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| Don't ask why this is the paperback cover and my other review was the hardback cover...I don't have answers |
Publication Date:
Read: January 7th - 8th
Rating: 3/5 stars
I think it's fascinating how all three books in this series have such similar average ratings on Goodreads. But Crossed has the lowest average, because we all agree it's the worst Matched book.
Honestly, Crossed started off surprisingly strongly. I was like, "Maybe I was wrong about this book being boring, and all about the characters wandering around a canyon?" But then we got to the canyon and started wandering around, and...well...
There are spoilers for Matched and Crossed ahead, if you're still trying to avoid spoilers for either of these books that have been out for over a decade!
Let's get into it. At the end of the last book, we saw our leads Ky and Cassia being dramatically separated. Ky was sent to the front lines (allegedly) to fight The Enemy, and Cassia got herself sent to work camps in an attempt to find him. What has actually happened to Ky is that he's one of various groups of aberrations who are acting as "decoys" that are killed by the Enemy near the front lines. Ky makes plans to escape into the Carving, a really big canyon, with two other boys, Vick and Eli. Cassia follows with a girl named Indie. They eventually meet up (well...not ALL of them) and that's halfway through the book. At the end of the book they join the Rising, the obligatory Questionable Rebellion in every YA dystopia. What happens between the 50% mark and the 100% mark? I'm going to be real with you: not a lot.
The issue isn't even that the book drags, exactly, because Ally Condie's style is very readable, so it's not necessarily a bad reading experience. It's just that all of that build-up from the first half completely dissipates, and instead we're left drawing out a few lackluster interpersonal conflicts until we decide to finish the book. It's like someone took that one episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender where Aang hides Hakoda's message from Sokka and Katara and they get mad at him and then they made it into the entire plot for the second half of a book, except this book doesn't even end with a cool fight!
This book only actually accomplishes two things: It introduces us to some new secondary characters, and it eventually maneuvers our leads to the Rising. That's IT. I'm forced to conclude that while the first half is more exciting than I remember, the second half...kind of justifies my VERY lackluster recollection of this book.
Anyway. In Crossed, we get Ky POV chapters. I like this, as I think it helps to flesh out his character, but there are times when it starts to labor the pacing. This is most noticeable when we're constantly switching back and forth between Ky and Cassia during their big dramatic goodbye, but also came through in a few other places. I feel like Condie would give us some scene from Cassia's perspective, and then in Ky's perspective we also get his thoughts on that scene, or their separate scenes would overlap a lot time-wise. Additionally, his POV chapters do retread some of the flashbacks/childhood moments that we already heard about from Cassia or Xander in book one. This didn't bother me personally but I get why other people would find it annoying.
It's also true that Ky and Cassia's chapters read pretty similarly. I've read a couple of excerpts of Ally Condie's other books, and I think she just has a VERY specific voice in all of her writing. So perhaps moving forward she just shouldn't do multi-POV any more. I didn't really mind it, since I kind of like her writing style, but it's a valid critique nonetheless. I'm curious to see what I'll think of the addition of Xander's POV in Reached.
Yeah, I'm also going to be reading Reached. Did we expect any other outcome? The Society definitely would have predicted this.
As for the new characters introduced in this book, I like them a mild amount. We don't get a lot of development for Eli, the kid who reminds Ky and Cassia of Cassia's younger brother, but he felt like a fairly realistic character that we just didn't get to know well, not like a cardboard cutout. Indie is tough and sad and secretive, a combination that I think works really well in secondary female characters. And she spiced up the boring second half of this book a little, so we simply must stan. She made a good foil for both Cassia and Ky, but I guess particularly Ky. I don't remember what happens with her in the next book, so...we'll see!
Hunter is funny to me because even though they clarify multiple times that he is literally like 23, I could not stop picturing him as grizzled and in his 30s/40s. Oops! I'm sure I pictured him that way as a teenager, too. Sometimes your mind rebels and refuses to show you an age-accurate character, I guess.
I'm looking forward to the third book, which as we all know had the worst title and the most plot. Did it have the best plot? Who's to say. I know for sure it had the MOST.
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