Exclusive Tour Interview with Ally Condie

We wanted to be transported to another world so we picked up Matched and decided to question the all and powerful creator!!

RTR: If you could have lunch with anyone, alive or dead, who would you choose and why?
Allie: Ooh, tough question! Probably Michael Phelps. I’ve been totally wrapped up in his story the past few Olympics. I know he’s had a bit of trouble in between Olympic Games, but he is unbelievably fun to watch when he swims (as is his mother, Debbie). I just admire anyone with the discipline to take it to the next level the way he has.

RTR: What’s your guilty pleasure?
Allie: Well, I have a few! But one of my favorites is to make chocolate chip cookies for the kids’ after school snack, especially when it’s cold outside.

RTR: If you could pick your match would you rather have Ky or Xander?
Allie: I don’t think I’d be able to choose, and here’s why: both of them are based, to some extent, on my husband. J So there are things I love about both of them!

RTR: How did you choose the poem Do Not Go Gentle Into the Good Night by Dylan Thomas?
Allie: I knew I wanted to have Grandfather give Cassia a poem, and Do not go gentle immediately came to mind. It’s one of my favorite poems and it’s also a poem that people respond to instantly. I thought it was one that would immediately speak to Cassia as well.

RTR: Have you ever thought about your match banquet dress?  If you have what would it look like?
Allie: Actually, it would probably look very similar to the dress on the cover of the book (which I adore). But my dress would be blue. That’s my favorite color.


RTR: What is your favorite movie, book, TV show and song at this very second?
Allie: Movie: Toy Story 3 (it is a big hit at our house). TV show: 30 Rock (I love to laugh). Song: Empty by Ray La Montagne. It is beautiful, and it perfectly describes Ky in Book 2 (so there’s a little hint about the sequel)!

RTR: What or who inspired you to write Matched?
Allie: Matched was inspired by a lot of experiences—chaperoning a high school prom, a discussion about marriage, becoming a parent and wanted to protect my kids but not stifle them—and the common denominator in all these experiences was my husband. He was there for all of them. So, you could say that he was the inspiration for the characters of Xander and Ky and for the book itself. I could never have written it without him.

RTR: If you could identify yourself with any character from a book who would it be?
Allie: Well, I wish I were as spunky and clever and fun as Scout from To Kill A Mockingbird. She is fantastic.>

RTR: What is your favorite prehistoric mammal?
Allie: Excellent question. I have always been partial to the woolly mammoth. Especially since my son spent weeks earning enough money to purchase a stuffed wooly mammoth from our local museum. It was such a saga that I think we all now have this feeling of pride when we see that toy around the house.

RTR: Juiceboxes or Jukeboxes?
Allie: Juiceboxes. We drink them all the time around here! But not with the cookies I mentioned earlier. For those, you have to have milk.
What fun questions! Thanks so much for the interview!-Ally

Allie thank you so much!! We can’t wait until the next book in the series!!!

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Matched – Ally Condie

★Check Out Our Exclusive Interview with Ally Condie★


The Gist:

Matched
Buy it here and support our blog

The Society is perfect.  The Officials plan out everything.  What you eat and where you work.  Who you love, and even when you die.  Not making your own decisions is a small price to pay for having a long, healthy life, and the people blindly follow the Society’s rules.  Cassia Reyes has complete faith in the Officials’ choices.  And there’s no reason she shouldn’t; her life has been wonderful so far.  At seventeen years old, Cassia is ready to be paired with her ideal match-for-life at her Matching Ceremony.  She isn’t surprised when she’s Matched with her best friend, Xander Carrow.  Her life continues to be wonderful.  But when she sees a second match, things get confusing.  Suddenly thrust into a world of rebellion, corruption and lies, Cassia learns that The Society isn’t as wonderful as it appears.  Her life is turned completely upside down, and she’s forced to make a choice between what is true and what is perfect.

What We Think
Reviewed by Living Destiny
Number of Pages: 366
We got this book a month or two ago as an ARC.  (For those of you who aren’t savvy with the book lingo, ARC stands for Advanced Reading Copy). I remember being really excited, because it was a new book to read that everyone else had to wait to read.  Yes I’m a dork.  But then I had to wait to read it (because North and Dream both got to read it before me).  So then I was annoyed, and found myself thinking ‘this book had better be worth the wait’.  Well guess what?  It actually was.

So, the plot.  It reminds me a little of The Giver.  It has the same story of the perfect world, where the secret flaws are revealed to the protagonist.  It’s nice to get a view of the future that isn’t all perfect technology, but isn’t total chaos either.  In this book, the future seems perfect.  There are problems, but not many people know about them.  It’s like a false sense of security.  Creepy, but interesting.  I thought the link to poetry throughout the story was nice.  It was strange to see how they only saved one hundred of all the arts.  I can’t imagine how they would choose what to keep.  If I had to be the one to choose, I might explode.  But that’s just me.  Then there’s the whole concept of ‘Matching’.  It’s fascinating.  I always love those elements in good books that make you stop reading and just think for a while.  The idea of an ‘ideal match’ got me to do just that.  Would my match be some random person from I-don’t-even-know-where?  Or would he be my best friend, just like Cassia?  How weird would it be to get matched with your best friend?  I feel like it would be really awkward.  But maybe not.  Now I’m picturing myself matched with my best friend.  And this just got too weird to even think about.  But I’m stuck thinking about it.  Gahhh.  Moving on!


The characters!  I liked Cassia as a main character.  She had spunk.  She was a little slow on the uptake sometimes, but it was understandable because she had been living in the same way for so long.  She was strong.  Not so much physically strong as mentally and emotionally strong, but still strong.  She didn’t back down when she wrapped her head around a goal, like climbing a hill.  There were times when she wasn’t confident in what she was doing, and she got nervous, but she stuck with it.  That was nice because it made her easy to relate to.  Everyone gets afraid.  Cassia wasn’t the only important character in the story though.  The boys: Xander and Ky.  Personally, I liked Ky way better than I liked Xander (although North will tell you that’s only because I have a thing for ‘Ky’s).  Xander was sweet and charming, but it seemed like he tried a little too hard at the being matched together thing.  He also seemed distant from Cassia at times, which is weird given that he also tried too hard, but it’s how he acts.  Ky was a mystery, which made him more interesting than Xander.  He was just as sweet as Xander was, but in a more intense way.  That sounds weird, I know.  Xander was sweet in an aw-that’s-cute-you’re-my-best-friend-and-I-love-you sort of way, but Ky was sweet in an I-trust-you-enough-to-tell-you-my-deepest-secrets-plus-I-fell-in-love-with-you sort of way.  I guess to me, the bottom line was Ky seemed deep and real, while Xander seemed shallow and a little fake.


So lastly (how appropriate), the last line.  The last line of a book is actually the first thing I read.  I know that’s rather bizarre and backwards, but the last line is like the first line for me.  It needs to be really strong, or I feel like the book will be weak or lame.  The last line of this book is really strange and cryptic.  I didn’t understand it at all when I read it, but it got me interested, because I wanted to know how it would make sense.  And when you read the book through to the end, it does make sense.  It was like a little ah-ha moment for me.  I get it now!  That kind of thing.  So the last line was good.
I ended up liking Matched.  I didn’t want to put the book down.  Which is always a good sign.  It’s possible for this book to stand alone, although it would end at a killer cliff hanger.  It’s going to be a trilogy though (aren’t all books these days?  Not that I’m really complaining), so I’m left waiting for the next book, just as I was left waiting to read Matched.  Hopefully the next book measures up to this one, in all areas (including cover art, because the cover art for Matched was really cool).  Final word?  Cute, meaningful story.  It makes you think, and it gets some emotion out of you too.  All around good.  And the contest between Xander and Ky makes it that much more entertaining.  (Ky is better!)
Real Teen Rating ~ A-: Read it!

Reviewed by Dream Catcher
First off, you should know that I LOVE dystopian stories. Dystopia (in literature) is an often (meaning 99.99% of the time) futuristic society that has degraded into a repressive and controlled state, often under the guise of being utopian. Yes. That’s dystopian for you, courtesy of wikipedia because all of the definitions on dictionary.com were stupid. So anyways I love that kind of thing. Futuristic government consiparcies and too-advanced technology and the supposed “perfect society”. Whenever I hear about a book like that I drop whatever I’m currently reading and find out more about that because, seriously, who doesn’t want to read a book that makes modern-day-society seem perfect? So when I heard what Matched was about I was obviously excited to read it.


Plot in one word: dystopian. Kidding. More like interesting. That’s such a boring word, though. Ooh I found some synonyms at thesaurus.com. Here they are: riveting, enthralling, engaging, compelling. I’ll stop there. Compelling was the best, it most described the plot, I think. Either way, the plot was interesting and very dystopian. I love the thought of being matched, but at the same time I hated it. Imagine just being told you were perfect for someone. Being told that you would love them. Horrible. There’s no falling in love; there’s just “Okay, I’ll love this person, they are my match, after all”. Not fair. But at the same time eveything would be so much easier. Being matched wasn’t only to a person, but a job, too. Officials picked what kind of job you would have. Again; good and bad. No one’s out of a job. But you don’t get to pick, either, or do what you love. Like if someone wanted to be a writer they couldn’t because there was no writing anymore. If someone wanted to be a singer they couldn’t because there was no singing anymore. Shudder. I guess that was my long and winded way of saying that the concept of being matched to someone was captivating. Their whole world was really facinating, so, in that, the plot was good.


Characters. Eh. In my opinion Cassia wasn’t the best. Her character was flat and kind of bland. She kept clinging to her society and that was annoying. She was also kind of clueless. She wouldn’t get what was happening until the second after it was too late. It just didn’t make for a very strong main character. To give credit where it is due, though, there was some character development, so by the end of the book she was a much stronger character. So that was good. Xander was sweet and caring, but since he was introduced as the best friend, I never thought of him as anything more than that. So, even though they were matched, I thought it was bizare that Cassia kept trying to convince herself that they were completely perfect for each other. Kind of annoying. I know that’s not his fault but I was annoyed he kept hanging on, too. Ky was  good character. He was my favorite character because he was mysterious and didn’t go along with everything in the Society. He was a good, strong character. Cassia’s family and her friend Em were pretty good yet average characters. But I think that’s to be expected from non-main characters. Cassia’s grandfather was one of the better characters, I think. He was strong and wise in his own grandfatherly way. The real problem I had with the characters was that I didn’t feel connected to them at all. Something would happen and I’d think oh, well, I guess that’s sad. Or exciting, or dramatic, or whatever. Mostly the characters were a little bland. Maybe that was purposeful – to go along with a perfect/bland society – but it didn’t seem right. But overall they were pretty good characters.


What bothered me most about this book – what made me give it such a low grade – was the writing itself. If the writing style had been different I would have really enjoyed the book. But it wasn’t. It was stiff and too-formal sounding. Now maybe the author wrote it like this on purpose. Trying to make Cassia sound as if she really was from her straight-forward, no-nonsense society. And if that’s the case…coolio. Wonderful. Spot-on. But the author had to keep in mind who was going to read this. Regular teenagers. Not Society ones. She still has to make the character relatable through the writing (it was in first person, after all) and in that, I feel, is where she failed. But I know the North Star and Living Destiny didn’t have a problem with the writing at all. So maybe I’m just being picky. I tend to be when it comes to writing. But there’s got to be someone out there who thinks like I do…right? Maybe they’ll agree with me.


First and last lines. Utterly important, right? Right. So the first line is pretty good. I think there are better ways she could have started off a story like this one, but she’s the author, not me. So if she thinks its pure brilliance, then sure, it’s pure brilliance. I just think its average. It didn’t really make me want to read it any more than when I first picked up the book, but it could’ve been worce. First line: “Now that I’ve found the way to fly, which direction should I go into the night?”. I think the thing I don’t like about it is that it asks a question. Who is she asking? Herself? I dunno, I found that weird. Now the end line is as important as the first. It can change how you remember the book. Like if a book was good but it had a really bad last line, you’re going to remember that terrible line, and maybe forget some other part of the book that was actually good. So, the last line’s extremely important. When I read it, at first I loved it (I always read the ending line second, right after the first). It was cool and cryptic and overall really good. But when I was reading the book through I realized that she’d already said the ending line three or four times before the end! Why would you do that? It just made the whole ending paragraph feel redundent! So that was annoying. You’ll see what I mean if you read it.


Now there was this poem that repeatedly kept coming up in the story. Like a theme. At first I thought it was a really nice touch – because poetry can be really beautiful - but it came up to many times for my liking.  Too much. It got to be annoying, like some chant used in the right context and wrong. It almost replaced the characters emotions at times. Like instead of writing about what Cassia was feeling, or something, she would put in a few lines of the poem in italics. Like Cassia was saying them to herself. It was okay, but just a little over the top at times, I think.


Overall the book was pretty good, but nothing special. In my opinion. If you’re looking for a good dystopian book, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this one, but I wouldn’t beg you not to read it, or anything like that. It was a book that wasn’t quite memorable for being good or for being bad. That’s all there is to it. But I think the second in the trilogy will be better. Few short words on the cover and title. On a scale of very coolio (meaning AWESOME) to not coolio (meaning bad). Cover: pretty coolio – I think they could have done a little better. Title: coolio – not the best title ever but still good. I love one-word titles. So, yeah. The book was pretty good and I want to read the second! Cliff-hanger (kinda)!
Real Teen Rating~ C+ : Well I guess it was good…

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The Thirteenth Chime - Emma Michaels

Real Teen Award
-Worst Writing Style in 2010

★Check Out Our Exclusive Interview with Emma Michaels★

The Thirteenth Chime
Buy it here and support our blog

The Gist:

Destiny only wanted a vacation. Just a simple week away from the pressure of school and the thought of getting married. When her friend Stephanie invites her to her mother’s new seaside home, Destiny takes her up on it. She goes for a week of relaxation and fun. But on their first night there, they are attacked. In the middle of the night the grandfather clock on the landing (which creeped Destiny out when she first saw it) chimed thirteen times. Suddenly, Leslie (Stephanie’s mom) is gravely injured and Stephanie – in a attempt to save her – is brutally attacked. But by who? And why? None of them remember seeing a person attacking. But Destiny does recall seeing a glowing green light… As Stephanie and her mother are rushed to the hospital, Destiny calls someone important to her. Someone she knows can help her. Not her fiance. But David, her ex-boyfriend who she hasn’t talked to since the breakup. Meanwhile, David’s life is falling appart. His work as an EMT isn’t exactly what he wants to be doing and the thought of Destiny still pains him. While breaking into the appartement of a suicidal man (with a gun) on a call as an EMT – to try to stop the man from killing himself – David’s cellphone rings. Destiny’s calling. This alerts the emotionally distraught man with the gun that David broke into his house…and he’s not pleased about that. After convincing the guy to put the gun down and not kill anyone, David gets an earful from his boss and partner about being too irrational and taking too many risks. They tell him that if he doesn’t stop it, he’ll be fired. So he calls Destiny back and decides to fly out to meet her, taking some time off work. He wants to help her in any way he can. Help her solve the mystery of the random attacks before the clock chimes thirteen times again.


What We Think

Reviewed by Dream Catcher

Number of Pages: 246

I really wanted to like this book. REALLY wanted to. Emma Michaels had been so nice during the interview…but that was before we ever read the book. We’d heard about it, and we’d heard that is was great. That was good enough for us – interview time!  Let me just say that I hope we don’t do anymore interviews with authors unless we’ve read the book already! Because now I feel guilty for writing a not-so-fabulous review. Anyways…the book, the book. I knew from the very first sentence that I wouldn’t enjoy it. Don’t get me wrong – I certainly kept an open mind throughout the whole thing (because, like I said, I really wanted to like this) but after the first sentence I had a bad feeling that it wouldn’t get any better. The first line is “Destiny flipped her light brown hair back into the flow of the wind.” Right off the bat, from the first sentence, it shows that the writing will not be good. And it wasn’t. To start the book by flipping her hair into the wind…not a good omen. It’s not interesting; it doesn’t make me want to read any further. It’s too random and meaningless to the story as a whole. Beginnings are one of the most important parts of the book (including the ending) and they have to go off with a BANG. This one didn’t. And it was evident.

Anyways, plot. It was…alright. I think the idea itself was good, but wasn’t exactly excecuted right. It was almost too technical. When I read the back of the book – the synopsis – I thought this can’t really be just simply a human attacker. It has to have some…magic, right? Well, there was hardly any of that. All police officers and prison wardens and hospital doctors and nurses and EMTs. There was way too much of that for my liking…it just seemed out of place. It just didn’t seem to fit the picture I had of the story in my mind after reading the synopsis. And its always annoying when the back of the book doesn’t match the story. So…plot was alright but not great.

The characters…they weren’t so great either. Let me first say that the main character being named Destiny didn’t make anything better. No offense to anyone, but I really don’t like the name Destiny (that information was completely irrelevent to this review). And I think the author used that name solely for the purpose of getting jokes out of it. “We met through Destiny”, “I’m dating Destiny”, “I’m in love with Destiny”. Ha, ha. It’s funny because not only is Destiny a name, but a thing, too! Ha, ha. I didn’t find it funny. Now Destiny as a character was almost worse than her pun-inducing name. I didn’t like her very much. She thought she was funny when she wasn’t. She called David to help her but she wouldn’t stop yelling at him and scolding him for being himself. She just wasn’t very likebale. I could stand her, however, for the first 3/8ths of the book maybe. Then the reader finds out that she dumped David after he saves her life – while he was in the hospital – and started seeing another guy a week later. A week! I may not be the master of dating and relationships, but I thought dating some other guy only a week after breaking up with a long-time boyfriend is a big no-no. Something really low. Apparently not to Destiny. Which leads me to my next question,did she ever “love” David at all? Though she claims to have loved him and still love him (as a friend, of course!). I dunno. I just found that whole thing worth mentioning…because it’s kinda mean, right? I mean, a week? After claiming to have LOVED him? Seriously. I found it all ANNOYING. Going along with that (annoying, that is) Stephanie was almost as bad as Destiny. She kept going after David – all the while insisting she didn’treally want to date him – and saying all these suggestive things to him. Okay, maybe it’s just me, but isn’t there some unspoken girl code that all decent people go by that states you NEVER date your best friend’s ex? I thought that was a golden rule. Or at least a silver rule. Anyways, it got old fast. Here’s how it usually went: STEPHANIE: “Blahblahblah something suggestive blahblahblah”. DAVID: “Uh…”. DESTINY: “Stephanie, you tramp, he’s my ex!!”. STEPHANIE: “Yeah…key word being ex!”. Gah! ANNOYING. Leslie was just an all-around okay character. She was alright despite the fact she called everyone “kid” and her refusal to be called “ma’am”. Now David. I don’t know where to begin, really. He was my favorite character…but that doesn’t mean that I like him. He was occationally funny, but by the end he was just ANNOYING. You would have to be SUPER HUMAN to do all he did in this book and survive. It got to the point of utter rediculousness. Okay, now there were two characters that I didn’t understand at all. I mean I understood them…but not their purpose to the story. Carline and Christina. They were basically pointless. Enough said. Enough with characters!

Now I’ll be nice and say something good-ish. The cover itself was pretty good. It was interesting with the pale face and bright eye with a clock face in it…even if it only half-had to do with the book. The title was good too. The Thirteenth Chime sounds dramatic and mysterious. So props on that.

And so, finally, I move on to the last topic: WRITING. Oh, goodness. Sadly, this was the worst part of the book. The writing itself was stiff and awkward and unlikeable. There were some instances where I was cringing at the way it was written. For example, once the word warily was used twice in one sentence. Twice. Inexcusable. I mean if it was meant to make the sentence sound poetic and repetative (or something) than it would be okay. But here it just sounded wrong. If the writer herself hadn’t caught that her editor should have. Sigh. Anyway…the writing sounded young and inexperianced much to my disappointment. Now…the dialogue was flat-out not good. It wasn’t believable. It didn’t sound like something an everyday person would say. Bad dialogue can ruin a book, which is why great dialogue is extremely important. I think if the dialogue had been better I would have liked the book A LOT more. Honestly, the writing flaws in this book are easily fixed with practice and hard-writing-work. It’s not set in stone that Emma Michael’s writing will always be as it is now. Her writing will get better as she works more at it.

This book seemed almost incomplete.It was like she hadn’t quite gotten the story down, or the characters, or the writing. I wanted to like it, but wanting isn’t always enough. I will read her second book, however, in hopes it will be better than her debut.

Real Teen Rating~ D- : If you have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to read.

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Gone (Dream Catcher #3) - Lisa McMann

Real Teen Award
-Most Annoying Character in 2010: Cabel Strumheller 

* New York Times Bestselling YA Series

* New York Times Bestseller

If you have not read Fade, then read at your own risk, this contains spoilers!

The Gist

Gone
Buy it here and support our blog

To escape the stress of dream catchery, Janie takes a vacation with Cabel. And things are going fairly well – aside from Cabel’s disturbing dreams of the future – until Janie gets a few urgent calls from Carrie. And what might those desperate calls be about? Janie’s mother, of course. Go to the hospital. Your mom’s at the hospital was all Carrie would explain in her messages. So Janie rushes back home to find out what happened to her alcoholic mother to make her actually go to a hospital. But when Janie gets there, she finds out that her mother wasn’t the one in need of hospitalization. It was her father. In a dreary hospital room lies Henry Feingold; Janie’s absent father. He’s in a coma; his brain exploded. Literally. While trying to figure out the mystery that is her father, Janie accidentally/on purpose wanders into Cabel’s increasingly disturbing dreams – leading her to believe that Cabel doesn’t want to deal with her dream catching anymore. Janie can’t figure out what to do. Could her dad be a dream catcher, too? Is continuing to dream-catch really such a good idea? Or is there a better, safer way to deal with her curse? Why did her father’s brain explode? And should she stay with Cabel or leave him to save herself?


What We Think

Reviewed by Dream Catcher

Number of Pages: 214

Wow. The ending of that gist was extremely cheesy. I felt like one of those corny narrators that come on at the end of over-rated TV shows. Will Janie’s brain explode? Is the man in a coma really her father? And will Cabel leave her so he won’t be bothered by dreams? Tune in to the next exciting episode of Teenage Dream Catcher to find out! So weird. But I couldn’t think of a better way to end the gist. So there you go. Viola! Anyways, here we are. The third and final book of theWake/Dream Catcher trilogy. As far as ranking the books goes this one has to be my least favorite. The best was Fade. The second best wasWake. And the worst was Gone. As far as plot I really only have one thing to say: repetitive. The same things happened over and over again. She broke into her dad’s house. She visited her dad in the hospital. She cried over Cabel. She broke into her dad’s house. Visited him at the hospital. Then cried about Cabel some more. It took me forever to finish this book not because of the length (a slightly-below-average length) but because of how boring listening to Janie whine was. “I’m going to mourn over the father I never had. Now I’m going to leave Cabel so I can live alone in a moldy cottage deep in the forest. Wait, no! I just remembered I LOVE CABEL!” Argh, enough already! I got the point the twentieth time you said that. But I guess that has more to do with character than plot….ah it’s all related somehow. Whatever. But since I brought up characters….they weren’t likable. Now, in any of the books, I had never thought of Janie as a strong character that I genuinely liked. She was always just kind of there. In this book, she had that annoying quality of just being there and not doing much…but she had also figured out how to whine like there was no tomorrow. I can cut her some slack because losing your eyesight and use of your hands would really stink. But seriously. Enough is enough. Yes, the characters have to be believable so some complaining should be tolerated, but at the same time, your characters have to be likeable. Constant whining and complaining is the best way to make the reader dislike the character. Moving on from Janie, Cabel was generally okay despite the fact he cried way too much for my liking. The first few times I felt bad for him. But after a while my patience wore thin. No offense dude, but maybe this is why she’s thinking about leaving you in the first place! All she ever does is watch him cry. WHERE HAVE ALL THE SANE CHARACTERS GONE? Overall I think just the first two books alone would have been fine. This one really wasn’t needed. Only one half-answered question was fully answered.  But until I started reading this book, I had thought every problem had a solution and every question had an answer. Apparently not. But yeah, in my opinion this book was pretty superfluous ( I love that word). Okay, so this review might make it seem like I really hated this book. But I didn’t. I finished it, didn’t I? In comparison to the others in the trilogy, this book wasn’t good. But without comparing it to anything I find it very average. Which isn’t good, but isn’t horrendous either. To end on a good note, the cover and the title were (as always) perfect and dramatic. So read this finale to the Dream Catcher trilogy because….eh. I tried to think of a witty pun having to do with the word gone….but I couldn’t come up with anything. Oh, well. Read the book and be done with it!

Real Teen Rating~ C : Ehhh….

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