Book Three in the Matched Triology
Rating: One out of Five Stars
Oh Ally… Ally Ally Ally… Please don’t hate me for this review.
I just want to say that I hardly EVER give one star ratings to books. I feel like its cruel because people work their asses off to write books and stories and they have to endure sooo much to get their ideas published. So know that I tried. I REALLY tried to find a saving grace in this book, but I just couldn’t. This whole Matched Trilogy was just not for me.
I can’t count the number of times my eyes glazed over while reading Reached. And with my previous ratings of two stars for Matched and Crossed, I was tempted to not read the finale. But come on, how can you NOT read the last segment of one of the most popular YA books in the last few years?! It would be like.. sacrilegious. And the last chapter of Crossed made me want to find out what the conclusion held for Xander (love), Cassia (twatface) and Ky (blech).
My dislike is rooted in three parts. 1.) Writing Style 2.) World building/concept 3.) Characters.
1.) You could sing my a lullaby after I have been awake for 48 hours and it wouldn’t hold a light to how fast this book would put me to sleep. As much as I love reading it, poetry should not be a novel. Especially not a Young Adult dystopian novel. Give me a book of poems and I will read the shit out of it. But don’t try to write a 500 page book in all that flowery prose and expect me to stay awake. Seriously, even the “action scenes” were in slow motion and made me yawn. I just wanted things to speed the eff up. If Reached had been a 200 page book it would have been much more tolerable. But instead I had to suffer through 300 more pages of meh. Not my style. No thank you.
2.) While I think the idea behind this series was interesting and creative, book one was the only part that made me believe in the world. Book two was a bore and book three just made me go “WTF” the whole time. Listen yo, if you want to write a story about a dystopia and you want the concept to resonate with your readers, the world needs to keep developing over the series. I feel like Condie gave us a decent starting point in Matched but then dropped all world building in Reached. I wanted to learn more about the Society, about the Rising, about what happened to Ky and his family. But the bread crumbs were spaced soo far apart I kept losing interest. And then one character would stumble upon a clue and then “VIOLA!” all the sudden all three characters knew about it too? Say wha?? How does that even happen?
3.) Um. Hate to sound harsh but… I think Cassia is my least favorite person ever. She was really supposed to be our heroine? She was the epitome of “book smart but not street smart”. She reminded me a lot of Gretchen from Mean Girls… just following the same stupid guy mindlessly when there are much better men right in front of her. Cassia also had the Gretchen tendency of latching onto to stupid shit and trying to make it happen. “Stop trying to make Xander’s love happen, it’s not going to happen!”
And why WHY is KY given credit for finding the cure? He was freaking passed out the whole time! He did NOTHING but act as a guinea pig unknowingly. AHHHHH! STAB MY EYES OUT PLEASE!
And poor Xander.. poor lovely precious smart wonderful Xander. Every time Cassia turns him down…
So yeah… Didn’t care for anything about this book or series. And all I have to say to Cassia is:
Rattle The Stars 
One Response to “Reached by Ally Condie”