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.
