Sarah has been buying books on our Kobo account lately to use the Chapters gift cards she got for Christmas. Two of the books she bought are Delirium and Pandemonium, the first two books in a trilogy by Lauren Oliver. I absolutely recommend this book for anyone who likes the recent rash of teen books - Twilight, Hunger Games, Cassandra Clare's City books, etc.
SPOILER ALERT: Do not read below the jump if you are planning to read this novel and don't want to know details about what happens.
The premise of Delirium is that a scientist in the United States diagnoses love as a disease, and comes up with a cure that desensitizes the patient so extreme emotions. Basically a lobotomy. But he starts some sort of cult and it takes over. The US closes it's borders and performs the procedure on all of it's citizenry that it can catch. Huge swaths of the US cannot be monitored and controlled, however, and become the Wilds, where the Invalids (people who haven't been "cured") live.
Delirium takes place in cured Portland, Oregon and focuses on Lena, who is a few months from her cure when the book starts. The cure can only be performed someone older than 18 - it causes various mental problems in anyone younger. Lena lives in both fear and hope for her cure, since her mother was diseased and supposedly committed suicide. However, on the day of the evaluation procedure that will determine where she will go to college and who she will marry after the cure, she meets Alex, who has a cure scar but turns out to be an Invalid born outside of the city and smuggled in by the resistance. Against all the rules and Lena's better sense, they start hanging out - dating, really - and they fall in love. Lena stills plans to stay in Portland and go through with the cure until Alex tells her that her supposedly dead mother is really in jail for love. They find her cell only to find that she has escaped into the Wilds. Lena is furious and plans to run away with Alex but is caught. They move up the date of her cure but she escapes and her and Alex make a run for the border. The book ends with Alex sacrificing himself so that Lena can make it over the fence and get away.
While this is a premise that has been used (successfully) in a number of book series lately, Lauren Oliver does a really good job setting up the atmosphere and the characters. The random quotes scattered in from existing literature to tie our current society into this one help to ground the story. It might even be said that it's not unfathomable that the Americans would rewrite history to suit them, or be governed by a cult. I really liked how Lena was so torn between wanting to be in love and being scared of it. She wanted to stay in her safe place in the world but can't because of Alex and her mother. I'm really looking forward to reading Pandemonium.
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