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The author sent out 25 query letters to agents who would likely represent young adult fiction. Eighteen rejections followed but so did seven offers of representation. Now Condie is working with some of the top names in the business. Disney has bought the movie rights and, just recently, “Matched” was named one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Children’s Books of 2010.
“It’s been really crazy,” Condie said. “I mean great, but kind of surprising.”
Along those lines, it’s inevitable that “Matched” will be compared to another dystopian trilogy about a girl and two boys, “The Hunger Games.” It’s a flattering comparison, said Condie, who adores the books. But it is a worry, too, she said, “because there’s action in ‘Matched’ but nobody writes action like Suzanne Collins.”
On a lot of levels, “Matched” is the story of one girl learning to choose, Condie said. There’s a lot going on, but a lot of it is personal rather than a grand arena action.
To read more about the inspiration behind “Matched” you can find the whole article at the Deseret News
Ally Condie’s Matched is set in a futuristic dystopian world where the Society dictates its citizens’ lives: where they work, whom they love, even when they die. There are some upsides. Because the Society pairs up DNA-compatible mates, disease has been eradicated (and no one ever has to Internet-date). But there are downsides too. Our heroine, 17-year-old Cassia, is ”matched” with her best friend, Xander. Then a glitch in the Society’s usually seamless system convinces her that her true match is a quiet orphan with a mysterious past named Ky. Naturally she falls for the guy she can’t have, and begins to question everything about their way of life. By the time Cassia discovers why everyone must always carry a red, green, and blue pill — and just how the Society goes about making sure people die at the appropriate age — Matched has ventured into surprisingly grown-up sci-fi. Not quite Soylent Green territory, but still kinda grim.
Read more of what Entertainment Weekly reviewer Sara Vilkomerson has to say at the source.
Thanks to PenguinTeen for the scan of the article!
YAreads.com recently interviewed Allie Condie about her upcoming book “Matched”. Find out what issues she wanted to highlight, what research she did for the book and more!
***Warning the interview contains slight spoilers***
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.
