Lena Tiddle is ready for her eighteenth birthday. By then,
she'll be done with high school, matched with the boy
she'll someday marry and ready to start college. But more
importantly, on that day, she will undergo the permanent
surgical cure for amor deliria nervosa -- better known as
love. But a few months before she is scheduled to receive
the cure, she meets a boy who makes her question whether
love is such a bad thing after all -- and whether she might
be falling in love with him.
DELERIUM delivers an evocative, often poetic, sense of
language, even as Oliver keeps ratcheting the tension and
increasing the risk Lena and her friends face. Theirs is a
dangerous society filled with guards and dogs and random
raids. Love, as defined here, is a broad category of
feelings. In addition to romantic attachment, the cure is
supposed to remove everything from the rapturous response
to art to familial affection to the pain of loss. The cure
is mandatory and Lena's mother was forced to undergo the
painful procedure three times (when the cure didn't "take")
before she committed suicide rather than face it again.
The best thing about this book is Lena herself. She finds
herself in a world that is very much a reaction against our
own. Her historians quote high divorce rates and
widespread drug use as a way to dull the pain as a reason
why the cure is necessary. Most YA protagonists start
railing against the distopia they find themselves in the
minute they find out there is another way. In Lena, Oliver
offers a unique -- yet very real -- perspective of a teen who
still believes what she has been taught (that emotions and
attachments are dangerous virulent things that can kill
you) and suffers profound guilt when she finds this at odds
with her own feelings.
Ninety-five days, and then I'll be safe. I wonder whether
the procedure will hurt. I want to get it over with. It's
hard to be patient. It's hard not to be afraid while I'm
still uncured, though so far the deliria hasn't touched me
yet. Still, I worry. They say that in the old days, love
drove people to madness. The deadliest of all deadly things:
It kills you both when you have it and when you don't.
Lauren Oliver astonished readers with her stunning debut,
Before I Fall. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called
it "raw, emotional, and, at times, beautiful. An end as
brave as it is heartbreaking." Her much-awaited second novel
fulfills her promise as an exceptionally talented and
versatile writer.
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