Okay so this post is going to look a little different than most of my book reviews. I read Delirium, Lauren Oliver's first book in her YA dystopian trilogy, about a year ago. I was in a blogging slump, though, and a review was never written. So since I just finished the second book in the series, Pandemonium, and since I'm freaking out about it, I figured I might as well do a really short review of what I remember from the first one too.
In Delirium, the stage is set: Lena lives in a world where love is a disease to be feared above all. According to her government and the new system they've set up, love - the delirium - is the source of all of our world's problems. Any strong emotion, whether negative or positive, is unnecessary and dangerous. So all 18-year-olds receive the cure, which removes your ability to feel those emotions. You are matched with a spouse and you raise children, but no emotional attachment exists. Everyone does their job and follows the rules and become good, complacent and content adults. Lena is a strong believer just months away from her own cure when she meets Alex, an uncured boy living in plain sight in Lena's community. It doesn't take long for Lena to begin questioning everything she's been taught her whole life...no matter what the risk.
When I first heard about this book, I was really intrigued with the plot. I thought it sounded like a great new worst-case scenario idea on what the distant future might hold. I was a little disappointed with the book, though, and when I finished I was curious enough to continue reading the series but not in much of a hurry. I thought some of the writing was a little slow and over-detailed, and I just didn't think it was as mind-blowing as a plot as I had anticipated. The second one, though...
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| taken from Goodreads.com |
I finished Pandemonium this morning, and I'll be honest...my mind is a little blown.
This one picks up almost right after the first one ends. (So I'll try not to spoil too much but it might be a little impossible.) Lena is in the Wilds, and has been found and nursed back to health by some people living in a settlement nearby. As she spends more time with these people, she joins them in an underground resistance movement against the government so determined to keep everyone in their robot-like state of complacency. Eventually, Lena gets caught up in a kidnapping gone slightly wrong, and is locked in a cell with none other than the son of the leader of the Deliria Free America, poster boy for all things cured. (I told you it was going to be super hard to keep from spoiling something.)
Whoa. I might not have loved Delirium, but I really enjoyed Pandemonium. I didn't notice the slow-moving plot or too many details like I did in the first book; the plot flowed smoothly and fairly quickly. But the plot itself was so much more interesting, I thought. I felt like Delirium was a little slow because of the foundation of plot that needed to be set, whereas in Pandemonium she was able to zoom forward to new information. The most important part, though, was that she split the book into two different places in time: Lena as she's being rescued and nursed back to health in the Wilds, and Lena six months later working with the resistance in New York City. By flipping back and forth with each chapter, my interest was so piqued. I was being given little breadcrumbs into what would happen eventually, but yet at the same time there were so many gaps in information I needed to keep reading to find out what was really going on. I got hooked pretty quick. And with the mind-blowing ending she left me with, I'm pretty stoked to start book 3, Requiem.
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