Matched by Ally Condie

First off, Happy New Year everyone!  Hope that everyone had a good christmas season and is ready to venture into the new and unknown that will follow in the 2012 year! This christmas, I received the Amazon Kindle Fire from my family, little did I know that this little contraption would end up consuming the rest of my break. Luckily, the biggest part of the Kindle is the ability to download and reads thousands of books, which made me actually interesting in diving back into reading again. I picked this book, Matched, by Ally Condie initially because the cover art was very intriguing. Sure, you can't judge a book by its cover, but sometimes the cover is all it takes to show a portion of the intrigue of a novel. The cover art is simply a young girl trapped in an swirly smoke orb. All it takes is one look at her face and body position to realize that she is trapped and is reaching to free herself from a set prison. The entire novel revolves around the subsequent idea of being trapped and not having the freedom to make one's own choices. It is set in a futuristic society in which a group of "Officials" regulate all actions of the individuals-going so far as to create their jobs, control their nutrition, and set up their marriages (their Match, or soul mate, is not their choice, they are in a "pleasant" prison, a perfect oxymoronic situation created intentionally by the author).

At the beginning of the story, the protagonist Cassie is just like the others in her society-she understands the rules set by the council and their purpose. But, this is changed by her grandfather who at eighty years old has realized the hypocrisy of the society and begins to change Cassie's views when he presents her with a forbidden poem. You see, in this society, the literature, history, art and artifacts were controlled and consisted of only what the council deemed as appropriate and necessary. They destroyed beauty to create order. Their intensive need to preserve and protect the people is ironic because in a morbid way it constricts and suppresses their potential and capability of being their own person. Cassie's grandfather's action to keep this precious set of words presents his character as a symbol of change-he is an element that spurs Cassie to change views she has had set since childhood. When the accidental image of Ky Markham is shown on her micro "match" chip, Cassie begins to fall for the wrong man. She had believed in the match system until, human error lead her to love another. She begins to have more confidence in her capability to control her own life, and she begins to question the motives of her society more. She changes from subservient into hard-headed and rebellious. Ergo, this action is the first stepping stone in her analyzation of her society and realization of its  intense control that traps the individual into a life they may not desire. "All the studies show that the best age to die is eighty. It's long enough that we can have a complete life experience, but not so long that we feel useless" (Condie 808). At first, Cassie supports the idea of the old dying at peacefully at eighty, that is, until she discovers this is because the government poisons their last meal. This book has an underlying universal theme of growing up. We all are forced to, at some point in our lives, look at the world around us and realize that things and people are not perfect, that dark and evil events have occurred as we were too busy being absorbed in everyday life, and that essentially in order to battle such happenings, we are the elements of change and are the only ones who have the ability to consciously make a difference. These are concepts that Cassie begins to understand as she falls deeper in love with Ky and battles her instinctive and natural instinct to do what the society wants, even though that is what could potentially destroy the happiness of both her and her lover. That is some strong subject material.