As in, let’s have some to celebrate this book being over.
Let’s talk pacing.
I mentioned with Graceling that the book seemed to actually be a couple stories linked together to try and pass them off as a continuous narrative. Matched, in contrast, looks like it’s one story split up to try and pass it off as a series. I wonder how much this kind of moneywhoring filler is a recent thing – I really don’t remember this at all from back when I used to read books, and while I wasn’t the most discerning of readers, I’m pretty sure I’d remember if most of them had nothing happen
I originally tolerated the pace because as usual I’m here for the worldbuilding, but this was more of a bait and switch thing – the world remains a hastily scribbled collection of generic dystopia features cribbed from past works. Let’s consider some chapters here.
Ch1: Cassia goes to get matched.
Ch2: Cassia is matched.
Ch3: More about matching, Cassia goes to work, and then finds the wrong face on her card.
Ch4: Cassia thinks about the fact the wrong face was on her card.
Ch5: Cassia keeps thinking about the wrong face until finally an official explains why it’s the wrong one.
Ch6: We learn about Ky and she talks to her grandfather.
Ch7: Her grandfather dies, she learns about the poems.
Ch8: More about Ky and a bit about their society.
Ch9: The hiking begins. She and Ky hook up.
Ch10: Her dad gets in trouble about the sample and more about her grandfather.
Ch11: Hiking. Cassia finally destroys the poems.
Ch12: More on the grandfather issue.
Ch13: Doing stuff, thinking about stuff, etc.
Ch14: Cassia thinks about stuff more.
Ch15: Hiking. Cassia boggles at writing.
And it only gets worse from here. This is shameful. It’s not like these are short chapters, either. We have all the wordcount of massive amounts of worldbuilding, but instead it’s filler that goes nowhere. You can compress this down easily – one chapter for the matching, one to give people a broader sense of the world, then the chapter on her grandfather and the poems.
Here’s a rough outline for how the story should go:
Cassia is matched and fine with it. Her grandfather dies, giving her the poems and her first feeling there’s anything lacking in her society. Ky sees her reading them in the woods and they start up a friendship over that. She realizes she feels like she’s in love with him, has a bit of doubt and confusion over that, quickly culminating in their kiss. (We’ll call this the Legend of Korra lesson – kissing once when one person is in a relationship is an understandable mistake, emotionally cheating for half the story is not.) Cassia, being a good citizen, confesses to this and asks if her match can be changed or if she can be changed to a single to be with Ky. In retaliation, Ky is sent away to the front and his distraught parents blab to everyone about how they’re losing the war. Cassia doesn’t take the pill, and afterward, begins to spread the word about what’s really going on, causing an uprising. That’s a far better thing to end on.
If, instead, the story is going to be about what the book’s sold as, about a girl falling in love with the wrong person, I really think it should have been a gay couple. I mean, it’s nominally about having the right to choose who you love, and it’s even got the contrast between the matched couples, who are chosen to make good Christian atheist babies, and singles, who don’t get to marry or have kids. It’s also a much better example of why it’s wrong to restrict people’s choices than just that sometimes teenage girls pick a different boy than the one everyone thinks they should, because sometimes teenage girls pick for really terrible reasons or that it’s wrong for people who commit crimes to be restricted from some aspects of society (and for the record, America does put way, way too many restrictions on criminals’ rights, but this book is talking in absolutes). Basically, nothing in this book is analogous to the average green-eyed white girl’s experience unless we generalize to all restriction of Romeo and Juliet fucking up your life over hormones is evil, while it maps very well onto gay rights issues.
If it’s keeping the general plotline, then at the end, she runs away on her own. The society has no real way of dealing with this because they normally don’t need to – there are no real maps, so no one knows how to travel beyond where they’re supposed to be. But unlike everyone else, Cassia has a compass – perhaps, that’s her artifact from the start.
…
So done with Matched!
As you may recall, the poll results last time were split. In terms of total vote, Pokemon Blue won, but when votes and antivotes were combined, Matched came out well ahead. Therefore, I decided to do both, Matched followed by Pokemon Blue.
In that line, we’ll be doing the winner of the popular vote first this time, followed by the combined vote winner. That’s looking like it’ll be Battle Royale followed by Unwind. You’ll have another ten days for voting and suggesting new books, then we’ll start the next poll.
Current list:
Sexteen/XVI
Elantris
House of Night
Eon/Eona
The Scorpio Races
Delirium
Witchblade
Unwind
Grave Mercy
Starters
Fever (Wither sequel)
Crossed (Matched sequel)
Gemma Doyle series
Animorphs
Pokemon Yellow
Temeraire is getting taken off the list as I read it on my own and I’m just going to do a regular book review of that one. The next of the lamest powers books has suffered a similar fate – I’ll be writing up some quicker summations and posting that next time I finish early, because upon reading the opening I’ve decided it’s entirely too stupid to need a line by line mauling.
“If, instead, the story is going to be about what the book’s sold as,
about a girl falling in love with the wrong person, I really think it
should have been a gay couple.”
Oh my God, seriously, where the fuck are all these straight white girls society is preventing from being with whatever guy they choose? Is this kind of like how if you tell someone what they said was stupid and they should avoid saying it if they don’t want to sound stupid you are apparently encroaching upon their First Amendment right to free speech?
So does Blue start tomorrow?
Their parents don’t want them pregnant with an abusive fuckup’s baby and IT’S JUST LIKE ROMEO AND JULIET WHY CAN’T DAD ACCEPT HE’S HER TRUE LOVE! There’s likely a handful of girls somewhere who have parents treating their perfectly normal boyfriend badly, but by and large, people could stand to pay more attention to what their kids do.
And yes, tomorrow is Blue! Wonderful, wonderful Blue.
I’d be curious to see a readthrough of “Stargirl” by Jerry Spinelli from a “I liked it as a teen and wonder if it still holds up” POV. It’s held up as a classic and actually has a male narrator, so it could be interesting.
Hm. I think I might have read that. The girl was sort of like a manic pixie dreamgirl but a deconstruction of it? I was less than enthused by the narrator.
Oh yes, that’s the one! Little!me thought Stargirl was awesome and Joe was… not.
Wasn’t the point that he was a dick, though?
Yep! I’m not complaining, just saying I agree with Farla’s assessment.
Hm. Now I think it would be pretty interesting to reread. Definitely got that he was supposed to be a dick, but there was something really unsatisfying all the same? It’s a story type I see a lot and I’m always vaguely annoyed by, although it’s hard to really articulate. It’s like, it’s acknowledging he’s not in the right, but it’s still all about him and there’s a sort of “well, what more can you expect from me” thing to it.
I actually found the story to be pretty depressing as a kid– he never gets a redemption. He bullies a weird girl in high school and then regrets it the rest of his life. It was pretty unfulfilling and for that reason kind of frustrating– why did we just follow this guy around if we never get to see him rise to the challenge?
I do remember liking the “be nice to the weird people!” message.
Yeah, I remember it was really good with her – we see that she’s not carefree like she first seems, and with how much bullying gets rationalized by saying they’re not really that upset so it’s okay to keep pushing and pushing – that sort of depth to her character was a great idea.
I guess it was going for the moral is that if you do this you’ll regret it so don’t, kids. But his side of things is all so banally evil, and it didn’t feel like it was really presenting an alternative so much as an inevitability.
“It was pretty unfulfilling and for that reason kind of frustrating– why
did we just follow this guy around if we never get to see him rise to
the challenge?”
Because he isn’t really the protagonist, she is. She goes on with her life after resolving not to let him change her, and he ends up with nothing but regrets. She wins.
Oo! Animorphs!
On the one hand, I’m pretty stoked. On the other, I kind of already know what sort of issues are going to be brought up.
There are a couple of people who are already blogging the series book-by-book.
(http://cinnamonbunzuh.blogspot.ca/)
And so far they’ve got:
The villain is completely and utterly unrealistic, to the point of being cartoonish; the “moral” character has extremely inconsistent and hypocritical views, which aren’t acknowledged in the story; there’s an obvious a deficit of female characters; and either the author or the ghostwriter is going on some really weird logic when it comes to being an animal (This bear has instincts and experience, but I have superior human intelligence, so we are equal in this fight! Even though all we’re doing is biting and clawing at each other). There’s this whole thing they have in one book, where they claim there’s no way to suppress free will, and then that huge plothole where the aliens can seemingly take over any lifeform with a functioning brain, and retain their original intelligence, but they always choose intelligent and rational species that can form organized resistances rather than animals…
I’m actually a bit more interested to see what you’d have to say about The Host. There are a lot of people who seem to hate the guts out of Twilight, but think The Host is actually decent. There is a shitty love triangle, of course, which would be on par with just about everything that’s been reviewed here so far, so that might be kind of a turn off.
Honestly, what is *with* western media and love triangles?
Yeah, I’ve seen it and they raise good points, but it’s more a reminiscence than a close read a lot of the time. I’d like to really dissect the plot.
The main issue with doing a close read on it is that there are something like 50 books. I guess if you’ve already read it, you can selectively review the ones that are key to the plot, maybe even do one or two reviews per book rather than one per chapter (they are rather short books anyway).
The latter is what I was thinking of. They’re short and as I recall relatively snappy reads – a lot of banter and little filler otherwise.
I actually only read up to the thirties, for various reasons.
That actually doesn’t sound too bad. I believe 30 is around where the series started to ghostwritten as well.
I was mostly worried about 8 billion chapter reviews consisting of: “they went to the mall, bought some pants, and Rachel maxed out her credit card”. Or “They turned into flamingos to make people feel bad about the environment”. “Marco falls off a cliff and turns into an osprey.” Etcetera.
Animorphs definitely has my vote then!
(Although the main issue with the plot is pretty obvious – that the yeerks should have bases in all the major cities, and the little victories the main characters get in the books should only matter on a local scale. ie. Why should California make a difference when the yeerks have already taken over all of Asia, Europe, South America, Africa and Australia?)
Oh yeah, it’d be more like a very expanded list of something like the Matched chapters here, a string of summaries and thoughts of each chapter lumped other.
I liked animorphs when I was in middle school. I stopped reading them because I outgrew them. They flawed, but they are harmless entertainment for preteens, nothing more, and must be judged on their own merits. Please save your righteous fury for a self-pretentious series truly deserving of immolation.
Well, it’d be judged as what it is if I end up doing it at all.
Oooh! Forgot to bring this up earlier, but Left Hand of Darkness would be a cool book to be looking at too!
As a suggestion, how about rhe Gone series by Michael Grant. The books are flawed, but entertaining. And the cast is pretty gender balanced. Moreso in the later books than the first.
Oh, yes, thank you- BATTLE ROYALE. I’ve been voting for that one since I first saw it on the poll!
Farla, when are you ever going to publish a book? All your plots are awesome and interesting. We need more YA books like the ones you envision…
^_^ Actually writing something is harder than yelling about it.
I read Matched, and while I liked the style, I found it to be incredibly slow-moving and none of the characters much interested me. I felt no urge whatever to read the last two.
Well, the third manages to have more going on, but it’s basically an entirely different story awkwardly tacked onto the previous two.