My birthday.' On the surface, the idea that love is a disease might seem gimmicky or 'done,' but I assure you, what Lauren Oliver brings to this concept is both thought provoking and exhilarating and the society that she builds around this belief is fascinating and frightening, along the lines of Lois Lowry's 1994 Newbery winner and standard bearer for all great dystopian young adult literature, The Giver. I'm scheduled to have my procedure in exactly ninety-five days, on September 3. She's been safe from love for so long, she says she can't even remember its symptoms. My older sister, Rachel, has been disease free for nine years now.

Everyone else in my family has had the procedure already.

Proverb 42, The Book of Shhh (The Safety, Health, and Happiness Handbook.)' Main character Lena picks up the thread, telling us, 'It has been sixty-four years since the president and the Consortium identified love as a disease, and forty-three since the scientists perfected a cure. Chapter one sets the tone with, 'The most dangerous sicknesses are the ones that make us believe we are well. Like Collins, Oliver has created a very strong narrative voice in her main character, given her complex thoughts and feelings and presented her with a daunting force to overcome.Įvery chapter in Delirium begins with a quote from a government or educational text. Collins' trilogy has definitely set the bar very high for the spate of teen books with a dystopian setting that have come since (and the handful that came before like Scott Westerfeld's intriguing Uglies quartet that just got a cover make-over) and I think that Oliver's book definitely meets it. Although I have not reviewed it here, I am (like millions of others) a huge fan of Suzanne Collins' amazing Hunger Games Trilogy, having read the advance copy that was passed from bookseller to bookseller at the store where I work in the months before it was published in October of 2008. But, if you can slow yourself down or if you decide to read it a second time (which I suspect you will) not only will you be able to take more notice of Oliver's beautiful writing, but you will also find yourself contemplating the fascinating conceit of this utopian/dystopian novel more intensely. I am sure readers will tear through Lauren Oliver'ssecond novel, Delirium the first time they read it, anxious to see how the story of Lena unfolds.

Delirium oliver