Review: Delirium (Book #1 of 3) by Lauren Oliver

Delirium is a heart-racing story about a world without love, and a girl whose world is about to turn upside down. Rating: 5/5

*This is book #20/28 for my 2014 book challenge. This is also book #4/7 for my YA-MA book challenge. You can take a look at my reading challenges here.

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 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 would rather be infected with love for the tiniest sliver of a second than live a hundred years smothered by a lie.

Before we start, 42 of my Goodreads friends have read and reviewed Delirium. Of those 42 people, almost every single review has a 4-5 star rating. Here are people that can’t agree on much of anything, literary at least, all feeling very similarly about this book. That is how good this is.

Lauren Oliver writes beautifully. Her debut novel, Before I Fall, is quite possibly my favorite book ever. I’m not one of those readers that likes to highlight and dog-ear pages, but there’s something about Lauren’s writing that makes me stop and think and then jot down various quotes. I have several pages of a notebook now dedicated to various lines and paragraphs from her books. It’s relatable and intense and interesting all at the same time. Delirium especially was so thought-provoking because it was set in present time. It allows the reader to put themselves in the characters perspective and think of what life would be like in this world. I think that is a huge part of why this book made me feel as intensely as I did. I couldn’t for the life of me imagine a world without love and passion, and I was silently fighting for the characters the entire time.

Speaking of the characters, there was a bit of “insta-love” which I know annoys a lot of readers, and I want to defend it in this case. For one, I don’t think it was really as instantaneous as everyone is making it out to be. I think it was initially a very intense sort of insta-curiosity. That little spark we all get when we meet someone that intrigues us and we don’t know why until it’s too late and we’ve already started to like them on a level that’s a bit deeper than lust. It happens, and it happened here, and I don’t think it’s right to qualify it as the same annoying insta-love that happens in so many other young adult novels. Besides, the entire plot of this book revolved around love being evil, and there needed to be a tiny bit of rush to the development of feelings between the two characters so that the interesting stuff could happen. There was also a very interesting amount of character development, primarily between Lena Haloway and the relationships she has with other people in her life.

I liked all of the characters for who they were, even when I was mad at the cureds in Lena’s life. The ending was so intense that I 100% fell into a state of shock. My entire soul wanted to weep and weep over where the story had progressed to, but I was so speechless and confused that I couldn’t do anything but sit there and stare at the closed book in my lap. I love a book that makes me this anxious and messes with my emotions. It’s rare that a story can make me care this much, and Delirium absolutely, without a doubt, needed to be rated a full 5/5.

God, I really enjoyed reading Delirium, and you bet your sweet ass that I already ordered the sequels! If you are at all interested, you can purchase the book for yourself from Amazon! And if you’ve already read the book, you have got to let me know what you thought of the ending!

Rating:

If you’re interested in reading my GoodReads updates from this book you can do so here. I must say, they’re quite entertaining. It will tell you exactly what I was thinking on certain pages.