Ally Condie's 'Reached' hits best-seller list

Ally Condie, the author of 'Reached,' is a former English teacher. (Photo: Brook Andreoli)

The 'Matched' trilogy is the most popular teen series since 'The Hunger Games''Reached,' the third book in the series, is currently No. 6 on USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books listDisney has bought the rights to the books, and a movie is in the works

3:38PM EST November 26. 2012 - Author Ally Condie says a "casual conversation about marriage" with her husband, an economics professor at Brigham Young University, triggered the most popular series of books for teens since The Hunger Games.

Reached, the third book in Condie's Matched trilogy, published by Penguin, landed at No. 6 on USA TODAY's Best-selling Books list last Thursday, her best debut and showing on the list.

The series -- which began with Matched (2010) and includes Crossed (2011) -- is a dystopian romance like The Hunger Games, but with less violence and more poetry. (Its rebellious heroine Cassia is inspired by Dylan Thomas' Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.)

It's set in the future when authorities, known as "The Society," tell everyone what to read, what to believe and who to marry.

Condie, 34, who lives near Provo, Utah, is a former high school English teacher. Four years ago, she and her husband, Scott Condie, were talking about marriage and imagined "what if the government chose when you married, who you married, and how you married," she says.

Condie, who had written five previous novels for a small Utah publisher, thought it could a great story. She recalled a high school prom she chaperoned and imagined "what if instead of going to a prom, you found out who you were supposed to marry at a banquet, like a prom taken to extremes?"

'Reached' by Ally Condie is a young-adult novel set in a society where the state decides who you can or cannot marry.

Condie, who quit teaching to raise three sons and a daughter -- ages 9,7,4 and 1 -- had already read Collins' The Hunger Games, "which I loved," but "I could never write action like Collins does." She says she was more influenced by older dystopian fiction, George Orwell's 1984 and Ray Bradbury's short story "There Will Come Soft Rains."

She's thrilled that Disney has bought the movie rights to Matched. David Slade (The Twilight Saga: Eclipse) will direct. No cast or release date has been set yet. With a laugh, Condie says she expects to "have about as much involvement as any author who hasn't written Twilight or Harry Potter."

She attributes the growing popularity of her series to teachers and librarians who embraced it. Matched is assigned reading for incoming students at Simmons College in Boston and Brenau University in Gainesville, Ga.

She says "that falling in love is a universal theme," and "struggling with control is something teens deal with. Setting those themes in a dystopian world creates a bigger, more dramatic landscape....We live in a world where it's not hard to imagine bad things happening globally."

Condie is at work on another teen novel, though she's not yet sure "where it's headed."

Bob Minzesheimer has written about books and authors since 1997 - as close to a dream job as any job can be for someone who loves to read. A former political reporter and editor, he was president of his local library board.

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