Frightful Friday: Matched by Ally Condie

Frightful Friday is a weekly meme in which I feature a particularly scary or chilling book that I’ve read that week. Feel free to grab the button & join in! Be sure to include a link to your post in the Mr. Linky at the bottom of this post!

This week’s book is Matched by Ally Condie.  You may ask why I deem this book eligible for Frightful Friday…read on to find out why.

In the world young Cassia lives in, Society Officials decide everything: where you live, who you marry, where you work, & when you die. According to the Society, this is the best course of action.  In the past, society had too much technolology, too much of everthing to truly appreciate what they had.

Individuals, upon reaching the age of seventeen, attend the Banquet and are matched with their future spouses. Their names are called & their match’s face appears on the screen.  In most cases, they’ve never met their Match before.

However, in Cassia’s case, the face that flashes before her is very familiar: it is the face of her lifelong best friend, Xander.  It’s a statistical anomoly to be matched with someone you’ve grown up with.  The entire society is quite intrigued.  Cassia is certain Xander is the one…until she plug’s in her match’s microchip and a completely different face flashes before her.  A face that couldn’t possibly be her match, and individual destined to be a Single, never meant to be matched to anyone.

Cassia can’t help but be confused by these turn of events. Just who is she destined to be with?  This, and her grandfather’s “scheduled” passing, forces Cassia to question the society in which she lives. 

I learned about Matched  at BEA (Book Expo America) earlier this year.  I obtained an ARC there and it’s been sitting on my shelf, begging to be read, since then. The wait was well worth it. Condie’s writing is so detailed, every little description & detail is important to the story. The colors, the clothing, every word had a need & purpose to the overall story. 

While reading Matched , I had to pause frequently so I could absorb and contemplate the world in which Cassia lived. What would it be like to live in a world when you had no say?  The Society tells you how much to exercise, what to eat, monitors your dreams.  Nothing is private, nothing is held sacred. They control what you read-in this case, only 100 poems, songs, etc. are kept.  All others are destroyed.

What really floored me was that everyone, minus Cassia perhaps, seemed to be okay with this.  Perhaps because they’d lived this way for so long.  One exclusion to this was Cassia’s grandfather.  He remembered life before the Society.  He remembered great literature.  He prodded Cassia to think for herself, question life, and urged her, to not go gentle into this society…to rage against the world in which she lived in.  These sentiments were taken from a poem by Dylan Thomas Do Not Go Gentle Into That Dark Night, a poem that I memorized as a young teen.  At his passing, Cassia’s grandfather provided her with this poem and the line that is truly powerful in this situation is the following:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Cassia’s grandfather had reached the age of 80, the age in which all citizens of the Society died. Again, just one more thing individuals had no say in. He wasn’t ready to die, he still had plenty of life left to lead.  He didn’t want his feelings, his memories, to die with him, so he passed them on to Cassia.

Although it is labeled as a dystopian fiction, it is my opinion that Matched has characteristics of both a dystopia and utopia.  On the outside, Society looks perfect.  Everyone lives a efficient and successful life.  It’s not until you look below the surface that you begin to see how horrific things really are.

Matched is the first in a trilogy.  I look forward to the second book, CROSSED, scheduled for release next fall.