Two happy side notes:

1) This is the anniversary of my husband’s and my first date. 🙂
2) My three year old now thinks it’s possible to get into a bubble.

The Blurb:

Cassia has always trusted the Society to make the right choices for her: what to read, what to watch, what to believe. So when Xander’s face appears on-screen at her Matching ceremony, Cassia knows with complete certainty that he is her ideal mate… until she sees Ky Markham’s face flash for an instant before the screen fades to black.

The Society tells her it’s a glitch, a rare malfunction, and that she should focus on the happy life she’s destined to lead with Xander. But Cassia can’t stop thinking about Ky, and as they slowly fall in love, Cassia begins to doubt the Society’s infallibility and is faced with an impossible choice: between Xander and Ky, between the only life she’s known and a path that no one else has dared to follow.

The review:

I liked the concept of this trilogy, but I couldn’t get behind the main character. Actually, I couldn’t get behind any of the characters. They just all read flat to me. I didn’t understand their motivations (particularly Xander’s, seriously). I also don’t think this series offered much new in the dystopian landscape. Their society could have been taken right out of the pages of The Giver, except there was also a love-triangle element. Scratch that, in The Giver, the society made sense. The society came across Utopian and as you read, you were given the nagging sense everything wasn’t as perfect as it seemed. This society hit you over the head with its wrongness so forcefully that I seriously couldn’t understand why the people within it were putting up with it. The leadership led in an illogical, hyper-emotion based way. Literally every character introduced by name in the book was being manipulated by the government on some deeply personal way. Who has time to micro-manage people like that? And when the government is so invasive that entire streets of people have to be relocated every few years people notice, no matter what pills they take. So pretty much everything added to this society that wasn’t from The Giver made no sense whatsoever.

The characters were bland, and every time a character got not bland it was a death sentence. I liked the second and third book better, they were grittier and absolutely filled with the non-bland redshirts, but as the series went on, the protagonist made less and less sense, the triangle really made no sense after book one, Xander went from being an okay character that was slightly clueless to pathetic, and Ky… I just didn’t feel him or Cassia enough to enjoy the books.

Two stars because the covers are awesome.