Matched

Matched is a young adult dystopian novel by the American writer Ally Condie, published in 2010 and the first book of a trilogy. It is set in a society that arranges the lives of its citizens from childhood, and the matching ceremony at the centre of the book is the point at which those arrangements become personal.

Cassia has followed the Society without question, and when she is matched with Xander she is pleased, because she knows him. A second face appearing on the display turns the ceremony into a problem: the Society is supposed to make no mistakes, and the alternative it has inadvertently shown her changes what she thinks about the life she has been given, and the novel follows her attempts to decide what to do without anyone noticing.

Condie writes in a measured first person, and the details of the Society's rules, its meals, its tablets and the poems it permits, do most of the work of establishing it. It was followed by two further volumes, and it is the book that sets out the rules the rest of the series breaks.