Delirium
Lauren Oliver
1st February 2011
Early thoughts:
Delirium is a painfully hypnotic and tantalising take on the dystopian genre for YA novels.
My heart is about to burst; in the last 100 pages, despite my reading this book on computer (I was DESPERATE to read this book that I pushed it to the top of my reading pile—not cool!), I was unable to do anything but continue reading, to continue the heart-wrenching journey of a love that is forbidden in the most epic of ways. The end was tactile and descriptive, and my mind was racing a million miles an hour;
it was as though I had become Lena, and in that time, that situation, I knew how she felt, I knew her pain and her desires and her never-ending conquest for something that the society would never allow of her. Lena comes off in the beginning of Delirium as a completely sheltered and happily ignorant product of this world that had been built around her, but by the end she’s so much more. She’s grown to this still-unsure girl, but she grows to this level of maturity that, among all her uncertainty, she knows one thing: I would rather DIE loving Alex than live in this society.
It’s something of a futuristic and outer-worldly take on the whole Romeo and Juliet phenomenon.
I know a lot of people on the blog are a bit tentative about reading this one via NetGalley, since reading books on computer are TORTURE (to those with e-readers and i-stuff, I envy you, only in this way), but this is one book that you DON’T WANT TO HAVE TO WAIT FOR. Oliver hits home exactly what expectations I had been holding of her next work when I finished off Before I Fall, her debut novel. She may have even exceeded those expectations. Oh yes, she delivered. Definitely pre-order this novel, and
I can’t wait for the next instalment of this alluring series, which combines two of my loves in literacy: dystopia and romance. I need to breathe now.
And yes, there is a killer of a cliffhanger at the end. Lauren Oliver remains among the top of my revered authors list.
Quotes:
#1
Most things, even the greatest movements on earth, have their beginnings in something small. An earthquake that shatters a city might begin with a tremor, a tremble, a breath. Music begins with a vibration. The flood that rushed into Portland twenty years ago after nearly two months of straight rain, that hurtled up beyond the labs and damaged over a thousand houses, swept up tires and trash bags and old, smelly shoes and floated them through the streets like prizes, that left a thin film of green mold behind, a stench of rotting and decay that didn't go away for months, began with a trickle of water, no wider than a finger, lapping up onto the docks.
And God created the whole universe from an atom no bigger than a thought.
(pg. 106 of NetGalley e-ARC)
#2
Sometimes I feel like if you just watch things, just sit still and let the world exist in front of you—sometimes I swear that just for a second time freezes and the world pauses in its tilt. Just for a second. And if you somehow found a way to live in that second, then you would live forever.
(p. 111 of NetGalley e-ARC)
#3
And still the sun rises and clouds mass and drift and people shop for groceries and toilets flush and blinds go up and down. That's when you realize that most of it—life, the relentless mechanism of existing—isn't about you. It doesn't include you at all. It will thrust onward even after you've jumped the edge. Even after you're dead.
(p. 212 of NetGalley e-ARC)
Funny tidbit: I threw in all three quotes to I Write Like,
and it seems she writes similarly to Stephen King.
Links:
Goodreads page
Lauren's blog
Lauren's site
Harperteen page
Amazon |
The Book Depository
Publication (dd/mm/yyyy): 10/03/2015
