From everything I heard about this book, I assumed the matching plot was the basic story that everything else was added to. I’m starting to suspect it wasn’t. The original seems to be some sort of Giver/Fahrenheit 451 mashup, and then the author was told to stick Ky in there.

One of the things fiction can do is hold up a mirror to society. There doesn’t seem to be any sign of that here. Nor is it just a look at another society for the sake of it – everything about this society invites comparison to our own, but only to congratulate us for being better than them.

There’s two issues here, the theory and the practice. What if we limited the number of books in circulation? Would that be right or wrong, would it have any benefits and do the costs outweigh them? That’s an interesting question. What if we removed almost all of our culture so that everyone was really bored all the time isn’t. None of this proves the theory behind it was wrong, it just shows they cut down way too far in practice.

What made The Giver work was that their society obviously was making people happy. They kill babies that aren’t within proper norms, but the children they keep are fed and cared for. They kill the elderly, but again, those people are cared for up until that point. It’s a society that’s been flattened down, removing the good with the bad. It’s easy to argue their society could be improved, but part of the strength of it was that it had ways it was better.

The Giver has people sharing their dreams with their family members as part of the fact they don’t have secrets from each other. This book has the government recording your dreams because it’s creepy. They didn’t like hyperbole or other imprecise language because it got in the way of communication. These people have a couple banned words based on a misunderstanding of what science is. The Giver had everyone obeying the rules because the rules were good, and there was no sign at all that the people in charge were held to a different standard. This has people scared of officials and officials throwing their weight around abusively.

So far, I feel like this book doesn’t know what it’s trying to say, or why.

Let’s see…

If we want a plotline about the matching, I’d say there should be an actual switch. What we have now is her being matched, then a minor glitch on the card that she somehow decides is super important followed by obsessing over the other boy even though supposedly she’s happy with Xander. Being happy with her match and then having that snatched away makes more sense.

Since Ky is clearly the endgame pairing, have him actually be the initial match somehow. Best, I think, would be to just have the card she’s given be his data, which would also explain how she finds out about him being ineligible due to his status. The information about him from the card would be how she knows all about him rather than her apparently figuring out everything regarding his tortured soul from staring at his eyes for a few days. The official shows up shortly afterward to explain it’s a mistake because they realized he wasn’t eligible, which then makes Cassia’s belief that it means she was initially matched with Ky before he was removed actually make sense in a way that saying someone fucked with her card as a prank doesn’t.

Alternatively, have him not be the match at all. If the idea here is that the matching system is bad and shouldn’t stand in the way of true love or whatever, give Cassia some other reason for being interested in Ky. I’d suggest having the matching already take place a while before the story starts or else have her not matched at all but know there’s a rule against being matched with anyone she knows so that it’s impossible for Ky to end up her match. After her grandfather dies, she goes hiking and all that progresses, and it’s their bonding over hiking and the poem that gets her interested in Ky instead of the initial push being that card nonsense. When they’re closer, he can tell her about the fact he’s not going to get matched at all because of his status and that’s how she can find out, instead of an official volunteering the information because she felt like it.

If the point isn’t a love triangle, then kill everything involving that. Cassia is with Xander, who will be playing the role of Girlfriend in this storyline, tagging along after her and offering uncertain support in her endeavors. Cassia has convinced herself she’s happy with her life until her grandfather gives her the poem. Although it appeals to her, she initially tries to reject it as something outdated they were right to remove, only to find she can’t let go of it. Instead of convincing herself, she starts to find problems in other aspects of society, such as the loss she feels over her grandfather’s death, and comes to the conclusion that the poem wasn’t discarded because what it talks about is irrelevant in the current society, but because those in charge want to prevent people from struggling against their rules.

I have yet to see any sign the deprivation matters, so let’s remove that. Color still exists and buildings are nicely decorated, although there are rules about what colors you can actually wear because they use color coding to tell who does what job at a distance. Only officials wear white. Also, the food they eat is perfectly good food instead of bland blandness. Things are boring because it’s all the same, not because they banned color and taste. They can keep the ridiculous media bans but only if they give people other things to do – maybe a strong focus on athletics, maybe they have a lot of manual labor because they believe in minimizing how much technology they rely on. They also have a really strong math program (math has obvious practical value, but it’s also really good as a form of uncontroversial science. There’s a reason Russians are good at math and it isn’t because cold and alcohol make you great with numbers.) and some sort of psych-related classes that are about getting people to communicate properly and get along with each other. No one should be making excuses to stripsearch Cassia’s dad because they’re mad he screwed up and no one should be considering Cassia’s mom’s appearance a factor in how they act. If they abuse their power, they don’t need to be petty about it.

One minor note: So far, this book has done a shockingly good job of having lots of women running around. Most of the other kids around Cassia are girls, her non-Xander best friend is a girl, many of the officials are female. There’s still an imbalance, though – we have Cassia’s mother against Cassia’s father and grandfather (who is her father’s father, not her mother’s), it’s Xander’s father who talks to them in the flashback. Ky’s father is the one who did whatever the infraction was and it’s his adopted father who was the one attacked with his son. And naturally their family is gender-balanced, so she has a little brother and not a little sister. Cassia’s great-grandmother was important, but she died long ago, and Cassia’s grandmother died before she could know her either. It’s well within the realms of chance, of course, but because books are always weighted toward more male characters to a minor or major degree, I’d like it better to see something where things were weighted the other way. And as this book is a love triangle and we are, after all, not going to get a gay love triangle, that means it’s going to involve two major male characters running around to one female protagonist, so making more of the adults female would have been nice.