Pages

Thursday, March 14, 2013

Review: Pandemonium (Delirium #2), by Lauren Oliver


Title: Pandemonium (Delirium #2)
Author: Lauren Oliver
Source: Borrowed from library
Format: ebook

From Goodreads: "So what was your name before?" I say, and she freezes, her back to me. "Before you came to the Wilds, I mean."

For a moment she stands there.

Then she turns around.

"You might as well get used to it now," she says with quite intensity.

"Everything you were, the life you had, the people you knew... dust."

She shakes her head and says, a little more firmly, "There is no before. There is only now, and what comes next."

After falling in love, Lena and Alex flee their oppressive society where love is outlawed and everyone must receive the "cure" - an operation that makes them immune to the delirium of love - but Lena alone manages to find her way to a community of resistance fighters. Although she is bereft without the boy she loves, her struggles seem to be leading her toward a new love."

My Opinion: I just finished this book and all I can think is: Holy freaking cliffhanger, Batman!!! I kid you not! I haven't been this excited to start the third book in a trilogy in a long time because I HAVE to find out what happens next! I'll try to calm down a little bit and give you my thoughts on this most awesome book. 

Lena has made it over the fence and into the Wilds, but unfortunately Alex didn't, and now Lena has to try to find her own way in an unknown and terrifying new world. Near death, she is found by a homesteader, Raven, one of a group of people who live and work together just to survive. There she begins to slowly rebuild her life and find a new purpose. 

The chapters switch off between "then" (when she first got to the Wilds and the months following) and "now" (approximately six months after that). Both time periods are interesting and the "then" chapters help us to understand how the "now" chapters came about.

When you're reading a really good book, a story that you enter completely while reading it, and things are going well for the characters, you just know something bad has to happen to them to shake things up. You feel the dread building up inside of you, knowing it will happen but hoping it doesn't, but at the same time anticipation is building because you know when it does it will catapult the story into whole new exciting places, so that when it does happens you just have to cry out loud "Oh my God!" THAT's the moment when you know if the author is a good one or a great one. If you can't turn the pages fast enough at that point to find out where the story is taking you now, then it's a great author, and I can unequivocally state that Lauren Oliver is definitely one of the best!! 

If you can't tell yet, I devoured this story in less than 24 hours because I didn't care what was going on around me (yeah, I have to apologize to my kids who kept annoyingly requesting things like food and drink, only to be told "Just 5 more minutes!" Of course, they are kind of used to that by now since this happens a lot with me when I find a really good book :D) and would give it 10 stars if I could! I highly recommend it to lovers of dystopian stories since this is one of the best I've read to date. Since I can't give it 10 stars, I give it a very, very enthusiastic 5 stars!! Now, I have to go bug everyone I know for a copy of Requiem so I can read it right away :D

No comments:

Post a Comment