Matched by Ally Condie

Release Date: 11/30/2010
Publisher: Dutton Books

Age Group: Young Adult

Pages: 366

Overall:

In the Society, Officials decide. Who you love. Where you work. When you die.
Cassia has always trusted their choices. It’s barely any price to pay for a long life, the perfect job, the ideal mate. So when her best friend appears on the Matching screen, Cassia knows with complete certainty that he is the one . . . until she sees another face flash for an instant before the screen fades to black. Now Cassia is faced with impossible choices: between Xander and Ky, between the only life she’s known and a path no one else has ever dared follow—between perfection and passion.
Matched is a story for right now and storytelling with the resonance of a classic.

This is going to be a conflicted review because I'm a conflicted person right now. Just letting you know :)

When I first started this book I started kicking myself for signing up for the ARC tour... I know I usually don't like the "censored society" books. Because usually when you have a tightly controlled government, there isn't as much emotion from the characters. Which I can see, it's normal. The characters aren't exposed to heightened emotions so why would they exhibit them? But, this story is about a journey and I think the book as well as the characters went through it. I went from being sort of bored throughout the first half of the book to being fascinated! I didn't want to put it down! The characters, especially Cassia went through a transformation right before my eyes!

The characters are one of the things that went through a journey, especially Cassia, I went from being sort of annoyed with her at the beginning to loving her at the end. She went from going along with everything the Society said, to rebelling, little by little I could see her transform from a robot to a person, and it was a weird feeling to all the sudden see her bloom. In part, that bloom had to do with Ky Markham who was the outsider in society and the other boy Cassia was matched to. At first I didn't see the appeal, sure he wasn't as robot-ish as everyone else... but other than that what made her want to get to know him other than the fact that society told her to? But, as he opened up, I fell in love with him too, his stories of the outer provinces, the way that he took life for what it is and was so sweet... swoonage! But of course, no love triangle is complete without "the right boy" the one that you should pick. But, this time it was a little bit skewed, "the right boy" was still the best friend (it's always the best friend), but instead of just pressure from herself to like "the right boy" (who I should mention's name is Xander, which reminded me of Buffy the Vampire Slayer throughout the book) Cassia had pressure from society. Society had matched them together and that's how they were supposed to stay, which would suck, in my opinion.

The plot and the writing were good, in the beginning a little slow but at the end very very good! Some spots were overly described, and some were way underly described where I had no idea what was going on, but maybe that's just me. Ally Condie did a great job with writing how the characters all blossomed into people which I thought was the best part of the story. I'm still conflicted on whether or not I want a sequel because on some levels I want to know more about the story and the characters, because there is definitely strings that need to be tied, but I like the notion of how it left us with hope and a new beginning... so I don't know... If a sequel comes my way I will no doubt be picking it up though!

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Hope everyone is having a great fantasyfest and a great week so far. Make sure you enter our Infinite Days contest before Sunday!

xoxo,