A mildly interesting dystomance
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| Condie, Ally. Reached. Speak, 2013. |
Buy it here.
Ever noticed how easy it is to talk about really great—or really
bad—books/movies/etc., but how difficult it is to explain why something is just
so-so? That's the problem I have today, as Reached, while certainly not a bad
book, cannot live up to the promise of the trilogy's first installment,
Matched, with its wondrous blend of poetry-as-resistance and chilling portrait
of the ruthless panoptical (at this point it seems almost redundant to note
"dystopic") Society.
Moreover, the love triangle at the center of the trilogy's
drama has lost some of its fascination for this reader, at least; in the first
book it was thrilling, in the second (Crossed) it was merely believable, but
here in the concluding volume, it feels already resolved, somehow, as though
there were never any doubt which way each character would go, and indeed
alternatives to the characters' "first choice" in love keep conveniently
popping up. One senses the heavy hand of Fate here, as well as that slightly
oppressive atmosphere of heterosexual pairing in which no eligible female (or,
in this case, male) can escape the ironclad bonds of matrimony: the Happy
Ending.
But Reached retains flashes of the power of the first
volume, as when Cassia recites (even if only in her mind) some of the key
forbidden poems, particularly the Dylan Thomas "Do Not Go Gentle".
And Condie did well to problematize the Rising, rejecting the easy
"resistance at any price" line of moral absolutism and instead
presenting a surprisingly balanced and even critical view of just about
everyone, Society loyalist, Rising insurgent, or unaligned alike (though those
who choose not to choose are made to seem noblest of all, as though to make any
compromise in service to an uprising is an unforgivable sin). There are strong
echoes/resonances with Hunger Games here, but if you want my two cents, Condie
did quite a bit better in wrapping her series up than did Suzanne Collins did
with the Hunger Games (particularly the cringe-worthy third volume Mockingjay).
So all in all, even though there doesn't quite feel like
enough here around which to hang a story, and the romance part (and, in fact,
the dystopia part) fell a little flat, Reached remains one of the better
dystomances out there. Whether this is more a commentary on the sad state of
the dystomance subgenre is up to you.
The Math
Objective assessment: 5/10
Bonuses: +1 for addressing the moral complexity of resistance to a dystopian society well (and
much better than in Collins' Mockingjay), +1 for foregrounding beautiful poems
as the stuff of resistance
Penalties: -1 for letting the central drama of the love
triangle (to quote Eddie Izzard on the Ottoman Empire) "slowly collapse
like a flan in a cupboard"
Nerd coefficient: 6/10 "Still enjoyable, but the flaws are hard to ignore"
[You can take a gander at our unusual scoring system here.]
This has been a public service announcement by Zhaoyun,
scifantomance connoisseur (and yes, I'm brave enough to admit I had to look up
how to spell that—I will be forever mystified that the French couldn't have
settled on 'connaser' or something reasonable!) and one of the sous chefs here
at Nerds of a Feather since early 2013.
