I am currently reading the book Matched by Ally Condie. I am up to page 58, and so far it's apparently about how you get "matched" to someone when you turn 17. We are first introduced to a girl named Cassia and her best friend Xander and they are taking the air train to the Match Banquet.
I find this story a little weird and off. First off, I noticed that there are a lot of rules. Right from the beginning on page 1, Cassia mentions "the Society". I noticed that 'society' was capitalized, meaning it's something that's official. I though about how weird that was because the Society sounds like a higher authority, but the actual name itself means everyone, a group of people, a community, etc. So i thought that was kind of contradicting. Then the author mentions emergency tablets that everyone carries on page 6: one green, one blue, one red. For a while the author didn't talk about it anymore, leaving a little tension/ suspense. I think this also shows that there are a lot of rules where Cassia lives because it said specifically that everyone carries it. I remember a little later on in the book (after Cassia got matched with Xander), when they went to the game center for a party, an Official announced over a loudspeaker that "someone has dropped their tablet container, please stand completely still and do not speak until we locate it" (page 50). This kind of scares me because the author still never said what the tablets are for, and everyone is making a big deal out of it. So therefore, the tablets are obviously extremely important. In that scene, it seems like everyone is also scared.
Another big rule that stands out to me is the thing with being "matched". When people turn seventeen, they go to the Match Banquet with their parents and they eat and stuff. But then toward the end, they get called up and Officials announce who they have been matched with, and give them a silver box that has all the information about their match. I see a big flaw in this kind of routine. I think I should call this a routine because it seems like everyone is used to it. They know it's going to happen when they turn seventeen, everyone does it. It's like getting your driver license kind of thing. The flaw I see in this is that they don't even know the person they are being matched with. Never seen them, never talked to them because they are from different provinces. Only rarely will you get matched to someone you know, and that happened with Cassia. This is kind of like a arranged marriage, except it's not even arranged by your parents. It's arranged by the Officials. Yet everyone seems fine with it. Are they clueless? Do they not see this flaw?
I noticed a few times the author mentioned something about making healthy offspring. I think that's one of the reasons for matching people. But the problem I see in this is that the Officials/ the Society almost want a perfect world. They want things to be a certain way: they want a specific person to be matched with another because they want a certain type of offspring. They want perfection. And another thing that bugs me is that none of the characters see these problems. It bugs me that this is their reality, their world, their everyday lives, and they don't see it.
I am really enjoying this book because there's still a lot more to find out about the world they live in. It's interesting to see how different their world is different from mine. It also made me realize that sometimes, this actually does happen in our reality. Sometimes, people want perfection so they do something unfair to get the perfection.
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