Crossed – Ally Condie

Crossed
Ally Condie
Penguin AU
2011, 367p
Read from my local library

At the end of Matched, Cassia and Ky were separated and Cassia vowed to find her way back to him. That goal finds her working her way through the Outer Provinces, picking cotton and desperately looking, searching for some clue of where he might be. When Officials come to take some of the girls she is working with away to an even more far-flung location, Cassia doesn’t hesitate to jump on board the airship even though she wasn’t actually listed to go.

Ky has been sent to an almost certain death – he and others of his classification are sent to the most outer places and used to convince an unknown enemy that the remote villages still contain population. Their job is to work during the day planting cotton (or looking like it) and dodge the shelling and shooting that comes at night. Usually people last merely days but somehow Ky has managed to survive. And now he’s been sent to a place that he knows. It was once home and he is more than familiar with the surrounds. He’s pretty sure that he knows a way he can escape and then he can think about finding Cassia.

Cassia has teamed up with a girl named Indie in order to escape their new location and attempt to find Ky. They’re not exactly friends, more like allies but together they’re piecing together the information about a Resistance to the powers that be in the Society. Cassia wants to find Ky but she finds that she also really wants to find this Resistance and be a part of it. She thinks her grandfather might have left her some clues – like Ky has.

Crossed is the second novel in Ally Condie’s Matched trilogy and to be honest, it’s given me the most trouble I think I’ve ever had writing a review. I was no huge fan of Matched, but once I start something I have to finish it so I requested this one from the library and read it in a night. In one way, I liked it better than I did Matched because it seemed like stuff happened. I had found Matched very level for a first in a trilogy.  However once I’d finished it I realised that it was mostly a trick – very little actually happens in this book! It just seems like it because the characters move around quite a bit.

There’s a lot of romantic prose and poetry quoting and referencing here and I’m sure that some people will be touched by it and find it beautiful, especially when Ky and Cassia are traipsing through some utterly desolate countryside. I’m not sure what it is, but ultimately I don’t buy their romance. I didn’t buy it in Matched and I didn’t buy it in Crossed either. I never really saw their desperation to get back to each other. I understood Ky’s need to escape his situation – he was certainly going to be killed if he stuck around much longer, with these bombings from an unknown Enemy. I’m assuming that more information will be given in the final book about the ‘Enemy’ because that whole storyline came out of no where. I wasn’t even aware there was anything else other than the Society. This book also builds up a Resistance, which proves remarkably easy to find and join. But then again I suppose they always are, otherwise our heroes and heroines wouldn’t have anything to do.

I think fans of Matched will really love Crossed. I was hoping for an improvement on the style and story but ultimately I didn’t get what I was after. There’s one more book to go and I think I will probably read it for reasons I mentioned above – I am nosy. I like to know what happens, especially how things end. It’s why I can’t give up on series books, even after I’ve stopped loving them! The good thing is, Crossed is an easy read. I liked the introduction of the new characters and I liked the dual narration. Ky and Cassia do at least sound different, although I still feel that Ky is about as unrealistic a teenage boy narrator as I’ve ever come across.

All in all, better than Matched, but not something I loved.

5/10

Book #27 of 2012