Review of Matched

My review of Matched by Ally Condie is based on a hardcover copy of the book that I purchased for myself. The following review is my honest opinion of the novel.

Goodreads Summary: "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."

Matched has received so many mixed reviews I wasn't really sure what to expect when I started reading it; bloggers I trust implicitly had said they loved it, others had said they hated it. I was anxious. The premise sounded like something that I would absolutely love so I knew despite mixed reviews I was going to have to read it for myself to find out for sure and I AM SO GLAD THAT I DID.

For those of you that crave action in your dystopians Matched might not be for you; it isn't The Hunger Games, Divergent or even Shatter Me...it's far more subdued. I wouldn't even call it psychological in its progression but I would say in some ways its far more realistic than a lot of dystopians out there. I say this because I don't think that in every case people would fight like is demonstrated in the other books, sometimes people just go with the flow, they are so brainwashed that their ideas of right and wrong are twisted...Matched portrays this perfectly.

Cassia was a realistic heroine in the same way that this felt a realistic dystopian. Her mind was changed all at once; she did not immediately find the world she lived in to be a false one rather gradually the reader will discover along with her that not everything is as it seems. I would say that she is a naive narrator but that she has cause to be, the world in which she lives is not one that lends itself to being experienced. You see why she is the way she is and you begin to hope as the novel progresses that she learns, that she becomes the type of person that sees not only what the world around her wants her to see.

Aside from the lack of what may have become expected action my only other qualm with Matched is the "love triangle". I put that in quotations because I'm not sure even yet if Ally Condie meant for her readers to see it that way or if its simply there because Cassia had reached the age where she would be matched with her partner. But at the same time she is matched with her BEST FRIEND. For me this love triangle fell in line with the one present in The Hunger Games, the whole Gale VS Peeta thing. Or even Edward VS Jacob if that's more your thing. In a certain world that match would have worked, would have been ideal, he would have been her one. But with the changes you [or at least I] can't see it working out, there's really only one choice for the heroine to make. That's how I felt about the "love triangle" in Matched.

I'm giving Matched by Ally Condie a four out of five stars review. It was exactly what I had hoped for when I read the summary and I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the trilogy.