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themadpoker) wrote2011-05-02 12:26 pm
themadpoker) wrote2011-05-02 12:26 pm
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Book Review: Delirium by Lauren Oliver
Goodreads 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.
Whether you'll like this book depends heavily on how much you can suspend your disbelief. I had some difficulty with it because I kept questioning the central premise. What could possibly inspire a society to pathologize love? I think successful dystopias generally take problematic tendencies in society and run them to the extreme. So you take something like The Hunger Games and you're like 'oh okay she's dealing with exploitation as entertainment, the manufactured 'reality' of reality television, the fact that even justified war is horrific, etc'. You read Delirium and you're like 'oh yes, she's criticizing the way our society devalues parental and romantic heterosexual love! ...Wait a minute'. I think I might have been able to buy it better if the lack of love had been framed as a side effect? Like maybe the government started lobotomizing people as a misguided way of bringing about peace -- no strong emotions means no one could hate anyone enough to kill them. Unfortunately people lost their ability to love alongside their ability to feel so they started a propaganda campaign to say love wasn't that essential anyways. It destroys your rationality, losing it hurts, and all in all everyone is much better off not feeling things too hard. But the book kept emphasizing love itself as a disease from which pretty much every horrible consequence you can think of springs. Lena believes her mother committed suicide because she was never successfully 'cured' and the disease amor deliria nervosa always kills in the end. And like I said, I just could not figure out how Lena's society ever got to that point.
It didn't help that I couldn't stop nitpicking at the worldbuilding. Everyone receives the cure after they've turned eighteen, any earlier runs high risks of the procedure harming the patient's brain development. In the meanwhile boys and girls are kept strictly segregated so they won't fall in love with each other. First thing I thought was that wasn't going to be super effective in preventing any girls falling in love with girls or boys with boys. This doesn't really get addressed outside of a line where Lena mentions that homosexuality is known as Unnaturalism and seen as a side effect of the disease. I also kept thinking about the fact that there are different kinds of love. I'll take it on faith that the rules manage to prevent say, 80% of the population from finding romantic love (which they don't really seem to, Lena spends some time sneaking out to secret parties where boys and girls mix freely and most of the people she knows had to be forcibly dragged to their procedures because they managed to contract the disease but LALALALALA this society functions okay shut up it DOES) but what about the love you feel for your friends? Or your parents? The narrative's fairly clear on the fact that it's not just romantic love that's pathologized, it's every single kind. Lena's mother gets into a whole lot of trouble for visibly appearing to love her children and for the first half of the novel Lena just mentally sidesteps the idea that she won't love her best friend anymore after she has her procedure done. It's a society that's set up to self-destruct because you can feed people as much propaganda as you like -- and they do, Lauren Oliver starts each chapter with excerpts from textbooks and children's rhymes that support the love is EVIL party line -- but if everyone under 18 is capable of loving than they're going to and there will be built in resistance to the cure.
So yes. I had some trouble with this book! I actually only finished it because I am deeply committed to keeping up with all the popular YA releases I can. I have a ~dream~ and it involves someday working as either a YA librarian or bookseller. Books like these are RESEARCH.
On the plus side though, Lauren Oliver is a decent writer on the technical level. Her prose didn't irritate me and occasionally there were parts I thought were genuinely lovely. Take this, for example:
There's another bit I quite like but it comes near the end and it's a massive spoiler. Suffice to say I didn't have problems reading this book outside of my inability to accept its premise. I also liked that despite the fact that Lena's awakening to the ~horrors~ of her society is intimately tied to her falling in love with Alex1 Lauren Oliver didn't make the mistake of ignoring and devaluing her other relationships. This just in: it's possible to write a YA romance where the heroine has a life outside of the hero! I can think of a half dozen popular authors who could take a clue there.
1. The designated love interest. Pleasantly inoffensive; he did nothing that made me dislike him but he didn't really stand out as a character I particularly loved either. Which is kind of an apt description for this book as a whole! Love is good is a message I take no issue with but it's not really blowing my mind either.
But with ninety-five days left until her treatment, Lena does the unthinkable: She falls in love.
Whether you'll like this book depends heavily on how much you can suspend your disbelief. I had some difficulty with it because I kept questioning the central premise. What could possibly inspire a society to pathologize love? I think successful dystopias generally take problematic tendencies in society and run them to the extreme. So you take something like The Hunger Games and you're like 'oh okay she's dealing with exploitation as entertainment, the manufactured 'reality' of reality television, the fact that even justified war is horrific, etc'. You read Delirium and you're like 'oh yes, she's criticizing the way our society devalues parental and romantic heterosexual love! ...Wait a minute'. I think I might have been able to buy it better if the lack of love had been framed as a side effect? Like maybe the government started lobotomizing people as a misguided way of bringing about peace -- no strong emotions means no one could hate anyone enough to kill them. Unfortunately people lost their ability to love alongside their ability to feel so they started a propaganda campaign to say love wasn't that essential anyways. It destroys your rationality, losing it hurts, and all in all everyone is much better off not feeling things too hard. But the book kept emphasizing love itself as a disease from which pretty much every horrible consequence you can think of springs. Lena believes her mother committed suicide because she was never successfully 'cured' and the disease amor deliria nervosa always kills in the end. And like I said, I just could not figure out how Lena's society ever got to that point.
It didn't help that I couldn't stop nitpicking at the worldbuilding. Everyone receives the cure after they've turned eighteen, any earlier runs high risks of the procedure harming the patient's brain development. In the meanwhile boys and girls are kept strictly segregated so they won't fall in love with each other. First thing I thought was that wasn't going to be super effective in preventing any girls falling in love with girls or boys with boys. This doesn't really get addressed outside of a line where Lena mentions that homosexuality is known as Unnaturalism and seen as a side effect of the disease. I also kept thinking about the fact that there are different kinds of love. I'll take it on faith that the rules manage to prevent say, 80% of the population from finding romantic love (which they don't really seem to, Lena spends some time sneaking out to secret parties where boys and girls mix freely and most of the people she knows had to be forcibly dragged to their procedures because they managed to contract the disease but LALALALALA this society functions okay shut up it DOES) but what about the love you feel for your friends? Or your parents? The narrative's fairly clear on the fact that it's not just romantic love that's pathologized, it's every single kind. Lena's mother gets into a whole lot of trouble for visibly appearing to love her children and for the first half of the novel Lena just mentally sidesteps the idea that she won't love her best friend anymore after she has her procedure done. It's a society that's set up to self-destruct because you can feed people as much propaganda as you like -- and they do, Lauren Oliver starts each chapter with excerpts from textbooks and children's rhymes that support the love is EVIL party line -- but if everyone under 18 is capable of loving than they're going to and there will be built in resistance to the cure.
So yes. I had some trouble with this book! I actually only finished it because I am deeply committed to keeping up with all the popular YA releases I can. I have a ~dream~ and it involves someday working as either a YA librarian or bookseller. Books like these are RESEARCH.
On the plus side though, Lauren Oliver is a decent writer on the technical level. Her prose didn't irritate me and occasionally there were parts I thought were genuinely lovely. Take this, for example:
Love is the deadliest of all deadly things: It kills both when you have it and when you don't.
But that isn't it, exactly.
The condemner and the condemned. The executioner; the blade; the last-minute reprieve; the gasping breath and the rolling sky above you and the thank you, thank you, thank you God.
Love: It will kill and save you, both.
There's another bit I quite like but it comes near the end and it's a massive spoiler. Suffice to say I didn't have problems reading this book outside of my inability to accept its premise. I also liked that despite the fact that Lena's awakening to the ~horrors~ of her society is intimately tied to her falling in love with Alex1 Lauren Oliver didn't make the mistake of ignoring and devaluing her other relationships. This just in: it's possible to write a YA romance where the heroine has a life outside of the hero! I can think of a half dozen popular authors who could take a clue there.
1. The designated love interest. Pleasantly inoffensive; he did nothing that made me dislike him but he didn't really stand out as a character I particularly loved either. Which is kind of an apt description for this book as a whole! Love is good is a message I take no issue with but it's not really blowing my mind either.