Hardcover: 441 pages
Publisher: HarperTeen; 1st edition (February 1st 2011)
Language: EnglishISBN-10: 0061726826
ISBN-13: 9780061726828
Source: Purchased from BookDepository
First Sentence: "It has been sixty four years since the president and the Consortium identified love as a disease, and forty three since scientists perfected a cure."
Favorite Line from the Book: "Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge. That's what it is: an edge; a razor. It draws up through the center of your life, cutting everything in two. Before and after. The rest of the world falls away on either side.
Before and after and during, a moment no bigger or longer than an edge."Book Summary: Before scientists found the cure, people thought love was a good thing. They didn’t understand that once love -- the deliria -- blooms in your blood, there is no escaping its hold. Things are different now. Scientists are able to eradicate love, and the governments demands that all citizens receive the cure upon turning eighteen. Lena Holoway has always looked forward to the day when she’ll be cured. A life without love is a life without pain: safe, measured, predictable, and happy.
But with ninety-five days left until her treatment, Lena does the unthinkable: She falls in love.
When I finished this book, I had this gut-wrenching pain that shot through me. There are just books which touch you deeply. Books which just steadily keeps on zooming into your heart and captivated you forever. Delirium is one of those books.
Lena Haloway leaves in a time wherein love is considered as a disease – amor deliria nervosa. A cure was discovered by scientists and the government mandates all citizens to go through the procedure. It was only ninety five days before Lena’s eighteenth birthday. The procedure will only be given when a teenager reaches eighteen years old. Lena was your typical law-abiding citizen. She doesn’t go beyond the norm. Lena is nervously anticipating the “cure.” She believes, just like the rest of society, that the cure will take away all the pain. Then she met Alex and slowly got infected. They’ve experienced a world totally theirs, a world full of love and secrets. Until one day Lena and Alex must decide on what to do next on how to proceed with their love and lives.
Delirium is such a gripping story. I absolutely love dystopian novels and this book definitely opened a new world for me – a world without love. Who would ever thought of a premise based on that? Lauren Oliver did and she’s a genius!
The entire novel captivated me. It was beautifully written to the point that I could feel what the characters are feeling… and that includes the secondary characters too. I could see the world of Lena and Alex though the intricate ways that the author described them. I absolutely love the how Lauren Oliver included passages, poems, etc. before each chapter began. It gives us not only an overview of the world that they live in, but definitely gives us clearer picture of how the characters were raised based on those snapshots of history and The Book of Shh. Each character is beautifully written. There is not a single character that I did not connect with in this book. Even Aunt Carol, Gracie, and Rachel I was able to understand where they were coming from. And the ending, it was just so astounding and shocking. It left me with a craving for more. It left me with a feeling of just pure loneliness of the events that went through. I even cried my eyes out. That’s how gripping it is. That’s how this book can captivate you and will never let you go.
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