The Kari AnnAlysis

Lena is ready to be cured. She lives in a society where love is the disease of all diseases. You get the cure right around your 18th birthday, you are matched with someone you will spend the rest of your life with and love won’t kill you. But the cure doesn’t always work, Lena’s mom is a prime example.

The day Lena takes the pre-cure test that will determine her future, there’s a protest and she catches a glimpse of a young man who will change her life forever. How can someone go from being so sure one day to be ready to run to the wilds the next? Is she just like her mom? Will she end up with the same depressing fate?

Before buying this book, I didn’t know a whole lot about it. I knew it was dystopian and that it had a pretty cover and that I follow Lauren Oliver on Twitter and have read very good reviews on her premiere novel Before I Fall. So, with gift cards burning my pocket, I ran into Borders the day Delirium was released and picked up my own, shiny, metallic copy.

I waited a week or so to start reading and when I took off the dust jacket so I could tote it along with me to work, and found that the cover, under the dust jacket is as beautiful hardcover for the book. That’s all I’m sharing. It was a very pleasant surprise and if you don’t want to buy the book to read, at least look at the art under the cover.

Now to the book, I’ve been a major dystopian fan recently reading The Hunger Games series and Matched. I’ve loved them all and keep wanting more. I know it is a coincidence, but Delirium and Matched remind me a lot of each other. No matter which one I read first, I know I would have found myself comparing them because of the similarities in plot. Young girl can’t choose who she loves but wants to love the one she wants and that goes against everything good and well in society.

Now this doesn’t mean that I didn’t fall all over Delirium and tote it around everywhere with me reading a page here and a page there, but I didn’t love it as much as I had hoped. I wanted more. More drama, more action.

Throughout the book, Lena goes from a rule-following, straight laced girl ready to become a woman to a rule-breaking, heart-following young woman. I admired Lena for following her heart. In our society, you are allowed to follow your heart, but not everyone does. In her society, it makes you part of the diseased, but she still goes with it. She went from timid to courageous and it was an amazing loved filled transition. She also has lived a hard life, getting kind of a bad rep for a decision her mother made. She has pushed through it, as if she had another choice, and accepted she wanted to be different, until the love hit her.

But there was something missing for me, until the end at least. I am not kidding when I say the last couple of chapters were amazing. They gripped me and pulled me in and I couldn’t put the book down until I found out what happened. And don’t laugh, we all know I’m an emotional roller coaster on a daily basis, but I seriously cried at the end of this book. I was not expecting it and was kind of bummed that I wasn’t loving it, then it hit me like a semi truck. It completely changed my view of the book and I’m dying to find out what happens in the next book.

If I have ever talked to you about the book I am writing, you will know that I am a big fan of something more than a number at the beginning of the chapters. Like in the Luxe series, there are newspaper clippings. It makes it more real, more creative. Oliver did a wonderful job of that in this book. Each chapter had little passages about  amor deliria nervosa, it’s history, symptoms etc. They were little factoids that helped explain a lot of the disease that the book was focused on without Oliver having to find a place for it in the book itself. Loved it!

It’s amazing what a fantastic ending can do for a book. Before the ending, I was working out my review in my head and hated to give something I’d hoped so much for a review that wasn’t glowing. I know it’s part of the process, but still. But thanks to the ending, I give Delirium 4 bookmarks.

ISBN: 978-0061726828
Released: February 1, 2011
Author Website
Kari got this book from Borders, courtesy Christmas gift cards