Reached - Ally Condie

Blurb:

 After leaving Society and desperately searching for 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 has been assigned to work for the Rising from within Society, while Ky has been stationed outside its borders. But nothing is as predicted, and all too soon the veil lifts and things shift once again.

Review : 

I would like to begin by saying that I loved "Matched". I mean I really  loved "Matched". It was the first dystopian novel I had ever read, long before "The Hunger Games" and "Fahrenheit 451 ".  I loved the world Condie created, a society where everything is chosen for you, even your life-partner. but after "Matched" everything went down hill. "Crossed"  was a nightmare , so bad I don't even want to talk about it. Because of the tragedy that was book two I really didn't feel like continuing on , but I had so much time invested in it I decided to keep going and find out where Cassia, Xander and Ky end up.  This is where my first problem comes in. To me, Cassia, Xander and Ky all had the same personality. They just seemed like they were exactly the same person, which is really confusing and awkward when the story is supposed to be of told by three different points of view. The plot centres around a virus epidemic , which I thought was a very interesting idea. But I feel like Condie may have glossed over some of the details, like the dots don't fully connect, so this also confused me. Obviously with a massive virus running around some characters had to die ( I won't tell you who.... ), but I just didn't seem to care, Condie didn't really afford any sort of emotional connection to the characters. I think Condie broaches a very interesting idea, that when you have the right to choose, sometimes you choose wrong, which I thought was really the antithesis of the idea Condie had been pushing from the beginning.  To be fair to Condie, she is a good writer and the book was hard to put down once something exciting began. I think the operations of the Rebellion were accurate, it wasn't a purely 'the society is bad, anarchy is good ' simple plot line. But to be honest, I feel like I only read this book because of the first two and if it had been a stand alone book I wouldn't have bothered to finish it.

Three Stars  ***