Book Review: Delirium, by Lauren Oliver

Short book review first:

Cinder, by Melissa Meyer
Cinder is  delightful, imaginative and cleverly plotted story, a hybrid between Cinderella and Sailor Moon, Sci-Fi and fairytale. The author (a self-proclaimed geek) set her story on the rarely used futuristic, funky version of a part Chinese, part Japanese society in which humans, androids, A.Is and cyborgs (in the story, cyborgs are secondary citizens) conexistened together. We also got the crisis of a mysterious plague, the tension between the Earthly states and the Lunar Kingdom.
Last but not least, there also is a romance between a kind-hearted prince and an orphaned cyborg girl from a far humbler background. (Okay, I must admit the plot and characters setting do reek of Sailor Moon a great deal)  Although I think the plot twists and the revealing of a certain character's true identity is extremely predictable (If you know enough about what's going on in Sailor Moon, you would figure most of the plot twists out right away). Still the story is highly entertaining and enjoyable, the writing is also good, so right now I'm eagerly waiting for the upcoming sequels.


Book Review: Delirium, by Lauren Oliver

Book Description from Amazon Review: Lena Haloway is content in her safe, government-managed society. She feels (mostly) relaxed about the future in which her husband and career will be decided, and looks forward to turning 18, when she'll be cured of deliria, a.k.a. love. She tries not to think about her mother's suicide (her last words to Lena were a forbidden "I love you") or the supposed "Invalid" community made up of the uncured just beyond her Portland, Maine, border. There's no real point—she believes her government knows how to best protect its people, and should do so at any cost. But 95 days before her cure, Lena meets Alex, a confident and mysterious young man who makes her heart flutter and her skin turn red-hot. As their romance blossoms, Lena begins to doubt the intentions of those in power, and fears that her world will turn gray should she submit to the procedure.  --Jessica Schein

Okay...so I finished this book, Delirium; a book describes a dystopian version of America, it turns out in this futuristic society, love is considered a fatal disease that needed to be cured so everyone can live in peace and order.

Well, in my opinion, Delirium has good writing, carefully and convincingly built characters to back it up. The world-building would also have been a finely detailed one if it were for one question that keeps popping up in my head:

It actually would take a lot of careful world-building and explanation for Miss Oliver's world to work out, but my problem with the book is: I can understand why a government might want to makes marital arrangement for its citizens, why they might want to censor what kind of books/movies/music etc their citizens are reading/watching/listening. But why on earth would they think ripping love/desire/passion out of people's brains is a good method for social control!?

Well, if you ask me, I'd say that if any government even try to do this--even going so far as to rewrite Bible to fit their anti-love scheme, then this government would most likely runs into all sort of troubles, putting the entire society under the risk of unrest even before achieving any kind of social control.

According to the author, the censorship against love isn't just limited to romantic love between men and women --alright, as you can predict, since it's a dystopian society we're talking about here, so gay and lesbian relationships are entirely out of the question-- parental love adults have for their kids, kinship between siblings and relatives, love between friends, love between pets and their owners; even down to the passion people have for their hobbies (music/books/sports etc); are also canceled.

May I ask, what kind of  benefit may the government gain by canceling all kind of love between citizens!?

I can understand why an evil government might want its citizens to have no strong desire and curiosity (so they would be less likely to ask questions), but before any benefit could be gained, I can already think of all sort of social problems that the absence of love would cause, e.g. child abuse (who would suffer the inconvenience of parenting and caring for those little monsters children if their parents don't have any parental love for them?) Not to mention, the number of people: adults, teenagers and children alike, who end up having mental diseases would also be skyrocketed. (haven't scientists warned us enough about how a loveless childhood would scar a person for life?) Plus wouldn't a lot of citizens also choose to remain single? (okay, how many people can suffer living with another person whom you have no special feeling for, for the rest of your life? I bet a lot of people would find the theory of it too horrifying to bear) Why the government can't find other easier methods--at least methods which would cause fewer side-effects-- to keep people under control?

Stories about dystopian society are great, but I would rather have the evil governments in those dystopian societies doing horrible things for a good reason or two, not me being told that these governments are controling/bad/evil, just because.

Plus I can't help comparing Delirium with Ally Condie's dystopian YA novel: Matched. I also can't help noticing Miss Condie did one thing that Miss Oliver failed to do: Condie had managed to make her dystopian world functional, with logic of its own while Miss Oliver's creation is shabbily built upon quicksand. In Miss Condie's fictional society, the government still got to choose its citizens' marital partners and jobs for them, they still censored books and knowledge that they didn't want its citizens to encounter, they still destroyed every 'unapproved' texts they could find, they played with citizens' minds by 'giving them just enough freedom, comfort and choices so they wouldn't question what's really going on'. And all of the above make sense to me, the setting in Matched actually makes its fictional world work for me. But in Miss Oliver's case, I think she had gone too far to a point that the supposedly original concept of 'love being banned and outlawed' becomes the one major flaw in her story.

Lena's character is understandable, she feels that she is inferior than the other teenages because her mother was never cured from love and committed suicide-- such parentage is as undesirable as having parents who are/had been in jail in our society. Therefore she's insecure about herself and hesitated to voice out her true opinion. Though I found Lena  to be understandable and realistic, still I didn't find her to be particularly likeable, instead I found myself caring about her friend Hana more as the story progressed. By comparison, Hana was a stronger, more vivid character than Lena, in fact in the story, key events happen because of Hana, while Lena looks like she was being acted upon than the otherwise. Therefore, if you like strong heroine for your YA, Delirium isn't the book for you.

By the way, there's a scene about Lena needing to sneak out after curfew to warn Hana of a crashdown against an underground party Hana was attending. Well, it should have been a chance for Lena to show her courage and concern for her best friend, but it turns out once the regulators crashed the party, Lena just ran away with Alex and then engaging in a long chat with him then also making out with him when Hana, her best friend, might still be lost in the dark or got beat into a bloody mess by the regulators? Lena, how could you?

Not to mention, I was unable to suppress my disbelief when I read that in a suppressing dystopian society, 500-plus teenagers were still able to sneak out and had a rave party after curfew; and the Invalids ('uncured' people who live in the Wilds) were able to pretend to be 'cured' citizens by simply creating scars on their necks . Oh god! What kind of dystopian society is that? The government and its reinforcers are failing miserably at keeping people under control!

There's one more problem about the world-building: the author also tells us her dystopian-America had closed its borders for years, forbidding people from exiting and entering the country. Oh, hey dystopian-America! Let's kiss international trade, stock market, world-domination, Made-In-China/India/Cambodia etc cheap produces goodbye! I'm certain the lack of these things would do the country much good!  

Delirium is a story that related heavily on the romance, but sadly I don't care about Lena's romance with Alex at all, I don't get to feel the love between these two characters the way I felt from Cassia and Ky's romance in Matched. There's chemistry between Cassia and Ky, even Cassia's relationship with her best friend Xander is also an understandable one. But I can't find anything to roof for Lena and Alex's romance. Alex is the nice, independent guy from the Wilds but I found nothing special about him. And of course, the boy who was paired with Lena was plain, had asthma and allergies and was a jerk (well, most of the teenage boys are); in another words, he is no match against Alex. So it leaves little suspense on who Lena is going to choose, that is quite disappointing.

That's another thing I don't really like about Lena. Have you met someone who constantly rants about how bad his or her life is, but hardly ever actually does something to change it? For most of the story Lena reminds me this type of annoying people. She didn't like how her life was going, but the best she could come up with is "That's my life" and swallowed whatever shit everyone else was giving her. Furthermore, she always rants about how plain-looking, how ordinary, how unattractive, how powerless she was while secretly being jealous of Hana (who is prettier and from a richer family). Well, if she lacks the guts to defend and express herself, if she can't even appreciate herself, then can somebody tell me why should I bother with her?

Everyone commented on Oliver's beautiful writing, I admit it really is good but not good enough that I'd enjoy stopping from time to time just to admire paragraph after paragraph of long description on different things. I'd rather have the author cutting out some of her long-winded writing so the story can move on in a faster pace. The ending is also good, I really enjoy the parts in which Lena confronted her sister and managed to escape, but as a whole, the story is not as good as I'd expected.

But if you ask will I read the sequel, the answer is yes, if I don't need to pay for it.