[Caveat: I'm trying to make good on my New Year's Resolution and get caught up to speed on this blog. That means I'm writing about books I read months ago, my memory might be spotty, and I'm just going to jot down a few sentences. In this particular case I'm really wishing I hadn't procrastinated because at the time I read this I wanted to also write about Delirium and compare and contrast. Let's see what I can do...]
I read Matched and Delirium within 2 weeks of each other and there is was no way to read the second without comparing it to the first as they both have such ridiculously similar plots. In Matched society matches up a boy and a girl who are perfectly chosen for each other. The couple then have a prescribed courtship, marriage, and children. It’s very determined, no choice, but people are happy with it-much like in The Giver. But then Cassia has a blip during her ceremony where she is shown another face other than her chosen partner. Strange things happen after that, including falling for that boy. In Delirium the world considers love a disease and when you reach a certain age you can be cured. Everyone hopes they don’t fall in love before the cure is able to be administered, but alas for Lena she falls in love shortly before her time.
Both stories have societies that try to control human emotions and the population, both have underground movements resisting that control, both have main characters who inadvertently fall in love, and both are clearly just the first in a series. I preferred Matched, though I did really like Delirium. I was really interested in how the premise was so similar but the worlds were so very different (I found that sentence from an email I’d written at the time of reading-now, months later, I cannot be more specific about how they were different!)
Definitely both series I’ll be continuing to read.
This was totally not as good as the first-falling prey to middle book in dystopian trilogy syndrome–it’s the dark times of sort of escaping, figuring out where you’re going, who to ally with, and I pretty much didn’t even care about these characters crossing through a big canyon and wondering whether they’d make it to the resistance.
