Showing posts with label Ally Condie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ally Condie. Show all posts

Wednesday, April 3, 2019

Summerlost by Ally Condie


Rating: WARTY!

This is a story of a summer where Cedar Lee grows up and processes long dormant feelings about the death of her father and her younger brother Ben in a car accident. Moving back to the small town of Iron Creek for the summer, Cedar finds work at a local renaissance faire where plays are put on. She works a concession stand and helps with wardrobe. Her new friend Leo made this possible, and as they grow in their friendship, they also share a common interest in local actor who died mysteriously after a hotel-room encounter with her former husband.

I haven't had good experiences with this author. Her Matched was so god-awful I couldn't finish it. It was so delusional that I renamed the author Ally Contrick. The story was "utterly ridiculous, nonsensical and profoundly stupid" (from my own review back in December of 2015). The main character in that book was so juvenile and shallow as to be a joke.

This story was a much better one, but let's face it, it would be truly hard to write one worse than Matched (which frankly ought to be matched, or rather torched, with some tinder and gasoline). The problem with this one was that the story really didn't move. Consequently, it became tedious and I quickly lost interest in it. I cannot commend it and I'm truly done with this author.


Wednesday, December 9, 2015

Matched by Ally Condie


Rating: WARTY!

I started listening to Matched by Ally Contrick (I may have mispelled that name) on the way to work yesterday morning and I quickly wanted to put a match to it. It's your standard dystopian trilogy and believe it or not, it's actually worse than Divergent. When I say that, I say it in Malfoy's voice from Harry Potter, when Harry and Ron are impersonating his two henchboys, and Malfoy insults Dumbledore, and Harry, forgetting who he's impersonating, objects. Malfoy says, "You mean there's someone who's worse than Dumbledore?" And Harry responds, "Harry Potter!" In my version, Malfoys says, "You mean there's a novel that's worse than Divergent?" and I say, "Matched!" and Malfoy responds, "Good one!" and then starts poking around in the little gift box he stole.

If there's one nice thing about a commute to work, it's that it's captive time. You have nothing to do for a fixed period of time twice a day, and so you fill it with thoughts, or study, or writing, or music. I fill mine with audio books. The view is boring after making the trip several hundred times, especially in the morning when it's dark, so this seems to me to be a good time to get caught up on my backlog of books, and also to try some experimental reading. Matched was one such book. I honestly didn't expect to like it, but I've long been curious about it. I'm curious no more. The writing is lousy and the reading is equally bad. The reader of this book sounds like she's about thirteen, and her voice is hard to listen to. She makes the main character (oh, yeah, it's a first person PoV novel and not well-written) come off as a thoroughly immature ditz.

The character is supposed to be seventeen, yet she holds her mom's hand to the matching ceremony. She says utterly bizarre things like "There's a girl in a green dress. Me." Yes, it was that bad. She sounds like the 'Me' Carebear, who I actually think is hilarious, and this didn't help. Not that I've had much exposure to any of the Carebears but Me was definitely my second favorite 'Me', after the Doctor Who character from series nine, who is otherwise known as Ashildr. But I digress! This character is completely self-absorbed, and is obsessed with boys, clothes, and make-up, and she thinks of nothing else. This is no heroic figure. It's not someone I want to even listen to, let alone follow into action.

The basic plot is that this is an ultra-controlled society. And we're expected to take that on faith. Admittedly I didn't read much of this novel, but there was nothing offered (and nothing given later from what I've learned reading other reviews) to explain how society ever got into this position (in the not-too-distant future) from what we have today. Everything is controlled. All but one hundred works of art in various fields have been destroyed, so now there is only one hundred paintings, there is only one hundred novels, one hundred poems, etc. It's utterly ridiculous, nonsensical and profoundly stupid. Obviously this is set in the USA, because only a YA author from the US could come up with such a patently ridiculous idea for a story and get it published. Yes, Veronica Roth, Stephanie Meyer, I'm looking at you. In reality, no one would ever let this happen, least of all self-respecting and rebellious young men and women. The very premise of the novel fails completely - and that's before Cassia Maria Reyes starts acting like a professional moron.

The matching ceremony is pretty much a rip-off of the "matching" ceremony in Divergent where you're matched to your faction, except here you can't choose. Cassia's man turns out to be Xander (yeah, about those names) who has been her friend from childhood and with whom she's delighted in every way - until there's a glitch in the system and she's briefly shown another guy, absurdly named Ky - a character who's never been in the story - much less in her thoughts - until now. He's the bad boy of this ridiculous instadore triangle, and of course, Cassia, who was totally thrilled with Xander is now humping Ky's leg - metaphorically. It's moronic. Ky - who makes her turn to jelly - is the designated bad boy and Xander is the good boy, so it's your tedious trope triangle all the way down.

We're told it's exceedingly rare to get matched as Cassia has been, yet we're told that cities are huge, so how rare can it be to end-up matched to a person you know? Someone didn't pay attention during statistics 101. Not that I blame the author for that! It's obvious from the start where this pointless trilogy is going, so there's really nothing to surprise the reader, and there's really no reveal to come. It turned out to be exactly what I expected for at least as far as I could stand to listen. I was honestly hoping to be wrong, and to find an author who can write original YA and bring something new and exciting to the table, but Ally Condie isn't that author, which is sad, because it argues strongly that English teachers can't write! LOL! I hope that's not true!

Instead of new and different, I got warmed-over Divergent, by way of the movie Logan's Run. Others have accused this of ripping off "The Giver" - with which I'm not familiar, so I can't comment there, but it's definitely a rip-off. And yes, I know that all novels are rip-offs to some extent, but really? At least try to make it different. I can't recommend this based on the portion I was subject to. At the end of the first disk, there's a clunkily foreshadowing line to the effect that Cassia won't be able to look at Ky the same way again. Here's my version: I won't be able to ready any books by Ally Condie again, now that I've read too much of this one.