Delirium

Author: Lauren Oliver
Recommended Age: 14+
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN-10: 0061726826
ISBN-13: 978-0061726828
Year Published: 2011
No. Pages: 441
Genre: Science Fiction/ Dystopian Fiction
Main Character Gender: Female
Read & Reviewed by: Kat



What if love was a disease, the deadliest of all deadly things?

In the futuristic world of Delirium, when a person turns eighteen, they undergo a government-mandated operation, also known as ‘the procedure’, in which scientists rid them of the lethal disease amor deliria nervosa, more commonly known as love. This operation also removes, literally, all emotion – to family, friends, pets, etc. After ‘the procedure’, you are cured and guaranteed a happy, safe and predictable life.
Lena is an orphan that has never questioned authority and can't wait until she turns eighteen. She believes that the men patrolling the city daily, looking for sympathizers, and the immense fence keeping her inside the city are completely normal and that they are there to keep her safe.

Lena changes the way in which she starts to count down the days until her procedure after she meets the mysterious Alex – the boy with golden brown hair like a crown of autumn leaves, whose eyes shine and whose touch awakens Lena's heart. It is Alex who infects her with amor deliria nervosa and it is through Alex that Lena begins to question if love is really a disease that requires a cure. What follows is a journey, where danger lies around every corner and a single misstep can lead to discovery and, ultimately, death.

I found the world Lauren Oliver created to be terrifying: without the ability to love and be loved, what do we, as a society, have left? There is no compassion left for children, or pets. Oliver describes one scene where a dog has been shot and beaten and is left to die on the streets because its owners have gone back to sleep and no one else has any emotional capacity. Everyone in this world who has been ‘cured’ is a zombie, a shell devoid of emotion, slogging through life.

This is the ultimate futuristic Romeo and Juliet novel and it kept me thinking until the last page. Assuming her reader to be smart enough to figure out her dystopian world was just one aspect that I loved about Oliver’s writing. Lena’s change in perspective and character were brilliantly plotted. They were subtle so that I, as the reader, could ease into her new outlook and agree with it.

Oliver composed such haunting, poetic prose that I had to keep reading. This passage, for example, showed Lena’s thoughts of the disease in the first section of the novel with particularly rich description.

‘I don’t like to think that I’m still walking around with disease running through my blood. Sometimes I swear I can feel it writhing in my veins like something spoiled, like sour milk. It makes me feel dirty. It reminds me of children throwing tantrums. It reminds me of resistance, of diseased girls dragging their nails on the pavement, tearing out their hair, their mouths dripping spit.’ (p.2)

When I read this passage, the passion Lena felt towards the disease was contagious and it dug into my skin. Oliver drew me into Lena’s life and emotions so I could not put Delirium down.

Each chapter started by quoting the Health and Safety handbooks about the disease from the world of Delirium, which made this novel even more believable. The setting was also strongly developed and with Oliver's rich description I was able to run a movie behind my eyelids and see what Lena was seeing. Because of this, Lena's world became a world I lived in when I read this novel.

Delirium is a twisted version of the Uglies series and anyone who has read and loved Scott Westerfeld’s series will almost certainly enjoy this novel. I rated Delirium 9.5/10 and recommend it to everyone, and particularly those who like fast paced novels with a well-thought out, exhilarating plot. Delirium is the first in a trilogy, followed by Pandemonium and Requiem.