Matched by Ally Condie: A Pleasant Reread

Let's not pretend this cover isn't iconic

Publication Date: November 30th, 2010

Read: January 4th - 5th

Rating: 3.5/5 stars (rounded up to 4 stars on goodreads, where this review is also posted)

I had fun rereading this!

My journey with Matched is as follows: I read it at some point as a teenager, probably in high school. I enjoyed it but definitely thought the second book dragged and the third one tried to cram in too much plot to compensate. From then on, I didn't think about it that much. I was surprised to hear people talk about Matched as one of the worst YA dystopias, because...c'mon guys. There are wayyyy worse ones out there. The one where the "dystopian" conflict is that people take nutrition pills instead of eating? The one about virtual reality that completely fails to make compelling commentary about virtual reality?

The problem is, no one but me read Hungry or Unplugged. But even among POPULAR YA dystopias, I feel like Matched is better than, like, Delirium, where love is illegal and everyone gets brain surgery to remove their capacity for love, because This Will Make Society Better. Delirium's second book was much worse than Matched's. If you're going to write a second book where nothing of import happens, I'd rather it be set in a canyon than in a random underground room, y'know?

So what IS the premise of Matched? Well, a lot of people will tell you it's a Giver rip-off, but I only read The Giver to stave off boredom on vacation, so I can't really comment on that (SORRY LOIS LOWRY). The premise of Matched is that we live in a Society (hee hee) that makes decisions for everyone based on statistics and productivity. The Society is obsessed with collecting data on all of its citizens and making sure things happen they way they predict. They have also pared down all of culture to one hundred poems, songs, paintings, etc., because there were ~too many~ for people to appreciate Before. A lot of people hate this and say it makes no sense, and to that I say, I'm okay with dystopian governments being a little illogical. Just as a treat.

We open with our main character Cassia attending her Match banquet, where her government-assigned Match will be announced. Because this is a special occasion, she gets to wear a fancy dress and eat cake. In a feat of statistical improbability, she is Matched to her childhood best friend, Xander. But Xander is blonde, and a known quantity, and therefore Doomed By the (Love Triangle) Narrative. When Cassia goes home and looks at the microcard she was given with fun Xander Facts on it, she sees the face of a DIFFERENT statistically improbable boy - Ky Markham!

Ky has dark hair and knows poetry and cursive, which means he's endgame.

The rest of the book is mostly Cassia gradually giving into her desire to know more about Ky (through the magic of hiking), while cracks appear in the Society's facade. Cassia realizes her parents keep secrets from her and each other, learns that the Society isn't as benevolent as she thought, and has to make choices about what kind of person she wants to be in this society. It's a largely introspective book where not a lot happens (unless you count all the hiking).

Even so, I enjoyed it. I think the Society, while not exactly groundbreaking as dystopian societies go, makes a good backdrop for Cassia's journey of self-discovery. And Ally Condie's writing style is definitely fine-tuned to produce the kind of quotes that you want to highlight and ponder. Also, I sometimes like books where nothing happens, as long as the nothing is interesting. This interested me as a teen, and I guess it still interests me now.

This is not to say that I don't have quibbles or just general comments. The build up was good, but there could have been a slightly showier finish, perhaps? Although I do like the drama of Cassia being complicit in what happens to Ky through her own predictability, so I'm not actually sure what I would change. I think Cassia is an interesting character, but Ky is left kind of too mysterious, and it was a little hard to believe that they actually were In Love by the end of this book. I also felt like we didn't get a lot of time to get to know Xander. But what I do like about Xander is that even though there's never any possibility of him being endgame, we know from the beginning that he's always very dear to Cassia as a friend, and he and Ky genuinely respect each other, even when viewing each other as rivals to a certain extent.

I remember back in the day I read this one review of Matched that made all these points about how toxic Ky was and how he spends the whole book/series negging Cassia, and now that I've reread it I'm like...what? That literally doesn't happen. Ky isn't my favorite YA love interest ever (that privilege belongs to Emeric from Little Thieves, thanks very much) but he's surprisingly nontoxic, all things considered. Like, he doesn't have nutritional value per se, but he's not going to do any damage to you if you eat him. Nontoxic. The play-doh of YA bad boys.

My overall verdict is that this is a quiet, contemplative YA dystopian coming-of-age with a side of romance. It's perhaps most enjoyable when you let yourself read it as the teenage girl you used to be, and it's generally a little unfairly maligned, in my humble opinion.