Matched and a break from the blog

Okay, first of all, I've been going through some life changes and until I get some things straightened out, I think I will have to take a break from the blog. For what may be my final installment, (hopefully not though) I'm going to talk about the Matched trilogy. If you've never heard of it, it is a dystopian young adult sci-fi with a love triangle, much like the Hunger Games. However this story starts with the good and works it's way to the bad.

The central character is Cassia, whose story starts out so picture perfect that if you picked it up and started reading it without knowing something would go wrong, you would be bored by chapter 3. And if it weren't for a twist that almost artificially injects conflict into the story, it would end right there. However there is a twist, Cassia needs to choose between her dream guy Xander, the future doctor, and Ky, a boy she would hardly have noticed if it weren't for a glitch in the matching system that suggests for a slit second that he is the one she should be with. In Cassia's Society, everyone is matched up with a life mate systematically at the age of 16, then they spend a few years courting, marry at 21, and proceed to procreate until 32 at which point they are sterilized so they can spend the rest of their lives raising their children and die precisely and promptly on their 80th birthday. Depending on your perspective, the world is a perfect system, or it is a sterile individuality crushing hell; what is good for the individual is not necessarily good for the many, and what is good for the many is not necessarily good for the individual. Society has existed for about three or four generations and Cassia's generation knows only a perfect world where everybody eats exactly what the need for proper nourishment, get a precise exercise regimen for their body type, follow a path of education that leads to their most productive occupation and any luxury that is not absolutely necessary for survival including arts and entertainment and even fashion have been reduced to the top one hundred popular accepted specimens that everybody can choose from to spend a certain allotted period of personal time to relax and unwind after doing their part in this perfect Society. But little by little, Cassia discovers that the freedom of choice is an illusion, and that illusion exists to placate the few that might be unhappy with a system that lacks any freedom at all, nobody knows how to create anything new, nobody sings except the national anthem, nobody creates art, nobody paints nobody sculpts, nobody acts, and nobody writes, all examples of the arts are artifacts of the past, presumably so nobody wastes their time actually creating  anything that isn't deemed necessary and important for survival. The system is almost perfect, there are Aberrations and Anomalies, Anomalies are those who reject Society's restrictions and therefore endanger Society, and Aberrations are those who have expressed an awareness that is too far beyond Society's parameters to be trusted as an integral part of Society. Ky is one of these Aberrations, coming from a town on the edge of Society where enough Anomalies congregated that the whole place had to be bombed, Ky was only a child and he was spared, but only because he had an aunt and uncle in Society that could not bear children so he was allowed to exist under the restriction that he could not disclose the ugly truth of his origins and he would have to be single and do grunt work beneath proper Society folk. At the end of the first book, Cassia is forced to use her job as a sorter to sort him and his coworkers into two groups, one that would receive a promotion and another that would suffer for being less effective. She isn't actually told which group would be which, but they leave her feeling responsible for Ky getting the decidedly worse of the two options.

The second book Crossed adds Ky's perspective as the two star-crossed lovers seek each other out on the outskirts of Society, but the biggest twist of all comes in the third book when Xander's perspective is introduced and we find out that he is actually a rebel himself and the three of them together help overthrow Society. But that isn't the end, it's only the beginning of the third book as they experience a world in which the change of regime is not necessarily the solution they were looking for. As it turns out, human civilization has an inherent flaw in that those in power must restrict those they are in charge of to keep the peace, but if there are enough people, there will always be outliers that don' fit the perfect system no matter what it is, you just can't please everybody. While our love triangle figures this out, their dynamic gets more complicated as each boy gets an alternate girl that he may end up with if not Cassia. Xander is surprising in that the value of choice is more important than getting Cassia, although he can eliminate Ky, it doesn't mean anything to him to get her by default, he has to give her the choice and let her choose him. This becomes important when Ky falls victim to a mutant plague. The plague was engineered as a weapon against Society and the rebels believed they could control t with a vaccine, but it mutates and puts some people in comas that the original treatment won't fix. I was really impressed because the chapters alternate first person perspectives, but Ky's chapters get shorter as his coma robs him of his connection to the world, the most powerful chapter I ever read in my whole life was a chapter that was blank except for the chapter heading and the note that it is Ky, that contrast really showed the emptiness of  being in a coma.

Overall, the series is pretty good, but it relies on a formula that can seem overdone if you aren't ready to take it on with fresh eyes. If you ignore the basic love triangle formula, this is one of the best dystopian stories because instead of showing the horrors of a world that oppresses the common folk, it demonstrates how such a world would be supported by those who benefit enough to not realize the price they pay, a message as timely as ever.