REVIEW: Requiem by Lauren Oliver

Pub. Date: March 5th 2013
Publisher: Harper
Pages: 391
Readership: Young adult
Genres: dystopia

They have tried to squeeze us out, to stamp us into the past.  

But we are still here.  

And there are more of us every day.  

Now an active member of the resistance, Lena has been transformed. 

The nascent rebellion that was under way in Pandemonium has ignited into an all-out revolution in Requiem, and Lena is at the center of the fight.  

After rescuing Julian from a death sentence, Lena and her friends fled to the Wilds. But the Wilds are no longer a safe haven—pockets of rebellion have opened throughout the country, and the government cannot deny the existence of Invalids. Regulators now infiltrate the borderlands to stamp out the rebels, and as Lena navigates the increasingly dangerous terrain, her best friend, Hana, lives a safe, loveless life in Portland as the fiancée of the young mayor.
Maybe we are driven crazy by our feelings.  

Maybe love is a disease, and we would be better off without it.  

But we have chosen a different road.  

And in the end, that is the point of escaping the cure: We are free to choose.  

We are even free to choose the wrong thing.

It's always difficult reading the end of a series. It's even more difficult when you're at the end of a favorite series. The Delirium trilogy is by far one of my favorite reads ever. It is just amazing and it was hard to say goodbye to it. That's why, though I finished the book over a week ago, I'm only writing the review now. The review is the final nail in the coffin, so to speak. Yes, I can always re-read them - which I will do - but I can never read the books for the first time again. Never meet these characters for the first time and feel all the wonderment, joy, sadness and anger at reading the words for the first time. It's a really sad thing to do. Reading the final page of the final book in a series and closing it is a grieving process.

I'm going to try to make this as spoiler-free as possible but if you haven't read Delirium or Pandemonium then you should not read this review.

I was really excited to get to see things from Hana's POV. At times, her chapters intrigued me more than Lena's. She's cured. She's on the cusp of marrying the new mayor. And since she's cured, she should probably be clouded, not caring and looking forward to her shiny new life. But she isn't. She's questioning things and the old Hana is poking through the cure. She's scared. There were times when I read Lena's chapters super fast just because I wanted to see more of Hana.

Requiem is a definite page turner. There was no lack of action, of movement, between Hana's struggles and realizations to Lena and her group trying to find shelter and then the resistance. There was never a lull and I am glad for that. And the deaths. The series and the events in the book definitely call for them but that didn't make the deaths any less shocking and sad.

Then there was the ending. Personally, I loved it. I've seen a lot of reviews and heard a lot of people smacking it, hating it, and downright being nasty about it. But I thought it was perfect. If there was a clean cut ending, all tied up with a bow, I don't think I would have been happy. If Lena had made a choice between Alex and Julian, I wouldn't have been happy. It's much more complicated than that. There is no clean-cut, happy ending for the world that the Delirium took place, at least not yet. Change is going to take a lot of work. A lot more blood, sweat and tears. The ending should reflect that, and it did. The ending is a new beginning and I absolutely adored it.

So as sad as I am to say goodbye to the series, I'd like to think that the characters I fell in love with are okay somewhere and happy. Who knows, maybe one day Lauren will revisit them and we'll get to see how they're holding up. But for now, there's only a bright new horizon for the characters in the triolgy.

★★★★★ 

I LOVED IT

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REVIEW: Pandemonium by Lauren Oliver

Pub. Date: February 28th 2012
Publisher: HarperTeen
Pages: 375
Readership: Young adult
Genres: dystopia
Rating: ★★★★★

I'm pushing aside the memory of my nightmare,pushing aside thoughts of Alex,pushing aside thoughts of Hana and my old school,push,push,push,like Raven taught me to do.The old life is dead.But the old Lena is dead too.I buried her.I left her beyond a fence,behind a wall of smoke and flame.

Sometimes the sophomore book in a series falls short. A number of things could happen: the author get lazy, it doesn't live up to the hype of the first, it just somehow ends up falling flat in every way possible or it simply sucks. Pandemonium is not one of those sophomore books. It was fantastic. It lived up to every one of the expectations that I had.

I love how the book was split between going back and forth NOW and THEN. It really showed all that Lena had gone through, her feelings from start to finish and the roller coaster she'd metaphorically been on. Lauren didn't simply do a time jump and suddenly Lena was all strong since losing Alex and crossing into the Wilds. She wasn't suddenly this new person. We saw how she was truly gutted, how she sometimes wished that she to had died while crossing instead of losing the man she loved. We saw her gradually grow and heal, even when she was in the NOW sequences. It was something I haven't seen done before.

In Pandemonium we also meet some new characters. There is Raven, Tack, Hunter - a few more - and of course, Julian. They are all fantastic and play a part in Lena becoming who she is now: brave, strong but also, underneath it all, a little bit broken still. You can be strong and broken at the ame time. Hell, I think you can only admit that you're broken if you're strong. Julian is Lena's new love interest and in many ways, he helped her mourn Alex and to heal. In no way has Lena let go but she's moving on.

Pandemonium doesn't lack action scenes. At points I was on the edge of my seat, fighting sleep, just to see what happened next. There was no way I was going to go to sleep or head back to work until I knew what was going on. Pandemonium is a brilliant mix of action as well as a very human story, as well as the dystopian element. Pandemonium will not disappoint you. It's one of the best sequels in a series I've read in a while.

I will say this: I wish I had read Pandemonium closer to the release date of Requiem because the cliffhanger is big. Very, very, very big. Huge and hair pulling and oh my GOD, it's big.

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REVIEW: Delirium by Lauren Oliver

Pub. Date: February 1st 2011
Publisher: HarperTeen
Pages: 316
Readership: Young adult
Genres: dystopia
Rating: ★★★★★

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 government 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.

I have no idea why it took me so long to read this. It has everything I love: dystopia, a good romance, and a great main character. But I put it off, and I put it off. Finally I decided to dive in. I'm glad I did.

At first, I was a little uncomfortable with the world of Delirium. Let me explain. A world without love? A world where it's viewed as a disease? I can see why but it still makes my stomach turn. It's baffling to think of a world without it. What about all the music, all the books, the movies, the television shows? Love is a big part of the world, an integral part, and to have that gone? "Cured"? It's insane. Inhumane. Wrong. But that's the world of Delirium. And people seem happy with it; to walk around as living zombies with veils over their eyes. They live in a fog. They don't even love their children. When they scrape their knees, they don't ask them if they're alright and wipe away their tears. They bark at the child to get up. It's insane to me, to imagine a world like that in Delirium. Lauren Oliver weaved it well, though. I could almost imagine being in it, being in Portland, surrounded by the boarder, fenced in like an animal. I'd like to think I would be a resister, or maybe even an Invalid on the other side, living in the Wilds.

In the beginning, I wasn't keen on Lena. She seemed to be trying to hard to fit into the mold of who she thought she should be; quiet, happy for the cure, obedient. She was trying hard to conform to who society needed her to be but she's not that person. It was nice to see her grown and come to realize who she was, and who she didn't want to be. 'I'd rather die my way than live yours' is something she says towards the end which really made me absolutely love her. I can't even imagine being in her shoes, having to choose which life to live: the one she wants to or the one that everyone around her expects her to. Lena is well written. She's someone a reader will really root for.

Alex.... I don't know where to begin on him. He had me the second he appeared in the story. Alex is a fantastic male lead. He opened Lena's eyes to the world. He showed her that the life the Cureds lead is no life at all. He showed her that there is more. Their romance is fantastic. It's a steady, realistic build up and then it just grips you and you find yourself hoping, praying and making deals with crossroad demons that they get a happy ending.

Lauren Oliver did a fantastic job. Her writing is absolutely stunning. I ended up with dozens of sticky tabs poking out of my copy because there were just so many quotes that I wanted to remember. She also does a fantastic job of creating a dystopian world that seems real; a world that could be a reality sometime in the near or distant future. It creates a sense of foreboding and unease that I talked about in the beginning. To live in a world where you cannot love, in a world there people cannot love you; it's a horrifying idea. Love is what makes us, shapes us. Whether it's romantic love, familial love or the love you have for a book or a movie or a song. There is none of that in this world. Lauren did such an amazing job that you could close your eyes and almost be in that world. She made it so that you felt like you could visit this world and feel the unease, see the fog in people's eyes. Some dystopians feel unrealistic and silly; this is not one of them. Delirium was a thrill ride that left me on the edge of my seat. Don't even get me started on the ending! I need to start Pandemonium right away.

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