Delirium by Lauren Oliver
07 May 2011 Leave a Comment
Delirium by Lauren Oliver
Harper Collins, 2011
448 pgs.
VOYA rating: 5p, 5Q
Suggested Reading Age: 13 and up
Delirium Nervosa. Love. It kills you when you have it. And it kills you when you don’t.
In this futurist, dystopian society, the government has found a cure for love to keep anyone over 18 from catching the delirium and compromising their logical thought and choices. Feelings. Love. It is all just a hindrance and dangerous. You can’t eat. You can’t sleep. You are miserable and shakey with longing when you catch the delirium.. But what are you without it? Safe? Complacent? Bored.
For her senior year, Lena and her best friend since childhood Hannah are getting ready for their procedure for when they finally turn 18. For poor Lena, the day can’t come soon enough. She comes from a troubled family, with a mother and father whom didn’t follow the fold and her family’s history has always haunted her. While she was raised by relatives, Lena never felt like she fit in. The sooner the procedure, the better she will feel. She only worries about her best friend Hannah. You are always different after the procedure and what if her and Hannah aren’t close anymore? Their natural chemistry and friendship will be compromised. Hannah is probably the only REAL family Lena feel she has in life. But oh well, it is a small price to pay, right? To be normal? And happy? And calm? And maybe Hannah and Lena will get paired with two boys who are friends too. But then something changes when Lena’s prelim testing begins and she meets Adam. Then, everything changes.
I LOVED this book for teens. It is relatively clean but still edgy. Language and content isn’t too racy but theme is an important one. Is it better to have loved and lost in love than to have never loved at all? For adolescents who feel like their romances mean the end of the world, this book forces teens to think about the other kinds of love. The love of a friend. The love of a mother. How do parents care for their children when they aren’t capable of love? Who helps get you through life when you aren’t able to love your partner? What is worth living for and fighting for? What would you give to make someone you love happy? This great theme is simple and there is a bit of a slow period in the book while the characters start to build but it has a great and quick ending. I am never pleased with an ending fully because they are hard to do well. I will love a book the whole way and then the ending falls short. However, for Lauren Oliver, this is done very well and for me, it was more entertaining exciting than “Before I Fall”. It also makes me think how dire, dramatic, high-stakes, emotional so many things are or seem to be for teens at that age. Teens don’t always LIKE feeling so moody in real life. They kind of can’t help it. A book like this suggests their moodiness is disease that can be fixed but at what cost? Makes you think how much you might appreciate all those hormones and obsessive feelings once they were gone…
Great read, with great themes and ideas. Similar the Feed by M.T. Anderson, Unwind by Schusterman, The Uglies by Westerfield and the classic 1984. With themes of friendship, family, romance, science fiction, social issues and commentary above all it is about love, the delirium, and reminds us all how lucky we are when we catch it.
Would you cure yourself of the delirium if you could?
