Pete, who is playing Angry Birds in the backseat: Mama, what’s this song about?
Me: Hm. I think it’s about dancing.
Pete: No, I think it’s about math.
Me: Did you say it’s about math?
Pete: Yeah, it’s about math. Because he said they want to start sums.
This weekend was not pleasant.
The nastiness started on Thursday, actually, when Poppy came home from her piano lesson with a stomachache. Not long after that, the stomachache manifested itself as a stomach bug, and Poppy was down for the count. It hit Pete hours later, and the rest of the day was a blur of Gatorade sips and emergency cleanups.
Friday wasn’t so bad. The kids woke up back to normal; I think Pete actually backflipped out of his bed. So that was good. But then Rockford left for a business trip in the afternoon, which was not so good. I don’t like it when he’s gone in the best of situations. And this weekend? It was not the best of situations.
I’m sure you see where this is going by now.
The stomach bug hit me Saturday morning, about an hour and a half before Pete’s soccer game. We didn’t go to the soccer game. The really nasty stuff lasted for about 14 hours, during which time the kids feasted on unlimited TV, computer time and peanut butter. I was finally able to leave the bedroom yesterday, but I still spent most of the day on the couch. The aches, chills and issues were gone, but I had some wicked nausea whenever I tried to move and a horrible headache even when I wasn’t trying to move.
It’s a good thing I made my grocery list early last week. I haven’t wanted to think about food for days.
It is the future, and we have turned our lives over to the geneticists and the statisticians. In return they have given us our ideal jobs, our ideal mates and even our ideal meals, with each nutrient specially chosen to meet our unique needs. A few generations earlier, they even honed our art — music, paintings, poetry — to an essential few pieces to ensure it wouldn’t be too taxing or distracting.
Our lives in Ally Condie’s “Matched” are programmed and predictable, safe and stolid, and we are content with that. Until one day when, perhaps, a few of us realize that there could be more.
“Matched” is the first book in a trilogy about “The Society” and a young lady named Cassia who lives within its bounds. When we meet her, Cassia is preparing to find out who her “match” is. She’s excited and nervous at the prospect of learning her future husband’s identity, and she’s thrilled to be wearing a pretty dress for the event as opposed to her everyday “plain clothes” provided by The Society. In other words, the 17-year-old girl is a pretty believable character. She’s pleased to learn her intended’s name, but the story really gets rolling a bit later when another boy’s picture briefly shows up in his place. Is it a glitch in the system? Can there be a glitch in the system? And what if this boy truly is a better match than that other boy?
I love dystopian fiction, and I enjoyed Condie’s vision of The Society’s sterilized world, a Utopia-with-a-price setting that owes a pretty big debt to Lois Lowry’s “The Giver.” It’s easy to imagine a world in which we’ve given up our right to choose even the most basic things in exchange for security and a guaranteed livelihood.
Condie also very nicely illustrates the power of art and ideas in “Matched.” I don’t want to delve too deeply into that, lest we get into spoiler territory. But I think it’s safe to say that The Society was right to worry about the power of words.
I didn’t actively dislike “Matched,” but I didn’t love the book either. I didn’t connect very strongly with Cassia or either of her potential beaus, which made it difficult for me to care much about what happened to them. For me, the balance of Action to Love Triangle was skewed a bit too heavily toward romance. If you like a heavy helping of romance with your young-adult dystopia, though, it’s a pretty good bet that you’ll enjoy “Matched.”
Nichole was compensated for this review via the BlogHer Book Club, but all opinions expressed are solely her own.
