Matched: A Society So Boring It Made Me Grateful for Chaos

The Society Picks Everything, Including Who You Marry

Cassia Reyes lives in the Society, a world so controlled that citizens don’t choose their jobs, their food, their deaths (there’s a scheduled expiration, which is its own quiet nightmare), or their spouses. At seventeen, Cassia gets Matched, the ceremony where the Society tells you who you’ll marry, and hers is Xander, her best friend since childhood. Great news, right? She’s thrilled. Then she goes home and slides the data chip they gave her into a reader to see his information again, and for one flickering second, a different face appears. Ky Markham. A boy she also knows. A boy who, according to the Society’s own math, should not have been possible.

That single glitch is the whole engine of the book, and I think it’s a genuinely great premise. Not “there’s a rebellion brewing” great. “A machine that is never supposed to be wrong just showed me a wrong answer” great. It’s small and cold and it works. The Society explains it away as a rare statistical error, still assures her Xander is her match, and Cassia should let it go.

She does not let it go.

What follows is Cassia slowly, so slowly, coming to understand that a world with no bad decisions also has no real ones, and that the safety she’s always taken for granted was built by erasing almost everything: art, books, even most of history’s poems, down to a curated Hundred. Her grandfather, in one of the book’s best scenes, breaks the rules and gives her a poem on his last night alive (that expiration date thing, remember), a piece of paper he shouldn’t have kept, with words on it she’s never been allowed to read freely. It’s a quiet, devastating scene, and it’s the moment the book earns its dystopian label instead of just wearing it.

Gorgeous Ideas, a Heroine Who Mostly Watches Things Happen to Her

Here’s the thing. Condie can write. Her sentences have a hush to them, a control, that actually mirrors the Society itself, which I think is intentional and honestly kind of brilliant on a craft level. The prose is restrained the way Cassia’s whole life is restrained. When she finally gets access to real poetry, specifically “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” the book uses those borrowed Dylan Thomas lines as scaffolding for Cassia’s whole arc, and it’s a smart choice. Rage against a dying of the light that isn’t loud or violent, just quiet compliance stretching out for a hundred years.

But. And this is a real but, not a nitpick. Cassia spends most of this book reacting instead of acting. She notices the glitch. She notices the poem. She notices Ky noticing her. For a three-book series that’s supposedly about a girl waking up to the wrongness of her world, an enormous amount of book one is Cassia hiking with Ky, feeling conflicted about Xander, and having internal monologues about choice while making almost none. I found myself, around the two-thirds mark, flipping ahead to see how much longer until something actually happened. That’s not a great sign for a 366-page book.

And the love triangle. Look, I don’t hate love triangles on principle, but this one is doing a lot of thematic heavy lifting it can’t quite carry. Xander is safety, Ky is the unknown, and the metaphor (Society-approved match versus the boy who represents free will) is so on the nose it practically has a name tag. I like Ky. I like the tension. I do not think the book needed quite this much hiking and quite this much yearning to get its point across.

I’ll admit something else: I went into this book primed to love it because I’d heard “The Giver but make it a love triangle,” and that comparison does this book a disservice both ways. It’s not as philosophically sharp as The Giver, and it’s not as propulsive as the dystopian romances it gets shelved next to. It’s its own strange, slow thing, and I spent a while being annoyed that it wasn’t the book I’d been told it was before I let it be the book it actually is.

The scariest dystopias aren’t the ones with soldiers in the streets. They’re the ones where you’d choose the cage yourself, gladly, if no one told you it was a cage.

About Ally Condie

Ally Condie was a high school English teacher before she became a novelist, and honestly, it shows, in a good way. There’s a bookishness to her writing, a real reverence for poems and the idea of forbidden words, that reads like someone who spent years watching teenagers discover literature for the first time and wanted to write a whole book about what it would mean if that discovery were illegal. Matched became a massive hit and launched her into the same YA dystopian wave as Divergent and The Hunger Games, and she’s continued writing YA since, though nothing has quite matched (sorry) this trilogy’s cultural footprint.

If the Poem Scene Got You, Read These Next

Matched works best as a mood, a specific ache, so here’s where to chase that feeling.

The Giver by Lois Lowry, for the sparse, controlled prose and the original “utopia is actually horrifying” gut punch, done in a fraction of the pages.

Delirium by Lauren Oliver, if you want the same “the Society controls your heart” premise but with more urgency and a heroine who moves faster.

Uglies by Scott Westerfeld, for another quiet-horror dystopian about a controlled society and the cost of belonging to it.

For your book club

1. Would you want to be Matched, if it meant never having to face the terror of choosing wrong?
2. Cassia’s grandfather breaks the rules to give her a poem, knowing it endangers her. Was that fair to ask of her?
3. Does the love triangle actually serve the dystopian themes, or does it distract from them?
4. The Society allows only a Hundred poems, a Hundred paintings, a Hundred songs. What would be in your Hundred, and what would that choice say about you?
5. Is safety without freedom a kind of death, even if no one in the Society seems to suffer for it?