Matched, by Ally Condie

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In the Society, Officials decide. Who you love. Where you work. When you die.

Cassia has always trusted their choices. It’s hardly any price to pay for a long life, the perfect job, the ideal mate. So when her best friend appears on the Matching screen, Cassia knows with complete certainty that he is the one… until she sees another face flash for an instant before the screen fades to black. Now Cassia is faced with impossible choices: between Xander and Ky, between the only life she’s known and a path no one else has ever dared follow — between perfection and passion.

I love dystopia. Love it. And I wanted to love Matched. I've heard some good things about it, and I was more than prepared to ignore the bad. Plus, it has a gorgeous gorgeous cover. /superficiality

Matched, by Allie Condie, is about a world where no one makes any decisions. The Society decides where you work, who you marry, and when you die. (When you're eighty.) This makes for a perfect life, and Cassia (that name is so annoying because I keep wanting to think it says Cassie and then I'm like, oh, nope, it's Cassia) sure doesn't mind. She's looking forward to being "Matched," which means that she'll have her husband chosen for her. Her Match is her bestest friendly-friend, Xander. (This isn't a spoiler; you can find out as much by reading the jacket flap.) This thrills her; she loves Xander very much. Apparently it's also very unusual for people to be Matched with people they live near and have met. Anyway. She's given a card full of information about her Match (even though she already knows everything about him). When she puts it into her computer-thing, a picture of Xander comes up - then switches for a second to a picture of another boy before the screen goes black. This, too, is someone she knows - a dude called Ky. Immediately, and bizarrely, she becomes rather obsessed with him. 

OH NO HELP LOVE TRIANGLE ALERT

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Um. I'm not big on love triangles. Can you tell? And I didn't like this one at all.

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Also there's a poem: Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, by Dylan Thomas. (Picture of Dylan at right.) (Teh Intrawebz inform me that this is a villanelle, and also that Dylan was Welsh and wrote this poem for his dying father. Perhaps you are interested in this information?) It's mentioned that there is also a poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, but since she doesn't include that poem in the book or even say anything much about it, I struggle to understand why she mentioned it. These poems are illegal, BTW. They have a hundred poems, and all others have been destroyed. Same with music, art, &c. This struck me as one of the only truly bad things the Society did. (Of course there was the whole euthanasia thing, but that didn't really make as much of an impact on me, to be honest. But more on all that later on.)

Anyway, I know you're dying to know what I thought of this book. Thing is, I enjoyed it. It truly is an enjoyable book. But on the whole? My reaction is as follows.

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Now I've got that over with (COULD NOT RESIST using that second one) I can explain with words.

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One of the reasons I've heard for not liking this book is how similar it is to The Giver, by Lois Lowry. This review (which you should check out; I agreed with just about all of it) describes it as "basically The Giver in a different format." I ADORE The Giver. Love love love.

They do have some similarities. There's the whole "no choices evar" thing. And some of the other stuff. Thing is? In The Giver, this stuff is genuinely horrifying. In Matched? I just didn't care. In a way, this is kind of like Giver minus the things that make Giver so horrifying and wonderful.

Actually, on the whole, for a dystopian world, this world seemed pretty okay. I mean, yes, having no choices is bad, and so is euthanasia, and so is the lack of poetry. But none of this except for the poetry really seemed bad they way she wrote it. Didn't care. Plus, they didn't really seem to do anything majorly bad, and when you find out about the bad stuff they're doing, it's too little way too late.

And some of the stuff that made Cassia go "OH NO THE SOCIETY IS COMPLETELY EVIL AND MUST BE DESTROYED" made me go "What? Why is that so bad again?"

About the characters. Cassia-of-the-annoying-name was just BORING. Like seriously we are discussing a major lack of personality. So was Xander-of-the-awesome-name. I liked Ky-whose-name-is-also-awesome, though I didn't get why Cassia-of-the-annoying-name started becoming obsessed with him. Siriusly: Why does having his face appear on the screen for a second or two mean that she loves him and must choose between him and the guy she's already been stated to love?

The grandfather character, though, was awesome and by far my favourite.

Then Teh Reveal at the end just annoyed me. Spoilers in white ink; only highlight to read if you've read the book, or the evil monster will come and get you: When it was revealed that rthe whole romance thing was just some random experiment by the Society, and I'm like "whut WHY?"

On the whole, this book is unremarkable and didn't really make me care about what was going on. But I did enjoy reading it, and I liked Ky and the grandfather, so... three stars?

In Six Words (from Cassia's perspective): Xander! Or Ky? The government's EVIL!