Rached-Ally Condie

The much anticipated finale to the "Matched" triology!

It had many, many twists and turns, but in a way it was slower than the other two. It was nice, however since the voice of narration changed between Cassia, Ky and Xander this time, and since they are all three in different places, it makes it convenient to help piece the puzzle together.

It's hard to write without giving things away, but I will say that I didn't feel like things were resolved as much as I had wanted them to be-politically speaking. Romance-wise, it was wrapped up fairly nicely. But to me, that's never as important as the political :-) As you know from my Divergent/Insurgent rant earlier. There is an element of bio-terrorism which is something that I've always been interested in (I did my senior project in Government/Economy on biological weapons and chemical warefare).

But one thing that I did get from this is that there are people who are OK with giving up freedoms in exchange for "safety" or at least perceived safety. For instance, unless they choose to somehow escape the Society, they choose to let their life end at age 80 in exchange for a guarantee that they will have good physical health until then. And that's just one of the most benign ones in my mind. But the fact remains that there are people out there who would rather be taken care of than have freedom to choose. I don't understand those people. Perhaps it's because of my religious beliefs that the fact that we as humans are agents unto ourselves and are allowed choice-and that it was so important that God Himself would reject a plan of coerced compliance in favor of one where He would have to view some of His beloved children (us) suffer because of our own bad choices or the bad choices of others. If God Himself believed that it would be better to have SOME suffering in order to be free instead of NO suffering rings very deep within me. If you have any inner conflict about that concept, C.S. Lewis wrote a book, "The Problem of Pain" that is beautiful. I'm only part way through that one, but it's not really written like a novel and it's meant to read in bits and pieces and then pondered or meditated on and is very thought provoking.