Crossed by Ally Condie

Title:  Crossed
Author:   Ally Condie
Genre:  Fiction/Fantasy
Length:  400 Pages
Weight:  1.0 lbs
Date of Completion:  June 6, 2013

Thoughts:

Dystopic YA fantasy.  It really seems to be the thing these days.  I stumbled across an article last week (that I can't find ANYWHERE) that talked about how labeling books as YA is incorrect.  I'm not always sure if I fall under the category of "young adult" anymore (the alternative is "old adult"?), but I am a big fan of many books in that classification.  Trues, the main characters are teenagers, dealing with teenage problems.  But the worlds and stories are not less appealing because I am no longer a teen.  

For Condie, I was intrigued by the world she created in Matched, and I was ready to dive into the sequel.  In all honesty, it was a very easy read and took me less than a day to finish.  Absolutely NOTHING happens.  Given the power that YA fiction has come forth with recently, I was more than a little disappointed with this middle book to the trilogy.  I know that a second story is always the hardest:  you have already captured some amount of interest by having to introduce the characters and their reality, as well as set up the main conflicts in the first book.  However, you can't get into the real action and resolution/twists until the finale in the third book.  This leaves you with a difficult task of all the "stuff" in the middle.  I've often wondered if, when there isn't necessarily enough material to have a full story arc separated correctly for three books, why authors don't just leave it at two books.  If feel like this would have been a good idea for this story.

Critique aside, I did like the very beginning of the book.  The first "chapter" for both Cassia and Ky had humanistic insight that hints at a some real talent in Condie.  For example,

 "And it is strange that absence can feel like presence.  A missing so complete that if it were to go away, I would turn around, stunned, to see that the room in empty after all, when before it at least had something, if not him." (pg 6) 

"I don't know why it's not the same, but it isn't.  At first, I thought it was having the picture that made it special, but it's not even that.  It's looking at something without being watched, without being told how to see.  That's what the picture has given us." (pg 12)

The two poems, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas and Crossing the Bar by Alfred Lord Tennyson, are beautiful.  Tennyson is one of my absolute favorites poets of all time!  I like their inclusion, and I think it gives the teenage audience a new appreciation for the culture (and lack of) that mankind has developed and, subsequently lost.  This speaks a lot about what art means in relation to being human.  And every time I think about this, I am drawn back to a speech from Amanda Palmer (yup, I follow her on Twitter) you can read here.  I'm not an artist, at least not in how I can create things, but I can understand the connections and the beauty.  It's all a bout being human.  This is a concept (losing art and culture) that is present in nearly all dystopia novels, and I think that says a lot about the individual and expression we stand to lose.