I'm really gonna try to like this more than Matched...but we'll see. 
 *Update* 
 Actual Rating: 1.5 stars 
 Okay, I tried. I really did. I went into Crossed with an open mind after getting it from the library, even though I wasn't a big fan of Matched, I decided to give this series another try. But I'm beginning to think that it's meant for a certain type of person. Not to say that these are bad books - they're not - they're just not my cup of tea, personally. 
 To begin with, it aggravated me that I constantly had to go back to the beginning of the chapter to see who was narrating. I mean, obviously Ky and Cassia have different lives they think about, so for a while this wasn't a problem. But towards the middle and the end they sound exactly alike, like one mind, and not in the good way. 
 Another pretty major issue I had with Crossed and Matched is that I simply do not care much about the characters. I feel like, if, in the middle of this novel, Cassia and Ky accidentally walked off a cliff, I would just say "Oh" and move on with my life. They are bland characters. She is boring. He is boring. They can go off and be boring together, I guess. I honestly didn't care if they lived or died. And I think that during a book you should feel connected to the characters or it's just going to feel really flat. So the fact that I couldn't make that connection really took away my enjoyment of the story. 
 One thing I did enjoy were the side characters. I liked Indie. I liked Vick. I liked Eli and Hunter. They were more interesting than the main characters. Oh, and Xander. I like him, too. I am totally Team Xander in this series. 
 Let me just say, I like poetry. Sometimes a good poem in a book can add a lot of depth or meaning or beauty to the story. And while this was sometimes the case with Crossed (Ally Condie really is capable of some beautiful writing), there were Just. Too. Many. It got to the point where I felt like, if one more poem was presented to me, I would tear out my hair in agony and frustration. 
 This book was just slow paced in general, though. Where was the action? Where's the suspense? I do not know. There was no point in the novel that caused my heart to race, for me to get that I-gotta-know-what-happens-next feeling. No, it was more like the ugh-how-much-longer-is-this feeling that I hate. Reading should be fun, not an extreme exercise in patience. A lot of time, when I rate novels on a scale of 1 to 5 stars, I factor in how much I wanted to come back to the book. I did not want to keep picking up Cross. I wanted it to collect dust on my nightstand. The climax felt kind of dull to me. Like, "Oh, Cassia found the rebellion. Good for her. Only a few more pages to go now." 
 The ending of this was rather abrupt. Just a bad place to end a story, in my humble opinon. 
 Also, we weren't given much more knowledge about the Society, like how they came to be and who runs it. Is there a president or something? I would like to know. Now, in dystopians like this where the author creates a world from scratch, it's understandable that we're not going to get how everything works in the first book. But the second? Yeah, I think there should be a little more information presented, and we should have a pretty clear idea of the Society. To me, they're still just one big question mark (that I'm in no hurry to recieve the answer about). 
 If the third book in this triology ever comes my way, I might pick it up if there's nothing better for me to do.