Delirium: 1/3 (DELIRIUM TRILOGY)

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Goldberg, Lesley (February 7, 2013). "Emma Roberts to Star in Fox Drama 'Delirium' ". The Hollywood Reporter . Retrieved February 7, 2013. It may sound superficial to you, but once he said his name was Alex, he almost took a little place in my heart. I didn't like him right away, of course. (I'm not that weird) (Or maybe I am) but I love the name Alex so much, and I enjoyed every time Lena said his name. (I never came across the name Alex in a book at the past, except once, and he was a shitty person.) Ng, Philiana (March 1, 2013). " 'So You Think You Can Dance' Winner to Co-Star in Fox's 'Delirium' ". The Hollywood Reporter . Retrieved March 3, 2013. His hair is a crown of leaves, of thorns, of flames. His eyes are blazing with light, more light than all the lights in every city in the whole world, more light than we could ever invent if we had ten thousand billion years. What if we had to live in an alternative universe? What if this universe would be the same but not exactly equivalent to ours? What if it would be illegal to feel anything? What if love would be considered as a mortal sin? What if we had to spend almost all our lives not as human beings but something in between, since everything that breathes into us humanity would not exist at all? What if…? What if…?

So a day before the release of Pandemonium, I finally get around to reading Delirium. And after that devastating ending, my relief knows no bounds.But I was so very, very excited for this that I think I was even more let down by it than Matched, which was also something I was eager for. Before I Fall was fresh and compelling, and I felt like so much of Oliver, so much heart and so much work, went into it. I didn't feel the same about Delirium. I'm not going to accuse Oliver of selling out or hopping on a trend, but I do wonder how much passion was behind this story. It seemed sort of sloppy (and yes, I know, I read an ARC, and that may account for some of it). But there were so many inconsistencies and questions I had that I couldn't ever commit. I could only go along so far until logic would intrude. I would be forced to ask myself things like, If Lena was just bitten (badly) in the leg by a dog, why does Alex kissing her seem to erase not only any pain, but even any mention of the bite, until it's like an afterthought? How does her family not notice that either a) she's wearing pants in the middle of sweltering August, and limping, or b) she's not wearing pants and the scar is showing and she's limping? Because it has to be one of those 2 things. And though the "cure" may not make them care for her safety so much, it doesn't take away their suspicious natures. [Also, setting aside the fact that she walked home, how did they just walk home? Just like that. With raiding parties everywhere, and her bitten terribly, they just strolled on home, illegally, down the street? How do they get away with all the shit they get away with, in this repressive society? Hmm...] Things like this were peppered throughout the story, and they just made it nearly impossible to buy in to what was going on. Personally, the most dreadful moment that made me conceive the author’s massage wholly, was the parents’ behaviour towards their children. To put it differently, they were cold and apathetic like robots or even worse. This moment send chills through all my body for the frightful and unbearable thought, that maybe the world that Oliver describes, is not as imaginary as it may seem. The water is an enormous mirror, tipped with and pink and gold from the sky. In that single, blazing moment as I came around the bend, the sun – curved over the dip of the horizon like a solid gold archway – lets out its final winking rays of light, shattering the darkness of the water, turning everything white for a fraction of a second, and then falls away, sinking, dragging the pink and the red and the purple out of the sky with it, all the colour bleeding away instantly and leaving only dark.

Okay, maybe that was not the best overview of the book, but let me tell you this: Delirium is going to open up the floodgates of your hearts; you won’t be able to stop it. More importantly, Oliver's writing was flawless. She vividly described each scene, allowing readers to visualise each event as it occurred. Through her writing, Oliver also evokes a vast array of emotions from her readers. When Lena is enraged, readers are fuming. When she breaks down, crying hysterically, readers are right there, sobbing along with her. Her feelings of love, betrayal, and loss transcend all boundaries, lodging themselves in the hearts of readers around the world. The chapter headings with quotes from The Book of SHHH, nursery rhymes, playground chants, Comprehensive Compilation of Dangerous Words and Ideas, government pamphlets, schoolbooks and others are simply brilliant and add to the story in subtle ways. Amor Deliria Nervosa sounds like what doctors might call love if they wanted to classify it as a disease. There are lots of little tidbits like this that are clever and creative and make me wish for more from this book. I WISH these books would have been given some more thought when they were written. I believe they had a good idea going but there were too many mistakes that could've been fixed very easily. But this novel still didn’t work for me. Delir­ium, unfor­tu­nately, failed for me. Which is sad­den­ing, because Lau­ren Oliver is a good author and I know, with Delir­ium, she was reach­ing out and try­ing some­thing dif­fer­ent. I just wish it had been more successful.

I advise the still undecided to read either The Giver, the Uglies or both and to watch Equilibrium.