Book Review: Matched

By Allie Condie


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 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.

Why I read it: It’s dystopia, and that’s reason enough. Plus, the cover is absolutely gorgeous. I know you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but in this case the cover fits perfectly.

My Thoughts: I’ve decided not to do a ‘what I liked’ and ‘what I disliked’ about this book, because my thoughts are all over the map. Basically, I liked almost everything, but didn’t really like anything.

The premise is an intriguing one. At seventeen, everyone is ‘Matched’ up with the person they will eventually marry. Cassia is matched with her best friend Xander, and she’s completely happy with that until she puts her match disk in her home port, and another boy’s face appears for a second. I quite enjoyed this premise; the idea of an arranged marriage perfectly calculated on their personalities sounds like something that could eventually happen. However, I was annoyed by the romance in this book. She loves Xander and knows that she would be happy with him; he’s a super sweet guy. And yet, she decides to fall in love with Ky. I never really understood why she liked Ky that much more that she would risk everything to be with him when she knew it was impossible.

The setting was certainly well described. I enjoyed the portrayal of the Society as something that was meant to help the people. Instead of being an evil totalitarian government, they honestly meant to do the best thing for the people. I liked this twist, but it felt a little off when they would do some semi-evil things for no reason whatsoever. I got the impression that it was actually a fairly good society, but Cassia needed an excuse to rebel to keep the book from getting boring, so Condie would make them do something completely senseless, like go door to door collecting all their old valuables. Also, the Society decided to keep only a hundred poems/songs/paintings because the culture was too ‘cluttered’. I never really understood why they’d stop creativity like that.

As for the characters, I liked them alright but I didn’t quite identify with them. I really liked Cassia’s family. Her parents were nice, well-rounded characters, and I loved her little brother. I also really liked both the love interests, Xander and Ky. However, I never quite felt the romance between Ky and Cassia. It always seemed like they liked being together so they could talk about old (forbidden) poetry rather than having any real attraction.

From a Christian Perspective: Matched scores very high in this category. I don’t think there was any swearing at all. There was no sexual content, aside from two or three quick kisses that weren’t sensual at all. Religion is mentioned once or twice as something that ended a long time ago, with the coming of the restrictive Society. One of the major reasons that Cassia hates the Society is because she finds out that the reason everyone dies at eighty is because the Society poisons their food. It was nice to see an anti-euthanasia message in a popular book. In short, this is not exactly a Christian book, but it has nothing in it that would offend a Christian.

To buy or not to buy: I’ve decided not to buy this because it’s just not my type of story. I was looking for an action/adventure, it turned out to be a romance. If you love dystopian romance, though, this is definitely the book for you. 

Believability In Dystopias

Lately, a lot of dystopian fiction has been flooding into the market. I think this is a good thing; I’ve never liked Paranormal Romance, and I’ve always loved Dystopia (even years ago, before it became popular.) The dystopian genre is different from paranormal in that it is supposed to be realistic. Most dystopians are set in a futuristic world, often after a sort of apocalypse, that’s either defined by chaos or by a strict totalitarian government. Scientific advances often play a role, but most of the time this is just ‘fake science’ and has no real science behind it.

 

In short, dystopia is a sort of ‘What if?’ genre. What if love was considered to be a disease? (Delirium) What if kids had to fight to the death in an arena? (The Hunger Games) What if everything was decided by a Society, including the person you were supposed to marry? (Matched) What if a virus makes females die at twenty and males at twenty-five? (Wither) What if only teenagers could get pregnant? (Bumped) What if your entire life was defined by what faction you decided to join? (Divergent) Those are just several examples of the ‘What if?’ questions raised by recent dystopian releases.

 

Like any genre, dystopia gets its share of bad reviews. I’ve read negative reviews for all of these books, and most of them seemed to center not around the writing or characters, but on the believability of the story. Lots of people didn’t like Wither because it doesn’t make sense that a virus would kill all girls at exactly twenty years old. People thought The Hunger Games was unrealistic because there’s no way a society would enjoy watching children fight to the death. One of my biggest issues with Matched was that I never understood why the Society needed to control every aspect of life.

 

My question for you is… does it matter? Can you still enjoy Divergent even if you think there’s no way a society could ever evolve into five factions? Would you still buy Delirium even if the idea of ‘curing’ love by frying part of your brain seems just a little far-fetched?

For me, it all depends. I haven’t read Bumped or Wither but I don’t think I’ll mind either of them since they’re obviously ‘What if?’ books. The science behind them may be absolute baloney, but I like the idea. I think creating a world where the teens need to get pregnant is a cool (if somewhat sketchy) setting. In The Hunger Games I think the idea of the tributes having to fight the death is cool enough to make up for the minor lack of believability. However, I just finished Matched and I was annoyed because I never understood why the Society needed to control everything and why they were so lenient with some things but so strict on others.

What’s your take on believability in dystopias? Does it bug you whenever a book’s premise is a little unrealistic? Or do you think that a cool idea is even better if it couldn’t happen in real life? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this popular genre.

IMM

This week's IMM features a number of books I've been absolutely dying to read for a long time. Many thanks to HarperCollins for running weekly writing challenges over on inkpop.com, and thanks to Tara Hudson, author of Hereafter, for choosing my except from The Web as one of the winning entries. Thanks to that, I got to choose three books from HarperTeen. Time for a bunch of dystopias:

Delirium! I'm not a huge fan of romance, but I've heard so many good things about this book that I just had to give it a try. Plus, I love a good dystopia.

DIVERGENT! I've you've been reading my blog you'll know how much I wanted this book. As soon as it arrived in the mail I sat down and read it in just over a day. I'll probably post my full review on Thursday, but let's just say I really loved it. 

This is a book I hadn't really considered getting; I was planning on ordering Bumped by Megan McKafferty instead. Then I read some not-so-good reviews for that book and some amazing reviews for this, so I decided to give it a try. Who doesn't like fairy tale re-tellings? 

I didn't get this one in the inkpop contest; it's Random House, not HarperTeen. I picked it up from the library because I heard a lot about it and (you guessed it) it's a dystopia. I'm nearly done it now and it's good, but not quite what I had hoped.

That's it for my mailbox this week. Have you read any of these books, or are they on your to-read list? What did you get in your mailbox this week?