Do not go gently

I wanted to write a review of the second book in the Matched trilogy by Ally Condie, Crossed, but I'm not quite sure if I'll be defending it or criticizing it. Probably a mixture of both... so maybe don't read this if you're trying to decide whether or not you should read the Matched trilogy, because it will not help. Not to mention if you're coming here for help with decisionmaking, there's some cross-wiring in your brain because I. Don't. Do. That.

It seems that Crossed suffers from Second Book Syndrome. My previous experiences with Second Book Syndrome have included New Moon (Twilight series) and Tiger's Quest (Tiger's Curse series), and they seem to have taught me this: Second Curse Syndrome involves the dilapidation of the overall plotline, and serves more as a vehicle to further along the characterization*. Crossed is no different. Now, I had no problems with the characterizations in Matched to begin with, so imagine my pleasant surprise when I find that the second book added upon them. We find out things about the characters that we never expected to find out, and are left with the impression that we still don't know everything. Which, ahem, is kind of the point of a trilogy.

My problems with Crossed were similar to the issues I had with Matched, which included:

1. The oversymbolization/metaphor/muddledness. I probably just made up two words with that, but at least those words help get the point across. The symbolism in the first book of this series at first struck me as kind of neat, until the author kept changing what everything stood for and introducing new symbols, which did not help get the point across. The main metaphors were the colors green, blue, and red (can anyone else tell that the cover of the third book is going to be Cassia in-- or out of-- a red bubble? Whether that bubble is broken, or invisible, or empty, it will be red. I'd put money on it.), but after a while of belaboring the point that the colors mean something, you forget exactly what that something is. And thinking about it starts to hinder your enjoyment of the book. "Wait, what does that mean? How is that relevant? Gah, why am I so stupid?! Why can't I figure out why Indie would choose a blue dress?!" Seriously, I spent so much time trying to relate every mention of any of these colors to their meaning and relation to the tablets (green tablets calm you, blue tablets slow you down so you die if someone doesn't save you, and red tablets make you forget everything from the past 12 hours) that I probably just confused myself more. But is that my fault? No.

2. The secondary characters. The main characters-- Cassia, Ky and Xander-- are all splendidly different with similar goals, but different ways of thinking. But the secondary characters... I just don't care about them. Indie is a little intriguing, except I wouldn't actually care if the air ship she left on was being sent to the certain death of everyone on it. Eli is cute in that he's supposed to be like Bram, Cassia's younger brother, but the thing is: I don't even know anything about Bram! He asks questions and has a lot of energy. Okay, so he's just like every other 12-year-old kid out there (including Eli!). Vick's death shocked me a little but I got over it after probably one paragraph. I liked that he got a little background information out there, telling Ky about how he fell in love with an Anomaly, but I can't shake the feeling that that was only included so that Ky could relate to him, not to give him more dimensions as a character. And Hunter... we first see him at probably the most depressing, dramatic moment of his life, and after that what is there? We already know everything that really needs to be known, and everything else is just details about him. To me he seemed like a reincarnation of Vick in that they both lacked any real personality.

3. The dystopia. I like the general idea of how the Society controls every aspect of Citizens' lives for what is supposed to be their own good, but the execution is pretty poorly done. The Enemy is... who, again? And the Society sends its own people (Aberrations and Anomalies may not be Citizens, but they are people given a status by the Society, so they're still part of the system) out to be killed for... what, exactly? I just didn't understand the whole Society vs. Rising vs. Enemy vs. farmers thing. There are too many variables.

Those are my three main problems, and I'm hoping the third one becomes a little clearer in the third book. Or maybe even if I reread the first two. That said, there are certain things in the Matched trilogy that I think are done better than they are done in most books:

1. Again, characterization. This isn't a huge one for this particular series (I absolutely do not understand the comparisons to The Hunger Games, other than the fact that they are both "dystopian" --coughMatchedisutopiancough--), but it's not to be discounted either. I particularly love Ky, the quiet boy who knows when to shut up and when to stand up. He cared for Cassia before he even knew her, which may scream "insta!love" to you, but to me it just says he's a person who can read other people easily and knows what he believes in. Xander is the golden boy with a dark streak, the one Cassia's "supposed" to be with according to the Society, the one she's known all her life. She thinks she knows everything about him, but consistently finds out she is wrong. And Cassia, obviously, is the main character. Her whole life she believed in the Society until her grandfather, also kind of her best friend next to Xander, gave her two poems before he died that changed everything. Now she's a fighter and yadda yadda. I say "yadda yadda" not because it's overdone or unbelievable or anything, but because I need to move on with this thing. My point here is that the characters are all believably different.

2. This one only applies to Crossed, but it's a big one that can go really wrong if not done correctly. I'm talking about alternating points of view. While Matched was told from only Cassia's point of view, Crossed starts out from Ky's point of view and then alternates between him and Cassia. Each chapter, it tells you right under the number of the chapter who is talking now, but I didn't even need that. I could tell just from reading it who was talking, because they have such different voices. Ky is the realist, with contempt for all things Society (except Cassia) and all things Rising. But he speaks with a voice so... poetic, that I kind of just want to live in his chapters forever. I'll get to the "poetic" part later. Cassia's voice is much the same as it was in Matched, in that she tries to be poetic but kind of fails. She's almost too optimistic to say anything beautiful the way Ky does. She sorts everything into compartments in her mind and makes sure she perceives everyone and everything correctly, but at the same time she hates it. She hates categorizing people and tries to see them only for who they are-- in other words, she actively tries to think more like Ky.

3. Here comes what I'm talking about when I say "poetic." By this I do not mean the constant use of poems in the book, which actually gets excessive and annoying, but the total poetry in Ky's voice (and sometimes even Cassia's). Despite being the realist, Ky manages to say things that just make me want to read the same sentence over and over again and write it down and memorize it and say it in my sleep and get it tattooed on my forearm (okay, maybe not that last one).

i.e. "I see a glint in her eye as she looks at me and it makes me smile. Hold our breath? she seems to say. Move the earth? We've been doing that all along."

Also, "She's right. I do see myself in Indie. I feel a pity so deep for her that it might be something else entirely. Empathy. You have to believe in something to survive. She's picked the Rising. I chose Cassia."

And "The arrow of this compass is locked into place. No spinning. No alteration. Like me with Cassia. Locked on one idea, one thing in the sky. One truth to hold on to when everything else falls to dust around me."

And, talking about how his mother painted with water on rocks: "She believed in my father and went to his meetings. He walked out with her in the desert after the storms and kept her company while she found hollows filled with rain and painted with water. He wanted to make things-- changes-- that would last. She always understood that what she did would fade away."

Now that I have discussed all of this at length, I will tell you my real problem with Crossed as an individual book: there is, essentially, no ACTION. The whole book is Cassia searching for Ky and Ky trying to get back Cassia, and then them finding each other, and then the four of them (Cassia, Indie, Ky and Eli) trekking across the red rock and desert in search of... something. For most of the book I couldn't really keep track of what they were looking for. When I finally figured out that Cassia and Indie wanted to find the Rising, but Ky just wanted to escape and Eli basically wanted whatever Ky wanted, it was too late to save the book. It was past the point that should have been the climax. I did rather enjoy that Cassia and Ky actually had a disagreement for once in their lives-- a pretty big one too, even though it lasted all of about four seconds-- but even that didn't have any real action. Ky basically was like, "Okay, I'm not going to win this one, so let's do what you want." And then they found the Rising and there was no conflict and they got their assignments and there was no conflict and then the book was over with nary a conflict to mention. Cassia discovers that Xander is part of the Rising and makes plans to meet with him (another problem: Xander is a main character. Why was he only present for 15 pages of the whole book? I don't want a character that gets talked about all the time but is never there. That is the definition of passive). The End. I'm not even left thinking "What happens next?" I'm left thinking, "When is something going to happen?"

So Crossed, I would say, is the ultimate bridge book. Which is not bad, but not good either. The second book in a trilogy shouldn't be just a bridge book, it should be able to stand on its own. I am really glad that Veronica Roth at least acknowledges this, so I know she's keeping it in mind while writing the second Divergent book (I wanted to post a link to the blog post in which she talks about this, but I cannot find it). It's too bad Ally Condie didn't get that memo.

I give it 3 out of 5 stars because I thought the redeeming qualities slightly, barely outweighed the unredeeming ones.

*Note that Catching Fire (The Hunger Games series) was not included in this list.