Book Review - Pandemonium

Sarah was so anxious for me to read Pandemonium after I finished Delirium. I was pretty excited about it as well, since I really liked Delirium. 

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.

Pandemonium has a different structure than the first book. While Delirium had a linear timeline, Pandemonium alternates chapters - one in the future, and one from the moment Delirium left off and moving forwards. In a more legible summary:

Lena runs after the border crossing. She almost kills herself in the process, but is found by a group of Invalids and nursed back to health. She joins them at their camp, helping and eventually running with them when they are bombed by the police. They lose a few friends in the process and Lena fully commits to the Resistance. She works really hard to try not to think of Alex, who she believes to be dead. Lena is eventually smuggled into New York City with two others, Raven and Tack, as part of the undercover resistance. She is given the job of monitoring Julian, the son of the leader of the DFA, a fanatical group supporting the cure. Julian and Lena both wind up being kidnapped by an extreme faction of the Resistance, which turns out to be working somehow with the DFA. While escaping from this, Julian and Lena get closer and then fall for each other. They eventually get captured again and while Lena is smuggled out by members of the resistance, Julian is sent back to the city to be sterilized by lethal injection. When this turns out to be a plot by the Resistance to change support for the DFA, Lena leaves to go rescue Julian. Raven and Tack realize they've made a mistake and help her. Upon returning to the compound, Alex is there. The book winds up with Alex basically warning Julian not to believe anything Lena says about love.

Come on - who does Alex think he is? She thought he was dead and he's been gone for months! They're teenagers - months is an awfully long time. I think it was completely reasonable for her to fall for someone else. Of course, I haven't been locked up in jail, with her escape being the only thing I could think about day after day, hour after hour . . . It was a great ending for the book. I don't know if I wanted Alex to be alive, or if I wanted him to be a martyr. I realize love triangles are all the literary rage right now: Jacob/Bella/Edward, Peeta/Katniss/Gale, Will/Tessa/Jem. I'm getting a little tired of it, personally. Stop pulling the poor girls' emotions around! 

As for the DFA, the lobotomies are obviously not a good idea. The Resistance has the right idea in fighting back, but I don't agree with the methods. You can't become the thing you're fighting to defeat it - then you're just replacing it with something equally bad. They need to continue to try to convince the general citizenry to rise up and believe that the procedure is wrong. Hopefully this is the direction Oliver goes in with the next book, Requiem. Ugh, I hate waiting for books to come out!