What if love was considered a disease? And what if there was a cure? And what if society mandated you get the cure when you turned 18? Love makes you do stupid things, love can blind you to reality, love can cause pain-wouldn't life be better without it.
That is exactly the premise of Lauren Oliver's Delirium. This was another book mentioned on the dystopia prezi I showed my class and I was thrilled to discover it is also a series. Like most dystopian novels, on the surface things look good. Lena can't wait for the cure. She can't wait to be assigned a spouse and live a life without fights and extreme emotion. Life will be good after the cure.
That's not to say Lena's life has been easy. She lives with her cousin after her mom's suicide. People are suspicious of her because of her family background. There are people there who fought against getting the cure-they were sick, diseased. Lena does not want to be like that. That is until she meets Alex.
It's not really a spoiler to say that Lena fell in love with Alex because that's what we all expected. If you don't get the cure until you're 18 interactions with a boy could easily lead to infatuation or even love. And once love takes hold it's hard to let go. This isn't a spoiler, it's a fundamental human truth.
But just because I predicted Lena would fall in love that doesn't mean I could didn't enjoy the book. Quite the contrary. I loved exploring the world Oliver has created. She used one of my favorite tricks which is placing quotes at the beginning of each chapter. But these quotes are from the Book of shh-the handbook/rulebook/bible of this society. Those little snippets give you so much insight into the society as a whole. In addition I was rooting for Lena from the beginning. She's the kind of character that grabs you right away.
Now I won't spoil the ending but I will say I am glad I checked out all three books in the series because once I finished the first one I definitely wanted to start the second right away.
Falling in love...that's kids stuff.
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