Delirium

Delirium (2011)

A novel by Lauren Oliver

Waktu edar : February 1st 2011

Waktu membaca : Februari 2011

Media membaca : ebook di Stanza for iPhone

Hal paling berkesan : beautiful writings, great dystopian world building

Love can make you do crazy things. We all know that. But this book takes it a step further. In this book, love is a disease. A deadly disease.

Lena lives in a future world where love, or amor deliria nervosa, is a disease. At the age of eighteen, everyone goes into surgery to remove this disease, called the cure. Everyone’s afraid of contracting it. The most deadly crime is to be caught with a member of the opposite sex. Singing, laughing too hard, or too-long hugs and kisses are forbidden. There are regulation officer that patrols the city to look for signs of the disease. If you want to read books, movies, and music, you have to search through the LAB (Library of Approved Books) and LAMM (Library of Approved Music and Movies) and you can download it throught the intranet. The officers patrol everything. They’re listening on phone conversations, through closed curtains, to make sure that everyone is safe from the disease. The required reading for health class are Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare, to remind them of the dangers of love.

Before graduation, students are put through an evaluation, to determined whether they can go to college or not. The government also pick four possible match candidate that students can marry based on the evaluation performance. Everything is orderly and safe, and everything is determined by the government. All cities are enclosed in electric fence, where beyond lies The Wild, a place people used to live before the cure. No one ever went into the Wild because it is forbidden.

Lena can’t wait for her own surgery in three months. She lives with her aunt and two cousins after her mother commits suicide rather than give up on love. Lena is always teased at school because of her mother. The only best friend she had is Hana, and her little cousin that won’t talk, Grace.

And then, at the day of her evaluation, she met a boy. A part-time guard at the laboratory where she took her evaluation. The boy, Alex, is nineteen, and he had the three dot mark on his neck, the sign of someone who’s gone through the surgery. Before she realize it, she began spending more and more time with him, and two months before her scheduled surgery, she realized something. She fell in love.

Let me tell you all the reason why I love this book. When I first read about this book, I knew instantly that I’m gonna like it. I love dystopian book. A book about a future world where everything is so right but so wrong always fascinates me. Granted, this premise has been done many times last year. The genre dystopian YA is huge right now. And I have read similar books, like The Giver by Lois Lowry (awesome book and my most favorite dystopian YA), Uglies series by Scott Westerfeld (more action than drama, but awesome), and the latest is Matched by Allie Condie (in which the heroine is matched with a boy through evaluation, just like this one, but she fell in love with another boy). I thought I have had enough of dystopian YA.

But it turns out that I like this book. A lot. What I like most is the way that the author, Lauren Oliver, writes. It’s beautiful, like a beautiful prose, and it’s haunting and sad at the same time. This is her second book. Her first book is Before I Fall, about a popular girl who’s in a car crash and gets to relive the day she died over and over again. I love that book, and I love this book too. I think I have become a fan of Lauren Oliver.

And I love the world building. Lena’s world is not that different from ours in some places, but it’s a lot different in others. Because there is no love, a mother holding her crying child is considered a disgrace. Even husband and wives that kiss too long, or hug to deeply, can be considered under suspicion. I love how the book portrays Lena. In a way, she’s just an ordinary girl. But underneath, she is brave. And when she said I love you for the first time, my heart breaks.

And the romantic interest. Alex is a rebel, a bad boy. And bad boys are always delicious. I love their romance. It’s bittersweet. Although I feel like Alex as a character is underdeveloped a little bit. But I like their interactions.

I always like dystopian book. And this book is nothing original. But I still like it, because of how beautiful the writing is. I love it. And what I remember most is a quote that’s still haunting my mind even after I finish reading it.

I love you. Remember it. They cannot take it.