Review: Matched - Ally Condie

This is the first book of a dystopian YA trilogy, and I must admit I did not have high hopes for it. What little I had heard of it on Youtube was not great, but my library had it on the shelves, so I decided to give it a go. As you may know, I usually don’t like the majority of the books everyone else seems to love, so I thought I might like this one, even if everyone else doesn’t. But no such luck! 

The book is about our main character Cassie, who lives in the near future. Something has happened (I don’t believe it is ever specified) and life is now run by the Society who control people in the smallest ways. The Society decides who you should marry, when you should marry, when you should have kids and how many, what your job is and what you can do for fun. Apparently our present society had too much surplus, so they have decided to cut things down to more manageable numbers. This means there is only 100 poems, 100 songs, 100 paintings and so forth left to the people. I really liked the world-building and I thought it was intriguing to see how the world was run and ruled by fear. 

The writing-style didn’t really do it for me. It was too melodramatic in some places, and that just puts me off, e.g. “There is so much I want. I feel it so much that I am water, a river of want, pooled in the shape of a girl named Cassia.” Ugh. I had the same issue with the “Shatter Me” series by Tahereh Mafi. The plot-development was also really slow. When I read dystopian YA I expect action and lots of it! But this was just soooo sloooow! I almost gave up around the 150 page mark when nothing much had really happened yet. There had only been a few hints at things happening, but nothing comes of these hints for such a long time. 

I was also quite confused by the war apparently going on at the borders. When it is mentioned towards the end, I didn’t think I had even heard about it before and it turned out to be a pretty big plot-point. It might have been mentioned in the beginning of the book, but I honestly can’t remember. Once or twice there are mentions of attacks to the outer provinces but I thought these attacks were conducted by the Society, because we didn’t hear anything about other people living outside this Society. I was very confused…

The characters didn’t really do it for me either. I actually did quite like Cassia and the other main character, but at the same time I feel like I didn’t get to know them enough. I know there are two more books for character development, but I feel like the first book should at least have you interested in either the characters or the plot, and this book did not do that for me. I just don’t really care what happens next. I don’t think I will be continuing with this series. 

I gave it 2,5 stars out of 5 on Goodreads, purely because of the interesting world-building.