Matched

I'm a reader. I have been an avid reader since first grade when everything clicked and I figured out how.  I don't get to read quite as much now because the girls seem to see my sitting down with a book as time to a) need something only I can get them, b) try to steal said book, c) time to tell me a story.  And really it isn't just the girls who do it, Keary and Waylon are guilty too.  But I read as often as I can.

My sister-in-law is a reader too and has taken to getting me books for Christmas and my birthday.  I think she generally gets a book that she has heard good things about and would like to read.  She got me The Time Traveler's Wife, which I absolutely loved and boo-hooed through.  I borrowed the Twilight Series from her and enjoyed reading and snarking them.  (Except for Breaking Dawn, that... was not good.  And I will forever be irked by the whole Bella-birth scene.)  We both loved Harry Potter.  This year she got me Matched.

Matched is the first book is a series or trilogy.  It is set around a teenage girl in a post-modern society where very little is left up for a person to decide.  She is given a card with the information regarding who her mate is going to be and it is her best friend or it seems maybe she would have been matched with someone else she knows if he had been supposed to match.  I wanted to like this book.  It had an okay premise, but it just felt like the ideas weren't fully developed or explained well.  I did appreciate that at least Cassia (the main character) wasn't a weakling and letting things happen around her.  In that respect, she reminded me some of Katniss from the Hunger Games trilogy (I'm still reading this series, I'm about halfway through Catching Fire right now. Please don't spoil me.) It just felt like I knew were the story was going from the beginning.  Since it is a series though, things may be better explained and developed in the coming book.

The breakdown- Matched isn't awful, but feels like there is a lot of wasted potential in the story.  I probably would not recommend it to a friend, but I also wouldn't warn them to not read it either (a la Breaking Dawn).