Crossed. We are not going to be doing Crossed piece by piece because somehow, Crossed managed to be astoundingly worse than Matched. Remember all that nothing that happened last book? Imagine that, only it’s happening even though they’re ostensibly running from their government in a war zone, and also it’s even more insipid, somehow. I’m not sure how that’s even possible, but it is.
Let’s take a moment to ponder the cover, because it’s pretty fitting for the disaster that is this book.
The first cover had her floating in a bubble, and now she’s breaking out and, in the process, showing us YA cover designers flailing around in their attempt to portray a protagonist doing something other than passively sitting or lying somewhere. Just like this book is an attempt to have the main character doing something but is unable to stop writing it as a bunch of whiny teen introspection that only makes sense when it’s set in a room in a suburban home looking out over a nice backyard.
I really, really don’t think this was meant to be a trilogy. I don’t think the author really had much idea of where it was supposed to go when it wasn’t in dystopic suburbia.
All sorts of things are introduced in Crossed that make little sense, perhaps under the impression that if you didn’t explicitly say that someone’s never painted or seen anyone painting and painting is such a big deal the most his mother ever risks is getting a paintbrush that she uses to make water pictures on rocks, it’s not at all weird for the character who spent last book drawing awesome drawings on scraps of napkin to claim all this. (Also, apparently drawing is the greatest sin ever, even though last book, he deflected another girl’s curiosity about his writing lessons with the main character by pretending he’d been doodling trees instead.)
Speaking of him, we open with special soulmate boyfriend and his sucky soldier life. The book alternates POVs, which seems like a good idea. Halfway through the book, the two POVs meet, and although they keep alternating, the characters are so bland and samey I couldn’t keep track of who was speaking in a given chapter.
Anyway, the first thing that happens is that special soulmate boyfriend is putting the corpse of another soldier in the water. He died of starvation before they’d even been sent out to fight. Now, this kind of thing has happened historically, but it doesn’t make any sense happening in a place as obsessed with nutrition and calorie counting. I could forgive it if the idea was that they’re purposefully putting everyone on a starvation diet for some reason, but he’s pretty lively for a concentration camp victim. Furthermore, they appear to be desperate for bodies to staff their fake villages. Despite this, SSB insists that it’s because they don’t give a fuck about the soldiers, and there’s also a lot about it all being a plot to remove all the anomalies and aberrations from the population. The book gives us a setup of desperation and dwindling resources, then insists we ignore all that because it’s not what’s going on at all, they’re just murdering people for the evululz. They even have enough resources to give them super coats with built in heaters so they don’t freeze and some chip that monitors their physical condition for statistics purposes, but not for the chips to actually transmit the data wirelessly or track the location of the coat, let alone to use it to not accidentally kill people by starving them to death.
(It’s particularly stupid given last book, where it’s abundantly clear they barely have enough people to do the shitty jobs as it is, and those people are currently being worked to the bone. The whole of this book only makes sense if you accept the idea that Society’s bigwigs really, really want to force well-behaved good citizens into shitty dishwashing posts. And here I stupidly thought they were taking advantage of the fact the aberrations, being unable to marry, wouldn’t have spouses or kids to be upset by their treatment.)
Also, turns out there’s whole societies of people who aren’t part of Society! Because it makes so much sense that when an insanely conformist totalitarian cult that calls itself Society because they think they’re all of society would tell people that they can choose to be part of it or not, because it’s not like they spent enormous amounts of energy on trying to wipe out poems just for not being the hundred they picked. And then those people built a lifestyle entirely around trading black market goods to everyone else, and they still didn’t do anything to them, or even just watch the area to see when their own citizens tried to sneak in, and then they decide to wipe these people out because they suddenly decided where they are would be a great place to have their secret store of everyone’s DNA (oh, also remember last book when her dad “lost” her grandfather’s sample? Turns out they take DNA from everyone early and just do the rest because AUTHOR SAYS SO DAMMIT). And this place is also right in the bombing zone from the other country. And also it’s in a cave system that has multiple entrances, so the survivor of the attack can just walk in. (But he doesn’t smash up everything until the protagonists get there so they can be all OMGWTFDNA, because it was super important he knew exactly what he was smashing because apparently that the people who killed everyone he knew wanted it there wasn’t good enough.)
Everything is that stupid. I can’t even tell the plot coherently because everything is just a ball of insanity and explaining one part starts the rest unraveling. Oh, and the characters are all fucking dicks. Her perfect boyfriend decides to hoof it from the field using the rest of the soldiers to cover his tracks, but he’s so nice because he grabs this one young one who reminds him of her brother.
Also they’re not really soldiers because Society gave them fake guns, and why don’t the planes just FLY OVER THEM in that case? Even assuming that somehow a handful of soldiers standing in bombed out village remains really looks like an actual village to them and not the obvious decoy that it is, there’s infinitely better targets further in. Plus, they’re lucky to live more than a week and never even consider turning their guns on the people who ordered them to their deaths, so we don’t even have the usual reason why evil governments don’t want to arm their meat shields.
At one point there’s this big deal about ~rainbow trout~ and they find one in a stream and then the planes drop poison balls into the stream and oh no now it’s dead and foc fuck’s sake, planes, how have you not finished poisoning the water by now when you’ve had decades to do it! Why is everyone incompetent in every last possible way?
In terms of message the book is no less stupid and absurd. In a book revolving around the control of culture, we still have a black market economy based around trading pre-Society classics around. The poems the two of them memorized have no worth because she destroyed the paper they’re on so she can’t prove they’re real poems, because who cares about if they’re good poems or not? There’s bitching about how the evil society picked the hundred songs to be sure no one could sing them properly, and so fucking what! MAKE UP YOUR OWN SONGS THEN, THIS ISN’T THAT HARD.
(I do faintly hope that maybe this will be the moral of the final book, since god knows it doesn’t have room left for any other moral and also they’re out of poems. But probably she’ll just trip over another one and obsess over that.)
Also, last book she got some of the food tablets and this book it turns out they’re actually POISON DEATH TABLETS, because. Even though the odds of some dumb kid feeling hungry and eating a food tablet is pretty high, and even though it’s quite possible for something to happen and disrupt food distribution temporarily causing people to take them, what really matters is the government wants to ensure no one survives beyond it…even though it actually takes two pills to kill you, and the first one just makes you really weak, and people are only allowed to carry a single pill with them, so it can’t even get that right. And this is such a secret that her non-soulmate boyfriend who works in the hospital where they have access to extra food pills didn’t even know they weren’t extra food pills (and it can’t be that he was hoping she’d be caught trying to run away, because he wrapped each pill in a special little note to her, because haha you thought the love triangle was over! it will never be over.)
So anyway the moral is that pills are inherently evil, even pills that are just goddamn food pills, and you deserve to die if you dare rely on anything pillshaped.
Oh, and this book’s poem turns out to be even more super important than the last, because there’s this mythical “pilot” who’s honest to god their promised messiah who will come one day and and all this stuff about no one knowing who the guy will be or if maybe they’re the pilot themselves and don’t you guys have any actual leaders? Shut up and start actually doing shit!
And we learn that her stupid boyfriend actually hates his dad because his dad was screwing around with the terminals as a prelude to rebellion of some kind and this means his dad must have been thinking I AM TOTALLY THE PILOT because apparently that’s the only reason anyone will try to rebel and then he explains it was Society planes that nuked his beloved peasant village, even though last book the plot point was just that shit, the war is going badly but no one knows it is except on the edges. And because he hates his dad he hates the rebellion therefore he won’t join it and tries to prevent our supposed heroine from joining by such reasonable measures as burning the map, and then at the end she manages to join anyway and they’re maybe evil too!
Now also understand that all of these plot points are run through in the most tedious boring way imaginable, and then just understand it’s even more boring than that.
I assume the third book is her wandering around being stupid and thinking about stupid shit and then somehow society just blows itself up and they all make a new civilization based on obsessively clinging to all historical forms of art and not just a handful.