I didn't really want to read this. It didn't sound appealing to me at all, but a lot of my regular library teens are way into it and the third one comes out next month, so I figured I should grit my teeth and check this out so I can join in their conversations.

Anyway, I didn't hate it. It was very fast faced & I read it all in one night. I didn't love it, either. It kind of felt like Ally Condie put a bunch of other dystopian novels in a blender and poured them out into Matched. It's kinda like if the Giver and the Handmaid's Tale had a baby and that baby had a love triangle.

My favorite element was that in the future they have pared down human culture to 100 Poems and 100 Songs and 100 Paintings because everything got too complicated. (Spoiler, pretty much all the 100 Poems seem to be from Western culture.) But there are black market Archivists who have UNAUTHORIZED POETRY. As a librarian I enjoyed this very much because it makes reading Dylan Thomas seem like a completely badass act. Anyway, in spite of myself I'm intrigued enough that I put myself on the list for Crossed.