Ms. Dickinson's Purple and Gold Pick of the Week: Delirium by Lauren Oliver

For centuries, poets, novelists, playwrights, and musicians have written about the pain of love.  Love hurts.  Love can make you lose your mind.  Loving people can lead to heartbreak or unbearable sorrow.  In the future depicted in Lauren Oliver's latest novel, the dark and scary side of human emotion has been labeled a dangerous disease known as deliria--and it has a cure.  No one can put themselves or other people in danger because of love anymore.  Now, at around age 18, everyone is processed and gets the procedure which will protect them from catching deliria.   Lena Halloway can't wait for her procedure to happen in just a few months on her 18th birthday.  Some people get worried about the procedure or try to resist the scientists when the day comes but Lena is excited and anxious to be cured. Lena wants to be safe and happy for the rest of her life--unlike her mother who suffered from an intense case of deliria and killed herself.

Then the worst thing imaginable happens: Lena falls in love.  And suddenly she realizes that her whole life has been based on a lie.  Now Lena would give almost anything to avoid the quickly approaching procedure.  Being safe no longer seems worth losing the ability to truly feel for the first time in her life.

In the mix of emerging dystopian fiction, Delirium has a particularly intriguing premise that helps it stand out from the pack.  Lena is an appealing character; her development from eager and nervously obedient citizen to passionate rebel is slow but believable and her initial support and belief for the existing systems helps draw the reader into the world more quickly.  Both Lena and her situation reminded me of Cassia in that other romantic dystopian thriller, Matched; both characters begin the stories very firmly invested in the status quo of their worlds and are transformed slowly by exposure to people (in both cases, male love interests specifically) who can show them a different side of the system.  Oliver very successfully depicts both the headiness and rush of first love and the sinister and slick action of a controlling state in an addictive novel that is equal parts tragic romance and dystopian thriller.  The larger universe could be more strongly developed and Delirium is not the best of the recent dystopian novels published over the last year.  However, the novel stands out as an intense and quite lovely exploration of the two-sided sword of human emotion and connection and will appeal to fans of both intense romances like those written by Maggie Stiefvater, Sarah Dessen, or Deb Caletti and dystopian fiction such as Wither, Matched , and the Uglies series.       

Check out Delirium by Lauren Oliver, author of Before I Fall,

 on display in the US Library's fiction section now!