Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Review: Reached by Ally Condie

After leaving Society to desperately seek The Rising, and each other, Cassia and Ky have found what they were looking for, but at the cost of losing each other yet again. Cassia is assigned undercover in Central city, Ky outside the borders, an airship pilot with Indie. Xander is a medic, with a secret. All too soon, everything shifts again.

Hardcover, Dutton, 512 pages
Published November 13th 2012 by Penguin

(info grabbed from GoodReads

This review is pretty spoiler free, so if you haven’t read Matched or Crossed there’s really no risk reading.

The ending to the Matched trilogy was truly beautiful.  All of the pieces came together like a puzzle, finally showing a bigger picture.  It was a superb ending to a great series.  However, until the ending, I have to admit I was kind of bored.  I tend to like slower paced books where I can get lost in the details and have the author paint a vivid scene for me, but I didn’t get that so much from Reached.

Probably my biggest gripe is the switching of characters.  I don’t typically like alternating perspectives and Reached is no exception.  There were three perspectives (Cassia, Ky, and Xander) rotating each chapter and for a majority of the book, with these characters were in different cities doing different things.  It was madly disorienting.  They obviously did eventually come together, and when they did the confusion was pretty much eliminated as you didn’t have to remember what that character was doing in the last chapter they narrated as much.  I felt it made reading the book much like a jerky car ride, with a speed bump placed at the beginning of every chapter.

The reason I think I became so bored at points was that there was very little going on.  I don’t know if it was intended for build up, because that is for sure not what it did for me.  There was simply a lot of waiting for anything to happen.  When things finally did happen, well… If you were hoping for a blaze of glory finale, you will be disappointed.  It could be said (and I am saying it) that Reached exemplifies a quote of TS Eliot: 

This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper

So why am I rating the book well if I was bored?  Well yeah, the ending was just that good.  Maybe part of me is just happy I’m through it, but I don’t think that is the only reason.  If you haven’t read the Matched trilogy at all and were maybe thinking about reading it, TRY TO READ THEM CLOSE TOGETHER.  There are a lot of minor characters introduced and minute details that are easy to lose track of between books.  There would be times were someone from a previous book would be mentioned and I’d be sitting there like “Who?”  Reading them within the span of a month or two versus reading them over the span of a year or two would probably make all the difference in that regard.

Final Thought: Reached gets 3 out of 5 toadstools
                        The Matched Trilogy as a whole gets 4 out of 5

This review is also posted on GoodReads.

2 comments:

  1. Mmmm I'm always interested to hear opinions on multiple points of view because I write them... And I'm very intrigued to know how the ending could be "just that good" despite the pacing issues--guess I should find out for myself!

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    1. It is a great series. Slower paced than many of the other dystopian trilogies out there, but so worth a read! Though a couple books that are great examples of multiple POVs (in my humble opinion) are The Sweetest Spell by Suzanne Selfors and Sisters Red and Fathomless by Jackson Pearce.

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