Ever since I’ve read Lowry’s The Giver and Collins’ The Hunger Games, I’ve been desiring to read dystopian/uptopian novels in the new millennium of YA lit. After hearing so many positive reviews of Matched from my friends (who are also avid YA readers), I decided to give Condie’s book a try. The author introduces us to another “perfect” uptopia. It shares the same likeness in The Giver, in Jonas’s Community. No one goes hungry, no one is homeless, and even love and death is controlled. With a premise like that, I’m sure it would entice a dystopian or Hunger Games fan, with a smooth pace and twists and turns in-between. The story moves at an incredibly slow pace. If anything, I would think the story would’ve moved a lot more smoothly. While Condie bypasses that nuisance of “insta-love” that keeps popping up in YA fiction, I found myself annoyed with the character development and the protagonist, Cassia Reyes. Her tentativeness in the book is understandable, however she is much too ambivalent to what/who she wants at times, with the resonance of Oliver’s Lena from Delirium.
“In the Society, students around the age of seventeen are paired to their significant other. Being paired with her childhood friend Xander, seventeen-year-old Cassia did not expect to see Ky’s face show up on the port screen. And, slowly, the two become closer and Cassia inevitably falls in love with him.”
From the moment I began reading, I was a bit iffy about this book. The writing is bland, tasteless. Condie tries to sound almost lyrical with the writing, though at times I feel as if the ending of chapters is abrupt and doesn’t flow as the narrative should’ve. I do enjoy the concept of Matched, mainly because of The Giver. Though the setting and characters don’t across as unique or original because of Lowry’s dystopian, the similarities of the book cannot be ignored from the story-line. Instead of making their own unique dystopia, many of the things are taken from The Giver.
The forming of Condie’s dystopia probably took place prior to the narrative, though there are many things left unexplained. Why do they have the Hundred Committee? Why did they get rid of all the artwork and poetry? What makes it so dangerous to hold onto a poem from the past?
Matched isn’t a story I would recommend to anyone (and this is coming from a fourteen-year-old). For those who are dystopian fans at heart will probably learn to love this story and see past its impurities and clumsy writing. Those who enjoy romance may like this story, despite of its slow movement. Of course, this is just my opinion. Everyone has a different taste and books and writing.
