Book Review: Delirium by Lauren Oliver

Title: Delirium
Series/Sequel? Followed by Pandemonium  
Author: Lauren Oliver
Genres: Dystopian, Romance
Age Level: YA (12-18)
Page Count: 441(Hardcover)
Summary: In the future, everyone becomes cured from every having to experience amor deliria nervosa -
 also know as love - at age eighteen. After you are cured, you are paired. You marry your pair, have children, and go about life in the job assigned to you. Being cured is a wonderful thing, they say. You are free from this horrible, fatal disease, and you will never again have to experience pain.
Lena is seventeen, just months away from her procedure. She's excited to be cured, to finally get rid of the shadow of her diseased mother that committed suicide instead of go through the procedure again.
But then she meets Alex. Wonderful, beautiful, mysterious Alex, who is hiding a past even more dangerous that hers. But when she feels herself begin to contract the disease... does she really want to stop it? Does she really want to get cured?

Review: This book.... I... I... I'm speechless. I really, really am. It was beautiful and heart-wrenching, and I almost cried at the end,which is very rare for me. I didn't, but it was pretty close.

The dystopian-ness of it was fairly normal, done many times before: getting paired, everything decided for you, etc. etc. The thing that made this stand out was the cure... and how the characters reacted to it.

Now, I'm not sure if any of you have read The Giver by Lois Lowry. It is one of my favorite books. Yes, it's not the most recently published (it was written in the twentieth century, gasp!) but in some ways these two books are very similar. In The Giver, no one feels anything. Like, anything. At all. No one. No matter what age. Except for two exceptions, which is the Giver and his apprentice Jonas.

While in Delirium, the other characters feel things, and those under eighteen are still completely normal in the way they feel, I thought it was interesting how Lena - and others tried to rebel against it. I loved Alex and Lena's relationship, how sweet it was how (SLIGHT, NOT MAJOR SPOILER) he read Shakespeare and other love poetry to her. (END SLIGHT SPOILER). As said before, it was beautiful and heart-wrenching, and just awe inspiring.

A problem, though: I didn't like how normally dystopian it was. There were really no unique parts except for the cure, which was the major part of the book, but still. It would be nice if she was a little more creative, instead of just sticking with the same old same old dystopian elements.

If you like dystopian and romance with some action, I would highly recommend this book to you. Despite it's faults, it is still an amazing book.



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