This book hasn’t actually come out yet–it’s not scheduled to hit the shelves until November, but Ally is a friend of mine and was gracious enough to lend me an ARC.  In other words, I got to read it before you did, neener neener neener.

The premise is, on its surface, very straight-forward: In a 1984-esque future society, where everyone is controlled and all choices (even who you marry) are made by the state, a seventeen-year-old girl falls in love with someone she isn’t supposed to.

Now I would guess that, having read that premise, you already have a thought as to whether or not you’ll like this book. Right there in one sentence it combines two particularly polarizing concepts: dystopia and love triangles.  I know many people who have a blanket dislike of dystopia (I think those people are nuts), and I know even more people who hate love triangles (I think those people are: me).  However, I would suggest that, regardless of your opinions of dystopian love triangles, you should give Matched a try. As Roger Ebert has declared, it’s not what a movie is about, but how it is about it. In other words, I’m personally tired of love triangles (having recently read Catching Fire, The Forest of Hands and Teeth, and The Dead-Tossed Waves), but I’ll never be tired of fantastic writing–and that’s what Matched is.

Matched paints a world in which all choice is restricted; every decision, from big things (like who you’ll marry and where you’ll live) to small things (like what food you’ll eat or what clothes you’ll wear or what you can learn) is decided by The Society. Unlike some less-well-written dystopian stories, however, there truly appears to be reasoning behind it all: every aspect of a person’s life is studied and measured and the decisions made by The Society truly seem to be the best life for that person. You’re placed in the job your best suited for, you marry the person who is the best match (both psychologically and genetically), and you will die a pleasant, pain-free death at the end of a long life, knowing that you contributed well to Society.

The specifics of the worldbuilding are subtle: we don’t see a lot of wild new technology or objects or anything else we might expect in a futuristic dystopian, but don’t let it fool you. The world is rich and detailed in far better ways than lists of high-tech cars and weapons and monsters. Instead, our sense of this world comes from the structure of the mundane and the perceptions of the characters. Just the description of the characters’ home life–how they sleep, how they wear clothes, how they throw things in the garbage!–is foreign and interesting by itself, and the completely natural way in which the characters understand and discuss these things makes it both realistic and unsettling.

One major complaint I’ve had with a lot of other dystopian (and fantasy and science fiction) is when the main characters seem to already have elements of a modern, Enlightenment-style sense of freedom and individual rights. I think this is a cop out in many ways, as those authors don’t truly need to show the state as a realistic entity–we see it from an outsider/free-thinker’s perspective, so they highlight the flaws in the society and, generally, the society is only ever seen as a villain.  What I find so refreshing about Matched is that we are so firmly ensconced in the world that even when chinks appear in The Society’s methods, the characters don’t immediately jump to the conclusion that The Society must be overthrown. After all, this is a book about a teenage girl, not a revolutionary philosopher.  In the words of Christof in The Truman Show, “We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented.”

All of that said, this is a book about realization, change, and, ultimately, choice.  But even here, these themes are not dealt with simply and obviously–we don’t see characters merely fighting for the right to decide who to love–but the themes are much deeper: do we really have choices at all? Does our very nature and genetics determine who we are and how we will act? (And, if The Society can perfectly analyze our nature and genetics, and make predictions of our behavior, are they wrong to do so?)

There is so much going on in this book, and I was delighted to find that none of it is there by chance. Little details–conversations and actions that seem like romantic fluff or setting flavor at first–wind their way together into a powerful, satisfying conclusion.

Dutton is betting a lot on this book–the back of the ARC listed a dozen impressive promotional plans–and I think they’ve got a winner. I loved it.

US Cover

The Maze Runner, by James Dashner

I’m not really expecting this blog to be dedicated to book reviews, but lately that seems to be what’s on my mind.

I recently read James Dashner’s The Maze Runner, a book which I should have read a long time ago.  When stripped to it’s most basic premise, The Maze Runner is similar to Variant: a teenage boy enters a Lord-of-the-Flies society, he doesn’t know who his captors are, but he thinks he’s being observed/experimented upon.  However, the story, setting and characters are all completely different.  In The Maze Runner, the protagonist, Thomas, has no memory of his past and finds himself being deposited in the center of a maze. There are dozens of other boys his age there, and they’ve created a little society for themselves; some grow food, some clean, some build, and some spend every day running out into the maze, looking for a way out.

I’ve known James for years, and read most of his books. If there’s one thing James is great at, it’s coming up with amazingly inventive ideas.  His stories are packed with bizarre and ingenius details.  And there’s never any dearth of action.  (I was going to say that there wasn’t a dearth of violence, either, but I also just read The Forest of Hands and Teeth and now The Maze Runner’s violence looks like “Tom and Jerry” by comparison.)

In past books, Dashner’s occassionally fallen into the trap of having really cool ideas and action but ignoring the characters. I was happy to see that wasn’t the case with The Maze Runner. While the main character, Thomas, is a fairly standard male hero, without a huge arc, I found the side characters to be lots of fun. Two, in particular, really seemed to jump off the page: Chuck, who had been the newbie to the maze before Thomas showed up, and Teresa, a girl–the only girl–who comes the day after. The dialogue with Teresa was especially well done; half the time she’s speaking telepathically (Belated Spoiler Warning!) so Dashner has to show her personality entire with dialogue (since Thomas can’t see her).

UK Cover

If there’s a flaw to the book (and there is) it’s that a lot of information is withheld for no good reason. (Well, the reason is to keep the reader reading, but there’s no realistic story reason.) For example, when Thomas first shows up, no one even explains to him where he is, or what the maze is, or what’s going on. They tell him to sleep and find out the next day–but there’s no reason not to tell him. And this kind of thing happens a lot over the course of the book.  It got irritating.

But still, the book was a lot of fun, and definitely worth reading.