Johanna Florez

I found this book pretty engrossing. (But maybe I'm just like that :P) I stayed up past midnight to finish it in one sitting.

While I felt like it was a good book, I also thought that it seemed an awful lot like other books I've read more or less recently. A lot of the ideas of this Society echo concepts found in Lois Lowry's books The Giver and Gathering Blue.

For example, just like in The Giver, people who apply to get a spouse are matched up with someone based on personality, skill, and other factors. The people have no choice. Yet the main character finds himself (or in Matched, herself) wanting to be able to choose.

Also, for the elderly, what other people think of as peaceful, natural processes turn out to really be the government's way of controlling who lives and who dies. When their time is up, the old are poisoned.

In Gathering Blue, those few artists who create things are taken away. They are forced to use their skills to create what the leaders want them to make. This is what I thought of when I read about Ky being the only person who knew how to write. He could make swirling cursive, but everyone else only knew how to tap letters on a touchscreen.

The love triangle of Cassia, Xander, and Ky reminded me a bit too much of Katniss, Gale, and Peeta in the Hunger Games. The whole best friend/other guy conflict. Whether to choose the one the government wants her to marry, or the one she currently has feelings for. However, I was relieved to find that Cassia's outlook on the love was very different from Katniss's. I can't really describe exactly how it was different... but it was refreshing, really, to see a different spin on the love triangle.

Having said all that, the content still somehow felt original. It seemed like the author did have her own story to tell. It only reminded me of those books because I'd read them recently and thought about them a lot. I was the one drawing similarities, not the author stealing ideas. Still, I'd recommend reading all these books far apart in time. They each have their own merits but they'll sound too similar if you read them one after another.

I don't know if this is a new style among authors or what. A lot of books seem to end leaving the reader with more questions than they had at the beginning. This one did for sure. It seemed that everyone had dozens of deep, dark secrets. But it also made sense- they were realizing that there were some things they simply could not tell each other.

So there you have it. A decent read. As tired as I am, I don't regret losing several hours of sleep over it.

Learning the author was 15/16 when she wrote this explains a lot to me. It's not the highest quality writing, but it's got the earnestness of a teenager with a huge burden on her heart.

I loved revisiting LaVaughn, a couple years more mature with a long way left to go. The end of Make Lemonade gave me goosebumps; the end of True Believer leaves me hopeful.

AWWWW.

I had fun using this as the first Shakespeare my 8th graders read.