: Matched
Matched (2010)
Written by: Ally Condie
Genre: YA/Dystopia
Pages: 366 (ARC)
Series: Book One (ongoing?)
Release Date: November 30, 2010
Disclaimer: free from publisher via LibraryThing
I wanted this book the instant I saw the cover. And in truth, I really didn't care what it was about: I just really wanted this cover! But I tracked down the premise and became even more enthused, so I plopped the sucker on my wishlist. I've even got it pre-ordered, but when I saw the ARC offered at LibraryThing, I went ahead and requested. Sure, the book was already on its way thanks to my pre-order, but this way, if I didn't like it, I could cancel the pre-order, you know? This should tell you how excited I was to read this book: that despite having already secured, I wanted to read it early ANYWAY.
The premise: ganked from BN.com: Cassia has always trusted the Society to make the right choices for her: what to read, what to watch, what to believe. So when Xander's face appears on-screen at her Matching ceremony, Cassia knows with complete certainty that he is her ideal mate . . . until she sees Ky Markham's face flash for an instant before the screen fades to black.
The Society tells her it's a glitch, a rare malfunction, and that she should focus on the happy life she's destined to lead with Xander. But Cassia can't stop thinking about Ky, and as they slowly fall in love, Cassia begins to doubt the Society's infallibility and is faced with an impossible choice: between Xander and Ky, between the only life she's known and a path that no one else has dared to follow.
Review style: Yes, this is a YA Dystopia Romance, but while I've grown quite tired of the typical YA romance formula, I want to talk about how the author makes the formula work here and what she does that's right. I also want to talk about the dystopian elements as well, because there were far more than I anticipated, since I went into this thinking the book had little focus other than a love triangle. Yes, a love triangle! And the author does it correctly! So yes, I'll be talking details about this book, and details can lead to spoilers, so skip to "My Rating" if you want to remain spoiler-free. Everyone else, onward!
As we've discussed before, if you're writing YA and you're gonna have romance, you might as well go ahead and follow the crowd and make it a love triangle. Stephenie Meyer does it. Suzanne Collins does it. And so do countless other YA paranormals out in the market today. It can get a little tiring, because suddenly those summaries look too similar, and you feel you've read the story before you've even begun.
That was my fear with Matched by Ally Condie. Sure, I wanted this book the instant I saw it, but since then, I've become increasingly tired of the romance formula in YA, and I worried this book just wasn't going to do it for me.
But do any of you remember my discussion of what makes love triangles REALLY work in my review of Mockingjay? Essentially, both guys competing for the heroine's affections must be truly viable candidates for her love. Neither one should be the OBVIOUS winner for her affections, and moreso, she should lose something MORE than simply the guy she doesn't pick when she makes her choice.
Well, ladies and gentlemen and YA fans of all ages: Ally Condie gets it right.
First, there's Xander: Cassia's best friend for YEARS and her Society-given Match. Everyone talks about how he's the best of all of them in their group, and we don't just hear about how great he is, but we see what makes him a great guy as well. You root for him, you want him to be happy, you want for Cassia not to be distracted by Ky so that she can be happy with him too. Xander represents the best of everything society has to offer: the perfect mate, the perfect job, the perfect life, etc. If Cassia follows the rules and picks him, she's guaranteed happiness on a multitude of levels, and truly, she does love Xander. This is not a question.
Then there's Ky: Ky's the second face she sees on the microchip that's supposed to contain all the information about her Match. She's assured this is a mistake, that Ky can't be Matched ANYWAY because he's an Aberration, which means he's THISCLOSE to being on Society's hit-list and he'd better behave. And he does. He's a very careful guy who's made being average into a science, which is all the more impressive because it's obvious how intelligent the guy is. He doesn't want to make waves, yet he holds on to his bitter past to remind him who he is. Cassia falling in love with Ky means she's making a choice, she's rejecting Society's control, but by doing so, she's not only risking her role in Society's perfect world, but she's risking her parents and brother as well.
Oh, and on TOP of all that, Ky's teaching her how to write. They share a love for banned poetry.
The author plays the romance very well. Cassia is truly torn, but she's attracted more to Ky for many reasons that are both her choice and not: one, if he'd not been an Aberration, he would've been her true Match. Two, he can teach her how to write, and he can teach her about the world beyond what she's always known. Sure, he's got the bad boy/forbidden mystique, but he's not actually bad, nor is he rebel. He just wants what he can't have. And the love actually builds over the course of the story. Most love triangles have the heroine falling head over heels in love-at-first-sight when they meet the other guy, but not so with Cassia. First she's curious, and that curiosity blooms into friendship and then love. It's done VERY well, and even more striking is its balance to the relationship Cassia has with Xander, which would've bloomed faster if not for Ky. She loves him and trust him, but she loves and trusts Ky too.
Which makes the revelation at the end that Society is essentially playing a game with them even more difficult. Cassia believed Ky loved her for who she was, without Society's interference. Not so: they tormented him with the knowledge he couldn't have a Match, but if he did, it would've been Cassia. So he knew the truth, just as she did, before they started hanging out. Which begs the question of how things would've worked if they HADN'T known, but we then learn something more important: while the Offical's "official" line is that it was intentional, an experiment, it wasn't an experiment until Ky's name had already been added to the pool and Matched with Cassia. That was truly a mistake, which begs the question: is that just what it is, a mistake, a sign that Society is slowly falling apart at the seams, or is their a larger game afoot, and did someone sabotage the system?
I suspect there will be more books, and I suspect we'll find out.
Moving on to the other dystopian aspects. Characters in this world cannot write. They cannot create (and if they do, it's under the strict direction of the Officials and erased immediately). Apparently, this dystopia was created out of our very full and cluttered world, so people only need to know the Hundred Poems, Hundred Songs, etc, all of which were selected generations ago to determine which had the right to last through history and which didn't. This gets into the fact that Society has set up everything so that nobody is inspired to rebel. The songs and poetry and stories and everything selected is meant to inspire conformity, never rebellion.
But Cassia's grandfather has secured two poems that have been hidden from Society for two generations. And this, coupled with her double-Match, inspires her to start wondering. We also learn what happens to the elderly, what Society hopes to accomplish in the future in regards to immortality, and how people's every action is practically predicted. Meals are prepared specifically for a single person to make sure they get the optimum nutrients, which means all of these dystopian elements combined create a rather startling picture: every aspect about the Society is about control. It's about giving the people just enough to keep them happy so they don't think about rebelling, but not so much that they start taking happiness for granted.
Things aren't going well for the Society though. We get glimpses of the world outside of the community Cassia lives in, and by the book's end, I realized we might have quite the epic story in hand. Not just in terms of a love triangle (because that feels more resolved than not by the end), but in terms of the world Cassia lives in.
Granted, by the end of the book, Cassia's choice is pretty obvious. We learn what happens to those who follow the rules; we learn what happens to those that don't. We learn that the answers aren't quite as clear-cut as they appear. There are some confusing questions raised (why was Cassia forced to move when she was so close to securing a position? Is it because of her rebellious activities?), and sometimes the prose gets a little melodramatic (then again, aren't all teens a little melodramatic at some point?), but overall, it's a rather enjoyable story.
My Rating
Worth the Cash: I'm saying this even though I don't have my hands on the hardcover yet. But reading the ARC made me decide I wanted to keep my pre-order in place, which means I'm still buying the physical copy of the book. While I was worried at first about another badly drawn love-triangle and a voice that felt a little too young for me, the book evolves and changes. Yes, there's a love triangle, but it's done properly and both of Cassia's choices are, at this stage, perfectly right choices, and by choosing one guy over the other, she's sacrificing more than simply the love of the other guy. But this is more than a love story: it's a dystopia that asks us to examine what it means to live in complacency, to wonder what it means if we let the government (or Society, in this case) always make our decisions for us. Does Society truly have our best interests at heart, or its own? Cassia certainly grows and changes over the course of the novel, and the characters are quite likable. I'm certainly looking forward to the next installment, and I think the book is worth reading for those readers looking a thought-provoking dystopia (one always wonders: how DID the world get to this state, anyway?) as well as those readers who want to see what I mean when I say the love triangle is done properly. Condie handles the love story with the right amount of realism, but there's more to this book than the love story.
Cover Commentary: I said it before and I'll say it again: I wanted this book the instant I saw the cover. It's gorgeous. I love the green dress the girl in the bubble, the so-simple yet so-elegant cover. My ARC even has this lovely, rainbow holographic-esque effect (it's not actually a hologram, but that's the only word I can think of to use) that sparkles when you turn the cover in the light. This book is going to look fantastic in stores.
Next up: Feed by Mira Grant