DNF Review: Crossed by Ally Condie

Crossed
Ally Condie
Series: Matched #2
Genre: YA Dystopian
Publication date: November 1 2011
by Penguin Teen
Source: Borrowed from the library
Rating: DNF

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The Society chooses everything.

The books you read.

The music you listen to.

The person you love.

Yet for Cassia the rules have changed. Ky has been taken and she will sacrifice everything to find him.

And when Cassia discovers Ky has escaped to the wild frontiers beyong the Society there is hope.

But on the edge of society nothing is as it seems...

A rebellion is rising.

And a tangles web of lies and double-crosses could destroy everything.

Because I believe that everyone and everything deserves a second chance, I decided to give the Matched series a second chance by reading Crossed in the hopes that it would be better than the first book. I gave Matched two stars so to me, that meant that it wasn't bad enough for me to abandon the series altogether, which is what I really should have done. I honestly didn’t think that it could have gotten any worse.

I got over a quarter of the way through Crossed before putting it down forever. My biggest problem with this book is that what I read was just boring. Nothing happened! To add to the fact that very little happened; we are introduced to alternate chapters that are told from Ky’s point of view, which I just didn’t care for them. Those chapters just didn’t add anything more to the plot and I asked myself this at one point: “Ky’s practically gone missing and Cassia is trying to find him. Why is he narrating about what he’s doing?” I usually figure that when a person is to be found by others, they’re supposed to be a bit of a mystery. I would rather have known exclusively what Cassia was getting up to (if she was getting up to anything at all).

I wasn’t too fond of Cassia in Matched, but I just didn’t like her in Crossed. I don’t think her decisions are very good since it seemed very likely to me that she would be killed (she obviously isn’t killed since there is yet another book in this series). If Cassia had done everything that I wanted her to do (be with Xander and stay in the Society where it is at least somewhat exciting), the first book would have been over very quickly. You know what they say, curiosity killed the cat. As for Ky, I just didn’t care for him in this book. His narration fell flat for me and just seemed unnecessary to the plot. I also found that his narrative voice is very similar to Cassia’s so something I would start a new chapter thinking that I was still reading from Cassia’s POV. Simply marking who the narrator of the chapter won’t do anything for me if the POVs don’t have different voices.

I don’t really care for poetry and unfortunately for me, poetry cropped up a lot more than I expected. There’s obviously Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas and Crossing the Bar by Alfred Lord Tennyson that are referenced to in the story, but on top of that, Cassia is writing her own poem. The quarter that I read felt like a bit of a poetry bombardment at times and I just wanted it to stop since I have never cared for poetry and I probably never will.

Twelve chapters into Crossed I began to doubt my reasons for giving this series a second chance. I tried to go further into the book but I just couldn’t take much more of nothing happening. If something did happen that I missed, it was probably because I was blinded by boredom. On the basis of nothing happening, this book unfortunately gets a big fat DNF from me.