Delirium
2011
- children's fiction
- maine, fiction
- love, fiction
- science fiction
- orphans, fiction
- family life, fiction
- nyt:paperback-books=2012-03-18
- resistance to government
- juvenile fiction
- families
The story
The first book in Lauren Oliver’s New York Times bestselling trilogy about forbidden love, revolution, and the power to choose. In an alternate United States, love has been declared a dangerous disease, and the government forces everyone who reaches eighteen to have a procedure called the Cure. Living with her aunt, uncle, and cousins in Portland, Maine, Lena Haloway is very much looking forward to being cured and living a safe, predictable life. She watched love destroy her mother and isn't about to make the same mistake. But with ninety-five days left until her treatment, Lena meets enigmatic Alex, a boy from the Wilds who lives under the government's radar. What will happen if they do the unthinkable and fall in love?
What it’s like
Cool, grey-blue Maine autumn light fills the pages of this dystopian YA novel, with its clipped first-person voice, short paragraphs and an undercurrent of dread that stays quiet rather than shrieking. The prose is intimate and reflective, turning inward as a teenage narrator tests every rule she was raised to trust, and the sensory world is domestic and orderly: tidy suburban rooms, wind off the harbor, the sterile calm of government institutions set against the wilder, unmapped woods beyond the fence. The mood is wistful and tense, a slow-building unease with a bittersweet romantic thread running through it. It suits a rainy weekend afternoon, a long train ride, or a reader who likes sitting with a single voice for hours. Pacing is brisk within chapters and the emotional arc follows a sheltered girl slowly questioning the certainty she was raised on. Violence is limited and mostly implied, with some emotional cruelty and a brief, sharp sense of danger. Romance is tender and chaste-leaning. It fits readers who want a gentle-to-moderate dystopia with a strong romantic pull, teens and adults alike, and it is not graphic.
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