Matched by Allie Condie
Published by Puffin, 2010

In the Society where Cassia lives, officials decide who you love, where you work and. when you die. A small price to pay for a long life, the perfect job, the ideal mate you might think. But when she is presented with two faces on the Matching screen, Cassia is faced with difficult choices. She has to decide to whether to opt for the only life she’s known or to follow a path no one else has ever dared follow - between perfection and passion.

The characters are conceivable though placed in a sci-fi setting and the storyline is one that will encourage reading in one sitting. Teenage novels quite often come in threes and Matched is no exception. It is Part One of a trilogy with the sequel Crossed due this Autumn. Disney has already bought the film rights.

Pre-viewing children’s and teenage titles in The Bookseller 11th March 2011, Fiona Noble heralds the impending prevalence of dystopian books for teenagers. She claims, “the I can’t love you because I might kill you category is rapidly morphing into the I can’t love you because of our crazy dystopian world category.”

Ally Condie’s Matched is one of the pioneers of this dystopian genre.