‘On her sev­en­teenth birth­day, Cas­sia meets her Match. Soci­ety dic­tates he is her per­fect part­ner for life. 

Except he’s not.

In Cassia’s soci­ety, Offi­cials decide who peo­ple love.

How many chil­dren they have.

Where they work.

When they die.

But as Cas­sia finds her­self falling in love with another boy, she is deter­mined to make some choices of her own. And that’s when her whole world begins to unravel…’

There are some mixed reviews cir­cu­lat­ing about Matched - some found the lack of action dis­ap­point­ing, oth­ers, like myself, enjoyed the qui­eter pac­ing of this one. Read­ing it felt a bit like observ­ing the calm before the storm. For a dystopian, there are barely any fight­ing scenes or signs of rebel­lion in this first part of Cassia’s story — while this might not sit so well with some read­ers, over­all I enjoyed the slow build up that Condie has offered up here.

Instead, we really get to really explore Cassia’s world, focus­ing on her life and that cir­cum­stances that lead her to first start ques­tion­ing the Soci­ety. Weaved through­out the story was a ton of infor­ma­tion regard­ing the many rules, reg­u­la­tions and restric­tions imposed upon the char­ac­ters; with tech­nol­ogy that can pre­dict every­thing a per­son will do based on sta­tis­tics and care­ful, life-long mon­i­tor­ing, as an out­sider look­ing in, any actions or choices made by the char­ac­ters rarely felt like their own.

Meals are basic, each one indi­vid­u­ally pre­pared for them depend­ing on nutri­ents required per the day’s activ­i­ties and deliv­ered at a cer­tain time — it is (of course), for­bid­den to share food (which straight away made me sus­pi­cious). Every house has a ‘Port’, which gives every­one direc­tions for the day — and I’m not entirely sure it can’t be used to lis­ten in on con­ver­sa­tions either. All house­hold rub­bish goes into an incin­er­a­tor, which is mon­i­tored. Dreams are mon­i­tored. Only those who live in a house (and Offi­cials) may enter that home — so vis­i­tors are not per­mit­ted. No run­ning in allowed (in fact out­door activ­i­ties seem to be extremely restricted alto­gether). Free time is lim­ited and orga­nized for you. There is a city cur­few. His­tory has basi­cally been wiped from exis­tence — only a Hun­dred Poems, a Hun­dred Sto­ries, a Hun­dred Paint­ings etc (nat­u­rally, all cho­sen by the Soci­ety) have been kept, the rest destroyed as cul­ture was deemed ‘too clut­tered’. Then there are the mys­te­ri­ous Pills every­one must carry and take with­out ques­tion when ordered. Soci­ety matches you to your future part­ner sci­en­tif­i­cally, to ensure high fer­til­ity and ‘good’ genes. Soci­ety dic­tates when you die — on your 80th birth­day — the opti­mum age before your health declines. Matched paints a detailed pic­ture of an iso­lated and rigidly con­trolled environment.

Condie does an excel­lent job of cre­at­ing a seem­ingly calm, peace­ful, log­i­cal, Soci­ety, ded­i­cated to the health and wel­fare of all it’s cit­i­zens, with a sin­is­ter under­tone and often chill­ing results. We don’t yet know all that much about the Soci­ety (and I would say this is where Matched falls down) — when and why it first came into power,  how the peo­ple out­side the Soci­ety live and more impor­tantly, who, is actu­ally in charge, behind the scenes. Condie has inten­tion­ally (I hope) left these ques­tions unan­swered to be explored fur­ther in books two and three, as Cas­sia pre­sum­ably dis­cov­ers the true motives behind the Soci­ety and the world she has grown up in. But I can’t help think­ing Matched would have been a fan­tas­tic first novel if the world build­ing had been cov­ered in greater detail.

Cas­sia isn’t what I would describe as the clas­sic strong hero­ine — she is a reg­u­lar 17-year-old girl, quite quiet with every-day thoughts, con­cerns and hopes for the future. When faced with evi­dence that all is not right with the world she lives in she is con­fused, fright­ened and angry. It takes a long time for her to begin to ques­tion every­thing around her. This def­i­nitely made Cas­sia a more believ­able char­ac­ter to me — if mak­ing the pace of the story a lit­tle slower than I liked at times. I found it fit­ting that it was love for her grand­fa­ther, her dis­cov­ery and grow­ing love of for­bid­den words and poetry, and her devel­op­ing feel­ings for some­one not cho­sen by Soci­ety, that gave Cas­sia the courage to risk every­thing for her free­dom to choose, despite being ter­ri­fied of the consequences. Hopefully we will get to see a more active Cas­sia in Crossed. 

Another YA book, another love tri­an­gle! I know what you’re think­ing — why is there always two guys fight­ing over one girl? But I think it works pretty well here (though I do wish that authors would switch it up a bit). I liked both of the male char­ac­ters and their roman­tic poten­tial. Ky and Xan­der — though clearly defined right now in their roles as ‘main roman­tic attrac­tion’ and ‘pla­tonic friend — poten­tially more’ — are both well writ­ten and I’m not so sure who Cas­sia will end up with even­tu­ally — if either (now that would make a change!). They are both strong char­ac­ters who we have only just scratched the sur­face of in Matched. There is a lot of poten­tial for both to grow into their own in the fol­low­ing books. I liked Ky a lot, and could under­stand com­pletely why Cas­sia falls for him. Xan­der was sweet but slightly bland, (more to do, I think, with how Cas­sia views him then any­thing else) — we don’t get much of a chance to get to know him — until the end, when sud­denly he becomes a lot more inter­est­ing! I get the feel­ing (and sure hope) that he is going to play a major role as part of the rebel­lion in Crossed, giv­ing Ky some com­pe­ti­tion and a great story-line of his own inde­pen­dent of his attach­ment with Cas­sia. Ky was an intrigu­ing char­ac­ter — I loved how we learnt frag­ments of his past, his life in Soci­ety as an Aber­ra­tion, how he teaches Cas­sia to write, how he warns and helps her even before they become close. Xan­der also risks him­self to help Cas­sia and her fam­ily and it was refresh­ing to have two good guys, but very dif­fer­ent with a dif­fer­ent view of the world due to their experiences.

The rela­tion­ship between Ky and Cas­sia was sub­tle and well paced — often there seems to be lit­tle rea­son for why two peo­ple fall in love in YA other than super­fi­cially. The rea­sons Cas­sia is drawn to Ky, how she falls for him and why she loves him felt real­is­tic. There is an instant con­nec­tion between them but their rela­tion­ship is built on a shared love of poetry, the way they see the world, their hopes, their fam­ily, their inter­ests. They each learn from one another and inspire one another. Both Ky and Cas­sia grow and are dif­fer­ent peo­ple by the end of Matched because of know­ing one another. At this point, I don’t think a roman­tic rela­tion­ship with Xan­der would have chal­lenged Cassia’s char­ac­ter in the same way. I would have liked to have seen a few more ‘swoon-y’ scenes amidst all the long­ing and ten­sion and quiet moments  (she is a teenager in love for the first time after all!) - espe­cially since Ky is clearly going to be the main rea­son why Cas­sia even­tu­ally risks her life and decides to go against the Soci­ety. But I can see why Condie chose not to take their rela­tion­ship too far, too fast — Ky and Cas­sia are cau­tious and hes­i­tant with each other because of the dan­ger they are in and the rela­tion­ships they have been exposed to — cou­ples who are matched by Soci­ety (more for breed­ing pur­poses then any­thing else) and reg­u­lated every step by Offi­cials. Attrac­tion, desire, flirt­ing — all of this is alien to them.

Matched is well con­structed and in places, beau­ti­fully writ­ten. It is by no means per­fect, it is a slow book and a lot of peo­ple will be put of by the pac­ing, the lack of answers about the Soci­ety, the world-building and dis­like the love tri­an­gle. But the nar­ra­tion flowed nicely and the end­ing in par­tic­u­lar is very strong. I per­son­ally found it a very enjoy­able read and can­not wait to find out what hap­pens next. I espe­cially loved that Cas­sia found free­dom in words. As a reader (and an artist), the cen­sor­ship of lit­er­a­ture, poetry and art by the Soci­ety gave me an over­whelm­ing feel­ing of loss for these char­ac­ters. I could relate per­fectly to how Cas­sia felt after read­ing that for­bid­den poem for the first time. The char­ac­ters were well fleshed out; I am eager to learn more about them all, and I sense quite an intri­cate plot in the mak­ing (lets hope I’m proved right!) In many ways, this almost felt like a pre­quel to the main story, and I sus­pect the action will begin in book two where we learn more about what exactly is going on. For a dystopian there wasn’t a really sense of sus­pense or ten­sion or even great dan­ger (yet) — which was a shame and the romance needed a lit­tle some­thing more to set up the next book. But over­all, Matched was a strong start to what could poten­tially be an excel­lent dystopian trilogy.

‘The scene is over­done. It’s ludi­crous, espe­cially after the quiet scene at Grandfather’s that I wit­nessed on Sun­day. This isn’t what death looks like. One of the actors falls to the ground dra­mat­i­cally. Gar­ish red blood­stains cover his cloth­ing. I hear Xan­der give a snort of laugh­ter next to me, and I know that he feels the same way I do. Feel­ing bad that I’ve ignored Ky for so long, I turn to him to share the joke. 

He is cry­ing. With­out a sound.’

~ page 90.

‘What poems could be worth los­ing every­thing for?

The very first line stops me in my tracks and brings tears to my eyes and I don’t know why except that this one line speaks to me as noth­ing ever has.

“Do not go gen­tle into that good night.”

I read on, through words I do not under­stand and ones that I do. I know why it spoke to Grandfather:

“Do not go gen­tle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.” 

And as I read on, I know why it speaks to me:

“Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no light­en­ing they

Do not go gen­tle into that good night.” ’

~ page 96.

Rec­om­mended Read­ing Age: 13+

Rat­ing: 8/10