Review: Reached - Ally Condie

Reached by Ally Condie is the final installment in the 'Matched' trilogy.

The first book in this series 'matched' I really liked and found interesting. although it was pretty typical of a YA dystopic series, the world itself and how Condie set it up as dystopic was really interesting. Often that's the thing that draws me in to a dystopic series; the actual world that it's set in, what it is that the government controlling, what's unique, what's forbidden, what's allowed etc (eg in the delirium series by Lauren Oliver that fact that love is forbidden is a really interesting concept, or in the Uglies series by Scott Westerfeild its that everyone get turned 'pretty' on their 16th birthday or Firstlife by Gena Showalter where you got to decided which place you wanted to spend you second life/death .. you get the jist)

The concept in the Matched series is 100% government control eg portion controlled meals set per person delivered to your door, whom you are going to marry, what job you will have, and when you get you assigned job people are separated so their job is the only thing that they know how to do so that the whole community is co-dependent on each other. So the 'Society' remains in power because everyone is segregated in such a way that they are dependent on each other, and thus, the 'society' to survive. Also a lot of things are strictly forbidden and there is a emphasis of the use of modern technology other old tech, shown in that people don't know how to write anymore. Creativity is forbidden and they only kept 100 of each of the old 'greats' I guess you'd call them eg 100 poems, 100 songs, 100 stories, etc (but of course there's an underground rebel movement fighting to preserve them.)

That's just a bit of background on the world the series is set in...
Reached is the final in the series and thus the climax, the crux if you will, but really I found the whole thing a bit slow... and just sort of dribbled off at the end.

Here's a couple of thoughts:

#1
I took me about halfway through the third book in this series to figure out/decide her name is probably pronounce cas-ie-a up till this point I'd just skip over her name whenever it was written. But that's probably just me... but it's pretty hard to read a book when you don't know how to pronounce the protagonist's name. * note I just looked it up on youtube to see how other people pronounce it other options include 'ca-se-a' and 'casha'. (I think i've made my point)

#2
This book does fall into the typical YA love triangle. Her best friend of forever is in love with her, they end up being matched, but she falls in love with someone else and ends up with him. Once, just once I want the protagonist to chose their best friend. However as the romance angle is not central to the book I'll let it pass and though annoying and over done it wasn't the focus of this book.
Although now that I think about it why do book with heroine protagonists always have male best friends? (okay so not always) but in the ones that do the friend has always has been in love with them forever and them realising that it's never going to happen and then eventually conceding to their best friend being in love with someone else. I get tired of reading the same characters over and over. It adds nothing what so ever to the plot of the actual story and doesn't give the characters themselves any semblance of their own individual personality or a realistic reaction to being rejected or the long suffering of unrequited love.


#3
On the whole I found the whole book really slow... up to the last 5th of the book pretty much nothing had actually happened. And the resistance, which is called 'The Rising', became a Governmental control in and of itself, like they became the replacement of 'The Society', but they weren't any better, and 'the rising' are trying to find the cure to the Plague, (that they invented in the first place to overthrow The society etc), the whole thing is just messy and hard to follow. It made it very hard to empathise with the characters at all, I really just didn't care about what happened to any of them. (Really I just wanted to to be over..)

#4 
The book is told by all three of the main character's perspectives (Ky, Cassia and Xander) switching each chapter, I'm really not a fan of this to be honest, writers generally do it for one of two reasons: 1 so they can kill off a character or 2 to 'show deeper insight' into the characters. I'm really not a fan of first person writing, just write in third person omniscient narrator and then you get everyone's perspective... 


All in all I was disappointed with this book and was overall underwhelmed. The concept started out as a modern Orwellien retelling but didn't stand up in the execution.