Review: Matched Series

Title(s): Matched/Crossed/Reached

Author: Ally Condie

Series: Matched Series

Publisher: Dutton Books for Young Readers
Genre: YA/Dystopian

Release Date: 2010, 2011, 2012

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 with complete certainty that 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.

-taken from Goodreads

Once again, I'm going to review a series as a whole instead of doing each book individually. When all the books in the series have already been published when I start reading them, then I usually finish them in under a week - it seems silly to post a separate blog post for each one 3 days in a row.

The Matched series was very interesting for me in that I finished it having no idea how I felt about it. I don't think I've ever finished a book or series and not been sure whether I liked it or not.

Matched, the first book, had me completely hooked from chapter one. The idea of every aspect of your life (from the food you eat and the clothes you wear to the person you marry and how many children you have) being decided for you by the government was so intriguing. I was fascinated by these people's lives and the way they seemed to just blindly accept everything they were told.

Condie does a wonderful job of making the reader see how easily our own world could turn into this one. As a result, the poignancy of Cassia's feelings toward creativity and what little art she's allowed to experience was amplified by my own feelings toward art - I couldn't help but think about how I would feel if I were limited to only 100 paintings or 100 songs. Thanks to our technological advances, our world has become indundated with art...anyone can write a story, sing a song, or draw a picture and thousands of people could see it online somewhere by tomorrow. The Matched series reminded me to try and truly appreciate the opportunities I've been given to be able to freely create and view beauty in my world.

I leave you with a quote from Crossed - it's my favorite little passage in the whole series because it's about love and it's so true.

"Everyone has something of beauty about them. In the beginning for me, it was Ky’s eyes I noticed, and I love them still. But loving lets you look, and look, and look again. You notice the back of a hand, the turn of a head, the way of a walk. When you first love, you look blind and you see it all as the glorious, beloved whole, or a beautiful sum of beautiful parts. But when you see the one you love as pieces, as whys—why he walks like this, why he closes his eyes like that—you can love those parts, too, and it’s a love at once more complicated and more complete."

Buy it: Amazon, Barnes and Noble