Review: Reached by Ally Condie

Reached (Matched #3)
By Ally Condie
Publisher: Dutton Books

To Sum It Up:

The rebel movement, the Rising, is ready to make its move against the oppressive Society, and so, too, are Cassia and Ky. Ky is assigned as a pilot for the Rising, while Cassia’s covert role finds her placed back in the Society. Xander, now a Medic, also has a part to play in all of this. Despite all of its preparations, though, the Rising’s plans do not go as expected, leaving Cassia, Ky, and Xander to face a future even more uncertain than it was under the Society’s rule.

Review:

I’ll summarize my feelings toward the Matched trilogy like this. Matched: meh. Crosssed: very good. Reached: meh. While Matched didn’t do much to distinguish itself in my mind from the other dystopian novels I’d read, it held my interest enough to warrant continuing the series. I really enjoyed the second book, Crossed; I found it much more action-oriented, and I liked the character growth exhibited by the protagonist, Cassia. Crossed left off with the promise of rebellion against the Society by the Rising. So I was all set to read about the Rising storming into the Society’s territory and cleaning house, or something to that effect. That’s not quite how things went down in Reached, though. Not even close.

Ally Condie’s prose is very pretty and the primary reason why I’m not giving this book a lower rating. The writing style of these books has always had this gentle, kind of poetic feel to it that perfectly suits passive resistance. I wouldn’t have minded a lack of epic battle scenes in Reached at all if the build-up in Crossed hadn’t implied that there was, in fact, going to be a lot of thrilling action in Reached. Instead, Reached falls back on a dystopian trope to drive the plot. I don’t want to spoil the novel for anyone considering reading it, but suffice it to say that many a dystopian novel has gone down this path before and with greater success than Reached does. This turn of events was a letdown. The rebellion that I’d been anticipating since the end of Crossed never materializes, at least not on a scale that the word “rebellion” brings to my mind.

With each successive installment, a new narrator has been added. Matched began with just Cassia, Crossed brought in Ky's perspective, and for Reached, we now also have Xander’s point of view. I was quite curious to read from Xander’s POV because his character was still such a mystery to me. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel as though I gained any insight even after having firsthand access to his thoughts and emotions. Cassia, Ky, and Xander’s narrative voices all blended together and weren’t very distinct from one another. Not only that, but they sounded detached from what was happening around them, like they were just observing but not actually interacting. This was the main problem that I had with Cassia in Matched; I never got a sense of depth from her feelings. To me, she was a much more engaging character in Crossed. For the final book, I thought that she reverted to the inscrutable Cassia from Matched, which was frustrating to see. My favorite character from the entire series was Indie because she always spoke her mind and had a spark to her personality that none of the main characters came close to demonstrating. I always felt like I had to work at guessing what was going on with them, despite the first person POVs, and even then, I only managed to scrape together outlines of who they were as characters.

I think the amount of closure and satisfaction you derive from Reached depends on how invested you’ve become in the series. For someone like me, who only had a casual interest from the start, this was disappointing. Over five hundred pages of what was to me mostly dispassionate narration really tried my patience. The hope of seeing some dramatic action take place is what kept me reading, but I hoped in vain. I wanted more rebellion, a romance that was more than lukewarm, and to feel more involved in the story. Crossed was definitely my favorite book in the series; I loved reading about Cassia’s harrowing journey through the mountains in search of Ky. Sadly, I didn’t find any of the story lines in Reached nearly as compelling.

All in All:

My expectations for Reached turned out to be very different from reality, so in a way, I feel I set myself up for disappointment. In the end, I think this series and I were just not meant to be.

Review: Crossed by Ally Condie

Crossed (Matched #2)
By Ally Condie
Publisher: Dutton Books

To Sum It Up: Cassia and Ky have fallen in love with each other, but the Society has its own agenda and has sent Ky to the Outer Provinces. Out in this harsh environment, where there is talk of a rebellion against the Society, Ky and the Society's other Aberrations and Anomalies are being used as decoys to make the mysterious Enemy think that the Outer Provinces are inhabited and to draw the Enemy's fire. With Ky in grave danger, Cassia leaves her family and life in the Society behind in order to find him, despite being already Matched to Xander, her friend since childhood. Both Cassia and Ky must brave a rugged landscape and put their trust in people they hardly know as they fight to make their way back to each other.

Review: Although I wasn’t wowed by Matched, I liked it enough that I wanted to check out the sequel, Crossed. One of my issues with Matched was the lack of enough action to really keep me glued to the pages. A lot of the time I felt like I was reading a traditional romance novel rather than a dystopian novel that had a romance in it. The protagonist, Cassia, also failed to win me over; I thought that her character needed more complexity to it. Both of these quibbles were remedied in Crossed, resulting in a faster-paced read that I couldn’t put down.

In a departure from Cassia’s solo narration in Matched, Crossed alternates between Cassia and Ky’s points of view. I liked seeing things from Ky’s perspective and learning more about him. He’s been thrust onto the front lines of the Society’s battle with the enigmatic Enemy. The Society is trying to contain the fighting to the Outer Provinces, and so those males whom the Society has deemed unfit for Citizenship have been dropped in the middle of the warzone to fool the Enemy into thinking that it’s attacking populated territory. Ky’s tragedy-filled life has given him a strong survival instinct, and he uses it to plan a daring escape from the village that he’s been jettisoned in. Ky also turns out to be a natural leader, like his late father, who was part of the rebel group known as the Rising. Condie made a very good decision to give Ky a voice in this book, and she did an equally excellent job writing his character.

As Ky attempts to return to Cassia, she is trying to reach him in the Outer Provinces. Cassia has sacrificed a comfortable life back in the Society to find him, and her journey, unsurprisingly, is a difficult one. This arduous mission that she has taken upon herself forces Cassia to toughen up considerably. She matures quite a bit in this book, and I found her to be a much more compelling heroine than she was in Matched. I give her a lot of credit for trekking through rough terrain and not whining about it.

A few new faces appeared in Crossed, and their addition was welcome. I liked both Vick and Eli, who escape from the village with Ky. The latter decides to save Eli because he reminds Ky of Cassia’s younger brother, Bram. Vick is just cool, and he was my favorite among the new characters. Cassia’s traveling companion, Indie, who is in the same work camp as Cassia at the beginning of the book, is a rather shifty figure. It’s hard to tell whether she’s a friend or a foe to Cassia. I can picture Indie striking out with some readers because of her dubious behavior, but I thought that it lent edge to her character.

And what news of Xander, the young man who is Cassia’s Match? Well, Xander only shows up very briefly in Crossed, but we learn some extremely interesting information about him. Going into specifics would head into spoiler territory, so I’ll just say that Condie needs to address all of the questions that I now have about Xander in the final installment of the trilogy.

I wish that there had been some more explanation about who the Enemy was, but that was my only gripe about this novel. Obviously, I enjoyed Crossed a great deal more than I did Matched, and I can’t compliment Cassia’s character development enough. I hope that she continues to grow in Reached, which I added to my TBR list as soon as I finished reading Crossed.

All in All: The pace and action really pick up in Crossed and are the main reasons why I zipped through it. I had planned to drop this series if Crossed turned out to be a repeat of Matched, but it was far from it. Based on the ending of Crossed, Reached looks to be a thrilling finale that I look forward to reading.

Review: Matched by Ally Condie

Matched (Matched #1)
By Ally Condie
Publisher: Dutton Books

To Sum It Up: The Society strives to make the lives of its citizens as perfect as possible. Cassia Reyes knows this firsthand. She has a loving family and a promising career path ahead of her. When the time comes for Cassia to be Matched to her ideal mate, he turns out to be her best friend, Xander Carrow. Everything seems to be going according to the Society’s plans until Cassia views the data on the microcard that is supposed to contain Xander’s information. His face appears but then is replaced by that of Ky Markham, whom Cassia has also known since childhood. This improbable error leads Cassia to do the unthinkable: she begins to question whether or not the Society always acts in the best interests of its people.

Review: Matched was a bit of a mixed bag for me. I thought that its strongest point was the love story between Cassia and Ky, which dominates the book. In fact, sometimes I felt like Matched could have stood on its own as a romance about two people wondering whether they’re destined to be together, without the dystopian elements.

The dystopian world of Matched was fairly disturbing. Because culture before the Society’s formation was “cluttered,” the Society has taken it upon itself to preserve only the hundred best songs, poems, paintings, etc. Dreams, food intake, and even what’s dumped down the garbage incinerator are all monitored. Then of course, there’s the Matching System. One aspect of this world that didn’t make sense to me was how Matched couples needed to be chaperoned on their dates by one of the Society’s Officials, yet at one point Cassia mentioned that teenagers were allowed to have crushes and flirt before being Matched. That seems odd to me in a society that even schedules its citizens’ recreation hours for them.

I couldn’t help but find myself comparing Cassia with Lena from Lauren Oliver’s Delirium. Like Lena, Cassia initially toes the line because that’s what she’s always been taught to do. Also like Lena, Cassia slowly realizes that there’s much more to life than doing exactly as she’s told. For me, though, the similarities between the two characters end there. I never felt a connection with Cassia. When she discovered the truth about the microcard incident, she was understandably angry, but I didn’t feel outraged on her behalf. I actually felt worse for Ky because his story was already so pass-me-the-entire-box-of-Kleenex-sad. Throughout the book, I felt like I was only skimming the surface of Cassia’s emotions, that there wasn’t enough depth to her feelings to elicit my sympathy or make me worry what would happen if the Officials knew how close she was growing to Ky. I did worry about Ky, though.

I felt a little sorry for Cassia’s Match, Xander. I didn’t think that he ever had a fair chance to win Cassia’s heart because once Ky entered the picture (almost literally), Xander disappeared for pages at a time. The book’s focus shifted mainly to Cassia and Ky.

I thought that Matched worked well as a love story, but its take on dystopia came up a little short for me. With all of its rules, the Society seemed intimidating, but I never got the sense of foreboding that I experienced while reading other dystopian novels. Nevertheless, I’ll be reading the sequel, Crossed, to find out what happens to Ky and to see if Xander plays a bigger role.

All in All: This was worth a library borrow but not the type of book that I’d read over and over again. I like my dystopians on the action-packed side, and this one didn’t quite fit the bill.