Matched by Ally Condie

Cassia Reyes lives on Mapletree Borough in the Oria Province in the Society. She lives with her little brother Bram, and her mother and father. She spends free-rec hours with her best friends Xander and Em. To Cassia, life is perfect, life is normal, life is as it should be, and there is no questioning it. Everything the people do in the Society is monitored by officials, and anything not accepted or approved from the previous society is burned. All information is recorded, from your dreams to what trash you throw into the incinerator. There are no secrets from the Society.

Cassia never questions this, or considers how much control the Society has over her. Why should she? She's been granted a perfect life, will be able to fall in love with her match like her parents did, raise a family, and die on her eightieth birthday, the optimum age to die according to the statistics. But around her Grandfather's 80th birthday, he gives her something that is guaranteed to turn her world upside down, with the help of a particular boy she hardly ever talked to.

The match banquet is Cassia's special night to shine, and find out who was determined to be her match for life, the one that fit her personality and needs absolutely perfectly. When that turns out to be Xander, Cassia feels like the luckiest girl in the world, to be able to be matched with someone in her Province is a huge advantage. They can talk anytime, and don't have to wait for pre-arranged excursions.

Cassia is beyond happy, and even though she knows so much about Xander, she still takes out the microcard with his information on it and puts it in the port (kind of like a TV/video call station in their house) to read about him anyway. But instead of Xander's face on the screen, she sees a flash of someone else, someone who shouldn't be in the system at all; Ky Markham.

Ky Markham is an Aberration from the Outer Provinces, which are the untamed places said to be vast and harsh and full of people suffering. Ky's parents died when he was young, and he was sent to live with Patrick and Aida Markham, his aunt and uncle who lost their own son to an Anomaly, which is like a murderer to us today.

Cassia doesn't understand why Ky's face appeared on the screen when he isn't eligible to be matched, but when and Official comes and talks to her, she tells her it was all a big mistake and that she shouldn't worry; the Society has it all under control.

After that, Cassia goes to visit her grandfather, and he persuades her to sign up for hiking, which is a summer leisure activity. He puts something in a secret compartment of the artifact he gave her, which was a golden compact, and tells her to only look at it when she is alone. She eventually takes it out when hiking, and finds the words of an ancient poem on it, and not one she recognizes of the 100 the Society decided to keep:

"Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words have forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night."

(-Dylan Thomas)

Cassia finds that this relates to her in many ways, some she doesn't even know yet, but use this advice throughout the book; "Do not go gentle"

Ky Markham signed up for hiking too, and when Cassia sneaks off to read the poem, he sees her.

Now they both have to keep a very big secret, and before they know it, they start falling into a forbidden love. He teaches her how to write, and gives her pieces of his story that she has to burn after reading, just like she had to do with the poem, to keep the Officials from seeing it. Then Ky and Cassia are assigned hiking partners, and they commit a heinous crime that an Official warned her about; kissing someone else when assigned to a match.

Things spiral down and take a couple turns for the worst, and Cassia makes assumptions and gathers new opinions, which is a new experience for her. Her family and even Xander end up showing support and promise to break the law to help Cassia on her most difficult journey yet, which I guess will be described in the next book in the series, Crossed.

I loved this book so much, but still have some questions. How did the previous society fall? Was it taken over by this society, or did certain things become the downfall of it? Is that how this society found ideas to keep information hidden, and why it had such tight control yet the people were oblivious? I think that shows sheer genius. Not necessarily in good ways, but the fact that a whole society can keep secrets and narrow down information and isolate people from knowledge without them knowing takes a lot of brain power.

I think a theme that this book shows is how much we use information, and how much we are aware or not aware of, and we can learn to open our eyes more from it. It really helped me to appreciate how lucky our nation is, to be able to think freely and be creative and say what we think, and even how we know how to write and know so many songs and poems. I tried putting myself in that situation, and if I didn't know what I was missing, I would definitely ended up like Cassia, and just followed along because you have such faith in a Society that has secret problems, which makes it more of a dystopia.

Another theme could be to question authority. Even though they have superiority over us, it doesn't necessarily mean that they know more or less than us. You can't expect the president to be a genius about everything. Kind of like parents. Your parents have heard opinions from other places and they may not be reliable, and even if they think they know a lot about something, they really don't. Plus, humans naturally believe what they want to believe, so a lot of information is biased.

This book helped me realize these things and many others, and really opened my eyes to how fortunate we are to live in a great country like the U. S. A. Although the subject of forbidden love is used a lot in novels, I didn't get a sense of repition. I really enjoyed this book, and would recommend it to anyone within earshot.