Delirium (Delirium Series #1) by Lauren Oliver. Harper (HarperCollins Imprint) 2011. 441 pgs (paperback). Young adult, fiction, sci-fi, dystopian. Oliver_Delirium

 They say the cure for Love will make me happy and safe forever. And I’ve always believed them. Until now. Now everything has changed. Now, I’d rather be infected with love for the tiniest sliver of a second than live a hundred years smothered by a lie.

The premise behind Lauren Oliver’s Delirium is an interesting one—the world has been infected by the disease called amor deliria nervosa and every country has been closed off from one another. There are hints throughout the book that Europe has been completely destroyed by the disease, and that would make sense given the fact that Europeans are closer together. The United States has survived, though each major city is cut off from others by fences and security. An official written missive from the government is required to travel between cities.

Life is heavily regulated in the city of Portland, Maine, where the main character Lena lives with her aunt and cousins. Her parents are dead; her father died when she was an infant and her mother committed suicide after three failed attempts at “curing” her of love. See, there’s the thing—there is a cure of love, something that Lena looks forward to for the first half of the book. It is only when she meets and starts liking Alex, a presumably innocent Cured guy that she realizes what a veil the government has put over everyone’s eyes.

Overall the story of Delirium is good, but Lena as a character is, in my opinion, profoundly annoying. It seemed like every other page she would complain about feeling sick or almost vomiting, and I found myself very annoyed by the book and would put it down for a bit to get over it. There are other minor things in the book that irked me. There’s a scene where Alex reads Lena some poetry, and she’s all “I don’t know what that is!” But I recall her saying something about poems before and how they were banned by the government.

Lauren Oliver’s writing is pretty good (better than mine, anyway!) and the book ended on a pretty interesting twist of events. I’ll probably read the others in the series eventually, especially since Fox (I think) is making it into a TV show. If you’d like a preview of the book, HarperCollins has one over on their website.