Crossed (Matched Trilogy, #2)
Something I'm really tired of is authors abusing the first person point of view. And when I say I'm tired of it what I really mean is that IT MAKES ME LIVID. But I'm letting my anger get ahead of me.
Crossed is the second book in Ally Condie's Matched trilogy, the first volume of which (also called Matched) was published last year at the peak of Hunger Games fever to some mild fanfare. I picked it up because EW gave it a B-, and because I had just devoured The Hunger Games and was looking for something to fill void the in my soul, a sentiment shared by many, I think, and certainly predicted by Condie's publishers. Matched was just the first in a long series of YA dystopian love stories to be published post-Hunger Games. I've read most them, and none are as good as the original flavor. Anyway, so a little background.
Matched introduced us to Cassia Reyes, who lives in a dystopian future America called The Society that controls every moment of its citizens' lives, from birth to death, as a way of supposedly staving off crime, disease, and suffering. There are only 100 books, 100 pieces of music, 100 movies, etc. in The Society. No one knows how to write, and no one creates anything. Everyone dies at age 80 in a formal ceremony attended by their families. Citizens are given aptitude tests and placed in jobs, and even marriages (called "matches") are arranged. Cassia's story is the center of Matched because when she received her Match -- her best friend Xander -- she accidentally saw another face, too: a mysterious boy called Ky. So Cassia starts asking questions, and pretty soon she's questioning everything around her. She falls in love with Ky, but Ky is an Aberration -- a person who has lost the rights and privileges of being a Citizen. It all snowballs from there.
Crossed picks up where Matched left off, with Cassia in the Outer Provinces searching for Ky, and the mysterious rebellion known as The Rising. In Matched, we only got Cassia's POV, but in Crossed, we get Ky's as well. While she's searching for him, Ky is busy escaping from his government mandated death sentence with a couple of new buddies. All four of them run around what I assume to be the Utah desert for the entire book, trying to keep out of The Society's hands and find the Farmers (what the society calls Anomalies, people who choose not to live in The Society) or The Rising (former Citizens who want to destroy The Society from every direction possible).
Matched was a frustrating read for me because it took what could have been a good premise and made it go BLAH. I had vague hopes that Crossed would continue doing the things I enjoyed from Matched, and fix the things that needed fixing, but sadly those hopes were crushed* upon reading this book. From the opening sentence of Cassia's bland narration, to the half-assed last chapter, I wanted to throw the book across the room. My experience of reading it can probably be considered close to masochism.
*I'd like to take the time to predict what Condie will title the third and last book in her trilogy. Crushed is a good candidate, I think. Also: Smashed, Burned, Wasted, Dumped (heh -- that would be a fun one) . . . any other ideas? Oh. P.S. - What the eff does 'Crossed' even mean? I read the whole book and still have no idea.
One of my biggest frustrations with the last book was Cassia's emptiness as a narrator. Despite my frustration, I excused a lot of it because I believed it to have been done on purpose to convey the emptiness of Cassia's identity in The Society, but it turns out I was giving the book too much credit -- seems that it's actually Condie's problem as an author. Ky and Cassia, who spend the novel alternating POVs, are INDISTINGUISHABLE from each other as narrators. I'm not even exaggerating here. If you open up a page at random and read a couple sentences, unless there are context clues embedded in it (like referring to the other person), you LITERALLY cannot tell the two of them apart. They both speak in the same vague, airy voice, saying things without actually saying them in that way that bad poets do. Condie seems to feel that vague poetic imagery is a good substitute for actual concrete description (and for actual plot and character development, but that's another issue entirely). Neither character has a voice of their own, instead they spend the novel borrowing Condie's overly poetic say-nothing tone. This is a huge problem because Ky wasn't raised in The Society -- he should have a voice, especially ESPECIALLY since "having a voice" is a major underlying theme in the series. Irony!
There are other serious problems with Crossed as well. While I appreciated the gesture of having Ky as a second narrator, the alternating POVs were jarring. The constant back and forth was unsettling -- maybe this wouldn't have been an issue if the chapters would have been longer, but I never felt comfortable in the setting or the events of the story. Like, one of the main things writers have to accomplish is grounding you in their fictional world as a real place, and the alternating POVs on top of Condie's non-substantial description made it feel like nothing in this book was real, like I was unglued as a reader from the text. Condie also has a tendency to over-rely on other people's words. If I had to read that Tennyson poem one more time . . . and I LIKE that poem. This would be nothing more than an annoying affectation if Condie's characters had solid voices, or her story was interesting enough to distract from it, but they don't, and it wasn't. It ended up feeling like she was using other people's words because she couldn't think of any of her own.
Some books can push past weak writing with strong story, but this book has neither. The entire scope of the story feels recycled: the dystopian world with absurd rules, the secret rebellion, the doomed romance . . . I've seen it before, and I've seen it better. I feel no connection to Condie's world, because she's the master of telling, not showing. There's a reason "show, don't tell" is a fiction writing mantra. Showing connects readers emotionally to the events of the story, and for the most part, telling makes the reader nothing but an observer. She puts bland, ethereal, poetic imagery in place of actual imagery or dialogue or hard description, and her characters are always talking about how much they love each other, but we never see it. And on top of all that, I felt like half the book was filler, that nothing really happened, and the stuff that did happen was robbed of almost all of its narrative tension. For example, the moment when Ky and Cassia reunite falls completely flat because Condie doesn't work up to it, and she doesn't know how to structure her story to make the most of moments like it. The whole thing feels like a feather Condie released into the wind.
****This has nothing to do with anything I've just said, but does anyone else feel like the cover is completely awful and on the nose? Why is she sitting like that? What the frak is she wearing? Very disappointing, as the cover for the first one was kind of gorgeous.
There were also some things that bugged me on a conceptual level. The vagueness of the name 'The Society' makes me want to poke rusty nails through my eyeballs. I spent half my life as an English teacher steering my students away from blaming the nameless, faceless collective of "Society" for all the wrongs in the world when they wrote their papers. To say that "Society" is racist or that "Society" is sexist or that "Society" doesn't like when people are different is childish. Grouping so many vast belief systems, cultural practices, and mores into one large faceless entity like that completely ignores the vast complexities at work in any given social situation, and it assumes that all people in any given society of people are more similar in those respects than they are different. It's simplistic, and every time that word pops up on the page, a little piece of my soul dies. I also wanted to quickly mention what I'm going to call the disturbing trend of the "I . . . I . . . I . . ., " which is how I began this extremely long and over-indulgent rant of a review, if you'll recall. It feels like YA books these days can't get published unless they're written in first person, but first person is so easy to fuck up, you guys. It's so easy for the author to let that I take over, to assume that when your narrator says "I" that also means he or she also has a personality. That's clearly what's happened here, and I see it a lot in YA books. I'm over here busting on Ally Condie, but she's not the only one. I can't tell you what a relief it was reading Ready Player One after reading this book. If you want to know how to do first person POV, go read that book (you should go read it anyway because it's bloody fantastic). Wade Watts has a voice. He comes alive on the page. Ky and Cassia are just blank I's, waiting to be filled in, by what, I'm not sure.
Honestly, you guys, I could keep going, but it would probably start feeling like I was kicking somebody when they're already down. Was there anything I liked about this book? I kind of liked the ending, but I'm not sure if that's because something interesting finally happened, or if I was just happy it was over.
****Will I be reading book three anyway? Yuuuup. Masochist, remember?
Look, I don't know why I'm getting so worked up over this book. It's just a book, I know that, but I feel like it has personally offended me somehow. Like, if it were a person, it would have spouted off some teen emo poetry while sitting on my head and farting. Wait, no, because farting would be giving it too much credit. Farting is funny. Crossed is not your funny friend who sits on your head and farts (in case you're wondering, this has happened to me). Crossed is the friend who tries too hard -- and it tries really, really hard -- but does not succeed. Mostly I just feel kind of bad now that I've reached the end of this review -- but I had all of these feelings, and I needed to spew them out somewhere. That's what the internet is for, right? Spewing. I think I'm right about this, but I might have do some checking around. I'll get back to you.