Book Review - Delirium

"Ninety-five days, and then I'll be safe. I wonder whether the procedure will hurt. I want to get it over with. It's hard to be patient. It's hard not to be afraid while I'm still uncured, though so far the deliria hasn't touched me yet. Still, I worry. They say that in the old days, love drove people to madness. The deadliest of all deadly things: it kills you both when you have it and when you don't…

"They say that the cure for love will make me happy and safe forever. And I've always believed them. Until now. Now everything has changed. Now, I'd rather be infected with love for the tiniest sliver of a second than live a hundred years smothered by a lie."

So I'm back with another book review because I have no life outside of literature. This time I'm doing Delirium by Lauren Oliver! I actually own book 2 (minor mix-up, got Pandemonium before I managed to read Delirium all the way through) and soon I'm getting books 1 & 3, yay! Then maybe I can get some sleep and stop pacing all the time… I mean, what?

Delirium might seem like a totally implausible concept - a society where love is considered a mental illness and the government forces you to undergo brain surgery at eighteen to literally kill the part of your brain that generates intense emotion. Yet Lauren Oliver spins this world in such a way that it kinda scares the heck out of you totally makes sense. Apparently the author saw on the news about the panic created by some kind of illness-epidemic - SARS or Swine Flu or something - and it spawned the idea of the book. Because let's face it, people can be total morons do dumb stuff when they're really scared, and illness is one of those things that really scares people. Like zombies.

In Delirium, Lena undergoes a transformation from being terrified of amora deliria nervosa, the scientific name for The Disease (aka love) - and for very good reasons, actually, as love is what destroyed her life as a little girl - to realizing that the society she lives in, the cure she's longed for, and the disease she's feared for so many years are all lies.

Lauren Oliver is a literary genius who deserves a medal for word-smithing has a brilliant way with language. At times the narration, in Lana's first person perspective, is a little… not flat, exactly. It's perfectly fine. But sometimes these brilliant lines show through (a few are listed at the bottom of this blog) and when placed side by side with the more mundane text, there's a bit of a schism (kinda made me go, "Awwww… I love diamonds, but make them blue. I want blue diamonds." You know what I mean?). However, those word-choice jewels are what made me fall so intensely in love with this novel that I couldn't live without it because I'm absolutely pathetic decide to buy this book before I'd even gotten 100 pages in, which I NEVER do. We're too poor to do that, lol. Usually I check a book out from the library and read it, then decide if I want to own it. But I was so impressed by Lauren Oliver that I fell in love and became a crack addict for HAD to own Delirium.

Lena is likeable, a well-thought out and 3-dimensional character. She's also very believable. I still remember what it was like to be in love at 17, when (to quote my sister), "[the person you] had a crush on walked in the door and it felt like you'd stuck your finger in a light-socket." The intensity of young love really shines through, and not in a codependent, creepy way. While Lena makes some seriously life-altering decisions after Alex, the love interest, shows up, it's not so much for him as because of him. He opens her eyes to a lot of things, including what she'll be losing when she undergoes the procedure.

I talked to my sister, who's done a lot of research into sociology and such, about this book and she had some interesting observations about the social commentary in the novel. I remember (and so does she) being a kid/teen and having adults completely ignore and/or cruelly demean trivialize my feelings strictly because I was young. In Delirium, there's a big theme of "the officials know best" and "the adults in your life know best" and "once you're cured (aka grow up) you'll see how unimportant all of this is." I didn't consciously pick up on that until my sister mentioned it, but she's absolutely right - that generally universal teen experience is one of the themes of the novel.

An undercurrent to this book that I like is a shadow of the famous Shakespearean play, Romeo and Juliet. It's even mentioned in the beginning of the book as a "cautionary tale about the dangers of the deliria." Kind of like West Side Story, there are plot events that correlate to events in the play - Juliet being forced into a terrible decision when ordered to marry Paris, trying to get a message to Romeo, etc. I can't be any more specific without giving away too much of the plot, but it's brilliantly interwoven throughout the text. As a fan of the play, this just made me love Delirium even more.

Also the love interest is awesome. He's not your stereotypical dark and brooding hottie (like Daemon in Jennifer L. Armentrout's Obsidian or Jace from The Mortal Instruments, though Jace is more blond and brooding). Lena loves him not for his hotness, though he is attractive, but for his personality and how he makes her feel. It's different from most love stories I've read in YA novels before. The only two I can think of that are similar are Katniss and Peeta in The Hunger Games  and Cassia and Ky in Matched. With these three couples, it's not about wild hot crazy monkey lust and darkly magnetic Byronic personalities physical appearances and bad-boy vibes followed by affection and getting to know the guy. I really like that. Not that there's anything wrong with Byronic bad boys. I love those too, lol.

All in all, I give Delirium a 4.5 out of 5 stars (though anyone who takes issue with present tense may find that a deficit). My only issue - the end of Delirium. I can't tell you why, that'd be cheating. But obviously nothing too crazy happens, since there are 6 books in the series (if you count Hana, Raven, and Annabel, the three novellas about Lena's best friend, this other girl, and Lena's mom). But hopefully any issues I had will get resolved in book 3. Can't wait for it to come out! Eeep!

—     LA Knight

Especially brilliant quotes I adore from Delirium:

"Not gray, exactly. Right before the sun rises there's a moment when the whole sky goes this pale nothing color—not really gray but sort of, or sort of white, and I've always really liked it because it reminds me of waiting for something good to happen."

"…and then a new song starts, this one just as wild and beautiful, and it's like the music reaches across all that black space and pulls at something at the very heart and root of me, plucking me like a string."

"Snapshots, moments, mere seconds: as fragile and beautiful and hopeless as a single butterfly, flapping on against a gathering wind."

"I love you. Remember. They cannot take it."

PS - I now own Delirium as well as Pandemonium. Yay!