Screencap from Kindle for iPhone
The Society chooses everything.
The books you read.
The music you listen to.
The person you love.
Yet for Cassia the rules have changed. Ky has been taken and she will sacrifice everything to find him.
And when Cassia discovers Ky has escaped to the wild frontiers beyond the Society there is hope.
But on the edge of society nothing is as it seems…
A rebellion is rising.
And a tangled web of lies and double-crosses could destroy everything.”Description from
I read the first book in the Matched Trilogy a long time ago. Like very long ago. 2 years actually. You can find my review here. But it made such a lasting impact on me that as I begun to read Crossed, everything would come back, all the images, the feelings and emotions from the first book. I love this series because it’s about the emotional revolution and less about the actual one.
A lot of series fall flat on the second book. Some might argue that this is exactly what happens in this series as well. To me, however, this second book makes a smooth transition to a third more powerful book. Obviously I haven’t read “Reached” just yet, but it looks as if the second one is the quiet before the storm of the third installment.
Don’t expect a lot of action in this one. We get deeper into the psyche and feelings of Cassia and Ky, whose narrative voice we are introduced to in this volume. They are both looking for each other, but in the process they discover themselves and how far they’re willing to go for each other. We learn a few things about the Society and about the Rising, a rebellious group who fight the Society, as well as the farmers, people outside the Society’s control. We also learn more about each character, both old and new ones. But mainly, we get a voyeuristic look of the two lovers’ minds.
Cassia, learnt to write and share forbidden words of others in “Matched”. In “Crossed” we see a Cassia transformed into a girl who wants to learn how to shape her own words into poetry, a metaphor for the rebellion happening inside of her. She has followed Ky to the Outer Provinces, a fish out-of-water who has to learn how to swim.
The characters have matured, the book is a transition not only from the subordination to freedom, but from childhood to adulthood. Both leads are aware of how blind their love makes them to the dangers of their world, but also of the actions that need to be taken to achieve the happiness they want from their lives.
The pace is quite slow in this book, as I’ve said already, but doesn’t take away from the poetry of the narrative that Condie has so masterfully crafted. Still, I believe it was necessary to shape the characters into the people they need to be to fight this cold war.
I would recommend it to those who love character-driven storytelling and of course those who have read the first book in the trilogy “Matched”, otherwise nothing will make sense.
That’s it from me,
Rhys out xXx
The post Crossed by Ally Condie appeared first on Rhys Christopher Ethan - Author of LBGT Queerky Tales.
