Deliriously Delightful Delirium

Delirium by Lauren Oliver

5 out of 5 gnomes

Oh Delerium how I love thee, let me count the ways.  I thought I knew the twists and turns that you would take but I was so very wrong.  You're quotably quotable and have lines of real beauty.  Your concept really makes one think about what they would do in that situation.  And your ending, wow it surely went down a path that I did not foresee.

As you can no doubt see, I really love this book and cannot wait until I get to read the next book in this series.  I can't believe that it took me this long to read it, that'll teach me to actually read books in my To Be Read pile more often.

Lena lives in a world that has deemed love a disease and love is like the worst kind of curse word.  In this place Romeo and Juliet is seen as a cautionary tale.  At the age of eighteen you are given the cure, which sounds like a lobotomy of some kind.  Everything is orderly and safe in this world, at least that's how it appears at first.  You are tested which determines if you'll go to college and matched with 4 potential mates.  So you pick one of the four and they take that into mind and try to match whoever would work best together.  After the cure you just kind of glide through life always happy, just looking ahead and barely remembering the past.  

Lena is a great character because of how much she learns and changes through the story.  She's the kind of character that you'll find yourself eagerly following her path and wondering what could happen to her next.  Since her family has been known in the past to have contracted the delira aka the disease of love she is happy to be cured and thinks that once she has the cure that it'll fix all of her problems.  She's the kind of character that yearns to be normal.  Then she finds out just how not normal her everyday life is.

The story goes in many interesting directions.  It shows an example of extreme isolationism in a county that sounds scary yet oddly feasible.  It shows the effects that rebelling against the norm can have and how far people are willing to go to fight back.

There are some fantastic relationships shown in the book.  There's the cold relationship between her and her aunt and uncle.  The relationship between her and her best friend Hana shows how much a friendship and people can change yet remain the same (good qualities and all).  There's also her cousin Gracie who has never spoken to anyone but Lena but seems to watch everything.  Gracie is one of those characters that I think could be very important in future books.  Then of course there's Alex who becomes an extremely important person to Lena and literally changes the course of her life.

At the end, which I read while working, I totally had a wow don't mind the teary-eyed librarian moment.  Not a lot of books get me emotional but WAM this book just takes aim and skews all the expectations you may have. I can not wait until the next book Pandemonium is released.