Krishna
A disclaimer up front : I know it is a very popular book, and is aimed at young adult audience. What follows is simply my views as an adult reading it, ignoring the fact that I am not the target audience. There are some young adult books I reviewed similarly but wanted to put the context right up front, here.
Cassia is waiting for her match banquet, where she will see hear the name of the boy she is to be matched with, that is, the boy she will marry. She is lucky to be Matched with Xander, a childhood close friend and a handsome boy who lives nearby. It is of course a highly regulated society and just like the match is determined by the government(?), their food is plain, there is a curfew at night and you begin to get an understanding of the dystopian society. People are tagged to learn what they dream of when they sleep, for example.
Once, the computer shows a match other than Xander and she is completely befuddled. It is a boy called Ky Markham. A society official comes and explains that it is an error and her match is indeed with Xander. It cannot be Ky because he is an ‘aberration’, family member of a person who had committed an infraction and thus not allowed to match or marry.
We get an inkling of where the story is going. A near perfect friend Xander, a wholly disadvantaged Ky, and an accidental match with Cassia. Go figure.
Now she keeps seeing Ky and wondering. His Grandfather dies when he is 80, as planned and engineered by Society rules.
His grandfather also finds for her two lovely and forbidden poems from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries hidden by his wife who died before Society was formed and things were ordered. She peers into it on a hike when she thought she was alone but was spotted by Ky. Ky and Cassia were the first two to reach the peak in the organized hike.
Later, his father is chastised by Officials for misplacing the tissue sample of Grandfather who expired as planned on his eightieth birthday. Cassie is sad that grandpa can never be reconstructed in the future if such technology becomes a reality.
She also manages to incinerate the smuggled but banned poem (from her grandmother) after memorizing them. Only Ky knows her secret.
She learns that her dad did not ‘lose’ the sample of grandpa but grandpa specifically requested that Cassie’s dad ‘lose’ it.
They also go to a recital and do garden work as ‘special treats’ graciously provided by the Society.
This soon gets boring. The details of how Society orders everything (including nutrient balanced food) begins to pall pretty soon. The little act of rebellion and Cassie’s growing attraction to Ky and his to her, all drag on slowly. Once you get that it is a very controlled dystopian world where everything is ordained and a la Big Brother no dissent is tolerated, you begin to realize that this story is kind of going around in circles – notwithstanding grandpa’s quiet rebellion until the very end.
There is more. She ‘sorts’ people in Ky’s factory by ability and places Ky higher than he is doing to ‘save’ him but those with higher abilities are sent to Outer Provinces to fight, where there is s rebellion brewing out of control.
There is also a lot of pop psychology where the Official (after mysteriously letting her not eat the red pill which is like the pen in MIB movies) and extols the virtues of the system, including killing people on their eightieth birthday through discreetly poisoning them. Why does the Official even bother to debate? Why does she turn up at every important moments in Cassia’s life? What is one young girl’s opinion who has been anyway transferred with her family to the equivalent of boondocks? No explanation. Very irritating.
But if you are looking for twists, there are several. How the grandfather quietly rebelled against the Societal restrictions. How Cassia herself defied the odds, how the Society actually (supposedly) had a hand in many of the ‘accidents’ that happened. How Xander himself had a surprise in store for Cassia. All of it kind of fizzle out because of the juvenile or young adult narration in the book.
It, of course, ends as a dystopian novel often ends. And is set up for a sequel that the author had clearly in mind while writing this.
Shall we say 5/10?
— Krishna