From the official Matched Facebook page!

We’re so excited about this–a Matched Trilogy box set with signed copies of REACHED inside! It will be available the same day as REACHED: November 13, 2012! Perfect for holiday gift-giving. (This box set will only be available in the US.)

UPDATE: The box set will be available while supplies last in Canada. The list price is $53.97 and is available for pre-order at many retailers. We’ve confirmed with The King’s English bookshop that if you call and pre-order, Ally will sign the outside of the box set for you!

EW’s Shelf Life just posted the best possible news ever: THE COVER AND TITLE OF ‘MATCHED’ BOOK 3!

Entertainment Weekly also has an amazing interview up with Ally. To read the whole interview, which also includes movie news, click here!

What did it feel like to put a period on the trilogy?
It was both wonderful and a bit sad. Sad because I’m finished with the story for now, and because I will miss these characters and this world. But it also felt very good to write scenes that I’ve pictured writing for several years now (since I began Matched) and to see Cassia, Ky, and Xander all the way through to the finish.

How do you all like the cover and title?
Would you like seeing a fourth MATCHED book?

There’s a couple of great new blogs on Ally’s site. An exciting piece is news is that Ally will be going on a book tour in February! So keep your eye out to see if she’ll be stopping in a city near you!

Visit her site for all the new info! www.allysoncondie.com

“Matched”: I promise, I didn’t mean to pick all books with just one word in the title. But that does make them seem more mysterious, doesn’t it? As does this one’s cover, which shows a girl wearing a lime-green dress trapped in a green-tinted bubble on a strangely iridescent white backdrop. The story, by Ally Condie, takes place in a supposed utopia, where there is no disease and also no indecision, because “Society” makes all your choices for you, down to when you’ll die. But when Cassia witnesses a glitch when she’s supposed to find out her mate, she begins to doubt that this is a flawless system. Love triangle + struggle against the powers that be = perfect winter escape.

See the full list over at Hollywood Crush!

Excellent news! MATCHED is number five on the New York Times bestseller list.
Congratulations, Ally!

I was checking Amazon.com to buy UK edition of Matched, and I saw that Amazon has already listed the second book of the Matched Trilogy!

CROSSED will be released on November 1, 2011!

SOURCE: Amazon.com

MATCHED debuted at number one on the the Winter 2010/2011 Childrens’ Indie Next List! SO EXCITING! Congratulations, Ally!

The list includes the top ten titles for the winter publishing season. Here is what had to be said about MATCHED:

1. Matched, by Ally Condie
“Yes, it’s dystopian, but Matched is really about a young woman, Cassia, discovering the gift of thinking for herself after growing up under the rules of The Society. When she is matched to her ‘perfect’ mate but finds out that her true match might be a different boy with a mysterious past that The Society is trying to cover up, Cassia begins to question their real intention. I can’t wait for the sequel, and I’m also hoping this will turn some teens on to Dylan Thomas’ poetry.” — Kelly Estep, Carmichael’s Bookstore, Louisville, KY

SOURCE: BOOKWEB.ORG

MATCHED was among the speculations of Next Movie’s The Next Magical Franchise list. Here is the article and what it has to say about MATCHED.

It was hard enough reaching the end of the “Harry Potter” series in book form. Knowing that the end is nigh for the movies just leaves us feeling a little empty inside.

Well, empty and extremely curious about what big, magical franchise will come out on top in a post-”Potter,” post-”Twilight” world.

As we dry our tears – in some cases, literally – we look into our office crystal ball, consult a few aurors and shuffle our Tarot cards to conjure up seven possible book franchises on the cusp of taking the world by storm.

MATCHED by Ally Condie

The Gist: If “The Handmaid’s Tale” and “The Giver” had a clever little baby, it would be Condie’s first book in a proposed series of dystopian YA novels. Cassia is a happy, well-adjusted teen living in some undetermined future where mandatory mates are delivered by pictures on digital information cards. It’s only when a glitch flashes the wrong boy’s face that Cassia considers the relative merit of dating options — and therefore questions the whole nature of her world.
Series Status: “Matched,” out Nov. 30, is the first book in a proposed trilogy from Dutton. There’s no news on the release date of the second book.
Movie Status: Disney beat out Paramount in a recent bidding war over the rights to this love triangle of the future.

SOURCE: Next Movie

SOURCE: YouTube

TRANSCRIPTION:

Hi, my name is Ally Condie and I’m the author of the book MATCHED.

There’s a girl named Cassia, she’s turning seventeen. The world that Cassia lives in is completely controlled. As far as money goes, there is none. You have nothing to trade, nothing to offer except your work experience so they very carefully select you and pick your job too. Your clothes are all the same, you eat the same thing, they bring your food to you, you don’t prepare it yourself. You go where they tell you to go, when you have free time it’s assigned, and you have several options to choose from. But really, there are very limited choices in every aspect. On her seventeenth birthday, Cassia is Matched with a boy. She doesn’t know who that boy will be, because usually it’s just the perfect match for her and usually that’s someone who falls outside of her sphere of knowledge. It’s not someone she knows. But as she goes to the banquet all dressed up for the first time in a long time, they don’t usually get to wear fancy clothes or eat really good food, she finds that she is actually matched with someone she knows, her best friend, someone she likes very much. But then later when she goes to find out more about this boy and to learn more about their Match, she puts the card in the screen and a different boys face comes up and so from then on it kind of becomes “Well, who IS my perfect Match? Who DOES the Society want me to be with? Does that even matter? Who do I want to be with?”

I think dystopia is really fun to read about because it has both elements of the familiar and the unfamiliar. There’s a lot of things we can relate to because it’s usually a society that’s based on either our society or the destruction of our society, so there are elements that feel the same. But there’s also a newness about dystopia and kind of a world building feeling that’s fun to read.

SOURCE: YouTube

MATCHED is featured in this new Breathless Reads commercial released by Penguin Young Readers. The Eternal Ones, The Replacement, Nightshade, and Sapphique are also included as well. You can log on to the Breathless Reads website and download the song used in the commercial, as well as download the first chapter of each book.