Book review: Reached (Matched #3) by Ally Condie

After leaving Society to desperately seek The Rising, and each other, Cassia and Ky have found what they were looking for, but at the cost of losing each other yet again. Cassia is assigned undercover in Central city, Ky outside the borders, an airship pilot with Indie. Xander is a medic, with a secret. All too soon, everything shifts again.

Reached is the third entry in the Matched trilogy, one that I’ve enjoyed a lot over the years it’s been coming out.  Dystopia is usually hit or miss for me.  There’s a suspension of belief required in that type of story, and if a society isn’t constructed in a way that seems plausible, it just doesn’t work for me.

With the Matched trilogy, I didn’t feel this.  The conclusion found the three main characters, Cassia, Xander and Ky, as part of the rebellion against the Society, something that’s been in the shadows since the first book.  And it puts you right in the action, despite being such a long book.  It definitely doesn’t drag things out.  Everything in the five-hundred plus pages of this book is relevant (even the chapter entitled “Ky” which is left blank).

The prose itself is lyrical in a way that doesn’t make it wishy-washy or flowery.  I never once found myself lost in the words, trying to figure out what was just said or what just happened.  I’d say it’s quite an accomplishment.

There are, of course, a few things that would turn people off to this book.  There are so many plot twists, much more than I remember the first two books containing.  Just when you think you’ve got everything figured out, they throw something else at you.  Right up to the end!  Of course, one of my favorite video game series is Kingdom Hearts and I can figure that out, I can figure anything out.

There’s also, of course, the fact that the Pilot is revealed so early into the book.  There’s such a big deal made, and the story about the Pilot is even told in its entirety at the start of the book, but the Pilot swoops in within a few chapters.  The Pilot is another thing that goes through plot twists and reveals, but the fact that he’s there from the beginning seems like an anticlimactic solution to something that’s been wondered about for the past two books.

However, this is a solid conclusion to the series, I like to think.  If you’ve read the first two, don’t miss this one.  And if you haven’t read the first two, why the heck not, huh?