Delirium by Lauren Oliver – review

To finish up my dystopian novels cycle, I’m going to talk about Delirium by Lauren Oliver. My first thoughts when reading this novel were that it wasn’t as good as the previous two I reviewed, Matched and Divergent. I read about 100 pages into Delirium and then put it down for a week, because I was a little burnt out on the whole dystopian scene.

When I picked it back up, I realized that it was actually just as good as the aforementioned novels, but the writing style was different. Delirium is a novel where “Love” is a disease called amor deliria nervosa (which used to be considered things like stress, heart disease, depression, insomnia, etc.), and society has found a way to cure it. They never explain exactly what the cure is, but it sounds like it’s some kind of lobotomy. It’s dangerous and can kill someone if it goes wrong, but usually the procedure rids a person of any inflammatory emotions so they just kind of glide through life in an apathetic, obedient kind of way. Children get their “cures” around the time that they finish school, and from there, they are paired with someone whom they will marry. They will have children if the government tells them to, or they won’t, but it doesn’t really matter to them, because they don’t care. They don’t love the person they marry, they don’t care what kind of work they do, they don’t have any really passions or hobbies, though they go through the motions of having them, and on some occasions, they actually kill their children because they can’t be bothered with them.

It sounds like a pretty awful existence, right? Not so for Lena. She is counting down the days (95 at the start of the novel) until her procedure. Once she has the procedure, she’ll be safe from deliria, and she won’t ever have to worry about it. Lena’s mother suffered from deliria that couldn’t be cured, and it has haunted Lena since she was a young girl. She wants nothing more than to have the cure and be safe for the rest of her life. That is, until she becomes diseased herself….

There are a couple of things that I really enjoyed about this novel. First, Oliver writes this novel with description that is so vivid it actually is gross. At one point, Lena describes the heat in Portland as creeping through the streets of Portland, festering in the dumpsters and making the city smell like a giant armpit. These sorts of descriptions made me feel like I was actually right there, sweating along with her. It was disgusting, but real, which was perfect in setting the mood of a dystopia. Also, Lena doesn’t become infected immediately. She doesn’t fall in love right away, as is the way with a lot of young adult literature. She meets her love interest, but keeps her distance, and it’s a while before she gives in and really starts breaking the rules.

This book is written a little more realistically than some of the others I’ve read. People get hurt, and the government in this particular novel seems pretty nasty as Lena gets a closer look at them. I tend to enjoy a book that follows a more realistic course of events.

My favorite thing about this book is how Oliver starts every chapter. She has taken all kinds of lore and nursery rhymes and turned them into “cautionary tales” about delira. One of the chapter starts with the story of Adam and Eve in the garden, and it says that humans first became infected with love when Even bit the apple. In another, it shows Romeo and Juliet as a tale to warn against the affects that deliria can have on the young, uncureds. I really enjoyed these little snippets, especially the ones from The Book of Shhh, which I took to be some kind of bible warning against deliria.

If you like this kind of novel, or have read the last few I have reviewed, you will probably enjoy Delirium. It’s less flowery than Matched, but just as vivid. My only real issue with this book was the ending. It ended pretty well, to be honest, and I’m looking forward to reading the next book, but at the very end of the book, Oliver adds a three-paragraph narrative summary of Lena’s struggle, and it’s out of place. I would have much preferred she leave these last paragraphs out of the book and end it with the action scene prior. But that’s a small quibble, and I’ll definitely be reading Pandemonium, the next in this series, when it comes out!