Book Review: Delirium
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I know I don’t usually post reviews of books I didn’t enjoy, but I haven’t really been enjoying anything I’ve been reading lately. I also get a lot of hits on my blog from fellow indie authors, so I thought this would be a good example of how immersion can make or break your story.
Immersion isn’t just “losing yourself in the act of reading.” If I needed all my books to be so interesting that I literally forget I am even reading a book, I would never love anything I read. Instead, immersion is a more subtle concept. That is, internal logic, solid worldbuilding, and lack of plot holes. This book lacked the basic internal logic that I require out of my reading, and the plot had more holes in it than a spiderweb.
I’ve been in such a mood for dystopian stories since finishing The Hunger Games, so I was sure I was going to love this book, but… I didn’t love this book. Didn’t hate it, didn’t love it. It was just a “meh” book.
The premise behind this book is that modern science has deemed love as a disease that needs to be eradicated. The US has closed off its borders with a wall (ironically, this isn’t realistic for all the reasons) and each city has been closed off by an electrified fence (though considering the fact that this electrified fence concept has a huge impact in the finale, it’s never mentioned that it’s electrified and surrounds the whole city until about page 300 when the author suddenly seemed to realize “OH CRAP HOW DO THESE PEOPLE NOT RUN AWAY FROM THIS SITUATION” and was like “HAHA THERE’S BEEN A FENCE ALL ALONG!!”)
…This concept in and of itself has so many plot holes. One of my favorite aspects of dystopian stories is that they can take a simplified concept, stretch it so far until it becomes a “bad” thing, and it turns into a social or political commentary. Let’s look at some of favorite dystopian novels.
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The Hunger Games? The Games started because the Districts all revolted and the Capitol wanted a way to control them and show them that they are in a hopeless situation. Believable, and the premise of the Districts themselves are also realistic: natural disasters have destroyed most of the inhabitable land and humans had to re-form their societies in order to survive.
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City of Ember? The world was on the verge of a nuclear war and the best scientists chose a group of humans to live underground in safety so that humanity would survive.
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The Giver? All unnecessary concepts and emotions are excluded (even considering the fact that the process of how this was done is unstated, this is still believable, because the world inside the book is solid.) Also, I kinda feel like this book was a ripoff of The Giver. Like Oliver looked at The Giver, said “I want to write this exact same thing, but with more romance!” and then… poof, we get this train-wreck.
I guess one could say that the worldbuilding in this book really needed some work because the premise just falls apart immediately. What benefit does the government get out of subjugating the citizens this way? Of course, I’m a girl who nearly failed social studies and psychology both, so maybe I’m just not seeing it and it’s obvious to others. But it also is worth mentioning that the “cure” is just a simple lobotomy; in the early 20th century, lobotomies were commonly used to treat mental illness, but there were too many side effects and it was phased out of use. If the author had addressed this in some way (eg. having one of the characters reference how the “cure” was based on a surgery developed a few decades ago but improved enough that the previous surgery’s inevitable side effects were a moot point) it would have been able to at least immerse me a bit more. Instead, it was essentially contradicting something that I already knew, which prevented immersion.
Speaking of contradicting the reader’s perception of the world to prevent immersion, Lena at one point mentions that her uncle (not the one who lives with her, but I literally couldn’t tell them apart. She apparently has two uncles, but the only one that’s been mentioned up until this point is the one who lives with her, Uncle William or something or other–we’ve never heard about another uncle before this) couldn’t have gone east when he escaped because he would have ended up in the ocean.
Apparently the author never bothered to give us a geography lesson because we’re assuming that unlike in The Hunger Games, the land mass of the USA is the same as what we know currently. So going east from Portland would land the uncle in California. Unless the kids are told that there is no such thing as California anymore and it’s all just ocean, or California is gone somehow. Reason number 452 why the worldbuilding in this book was awful and cringeworthy…
I also didn’t really care for any of the characters. I wasn’t invested in the romance between Lena and Alex, I didn’t care about Hana, I barely remembered Lena’s family members, I was disappointed that Gracie was relegated to a background character because she’s the one character in this book I actually gave a crap about, and Rachel, Jenny, and Lena’s uncle had so little presence that every time they were mentioned, I had to backtrack and remind myself who they were. In chapter eight, Lena mentions how grateful she is that Andrew Marcus, who works at her uncle’s store, is cured and reassigned to a different store and I was just like “Who?”
It’s such a shame because this book could have been so much more, but the characterization and worldbuilding were so lacking that the story just crumbled. At one point Lena is worried about Hana getting caught by a raid.
UM HELLO YOU HAVE CELL PHONES. Everything that happened as a result of that scene was essentially BS because Lena goes out after curfew to find Hana and warn her about the surprise raid. She almost gets caught until Alex rescues her. AND THEN IT WAS JUST AN EXCUSE FOR THE AUTHOR TO WRITE A KISSING SCENE BETWEEN THEM BECAUSE LITERALLY THE NEXT DAY LENA IS LIKE “WONDER IF HANA WANTS TO TALK TO ME AGAIN” AND CALLS HER ON HER CELL PHONE. HELLO. HANA WOULD HAVE OSTENSIBLY BROUGHT HER PHONE WITH HER TO THE PARTY. It would have been a different thing entirely if, for example, the government use GPS tracking on people’s cell phones to spy on them so Hana made it a point to leave her phone at home when she went out after curfew, but this was never established, so see my note above about how this story could have been so much more if only the worldbuilding was better.
Along the worldbuilding lines, the house at 37 Brook Lane (I believe that’s the correct address but that speaks for itself that I can’t remember the address) was apparently an important place for Alex and Lena, but it had so little setup that I didn’t remember it, and near the final quarter or so of the book when Lena agreed to meet Alex “at the house” and then says “Oh, I remember coming here with Hana,” I was like “Huh?” She remembers how there were bats in the master bedroom the last time they came there and I was like “You guys never came here before!” Backtracking in the book proved my point; I could not find the scene Lena was referencing.
Then near the end there was a plot twist involving the true fate of Lena’s mother but I just DGAFed about it because it didn’t get enough of a setup. The author sold us too well on what Lena believed happened to her so when it was revealed that it wasn’t like that I did not care one bit about that. And why in anyone’s mind would it be a good idea for a dictatorship government that monitors every single aspect of their citizens’ lives and throws mentally ill people in prion to allow said mentally ill person to keep what was essentially a knife that she could either stab people with or use to dig her way out? I’m not buying it.
At the end when Lena finds out the truth about her mother, she gets so pissed at her relatives that she essentially stops caring. She thinks they’ve betrayed her. But they had zero presence in the story (as I’ve stated above) and we didn’t see enough of them fully believing and trying to convince Lena that her mother committed suicide that Lena’s belief that they betrayed her is pointless. it just makes her look like a spoiled little brat.
I didn’t really enjoy myself reading this book. I didn’t care about any of the characters. The only thing keeping me reading until the end was because I wanted to know the details of what the “cure” was and how it was scientifically possible to effectively remove someone of the feeling of love. But then I saw a review on this book that said it was a lobotomy and talked about how the characters still being able to love their children, their friends, etc. was unrealistic, and I agree. After reading that review, there were technically no more story questions remaining for me, so I don’t know why I didn’t just give up on the book at that point (I still had about 160 pages remaining to read) but I kept reading. Admittedly, I did have one day when I read for about ten minutes before getting ready for work in the morning and I lost myself in the act of reading, so maybe that kept me reading; I was hoping for the book to be one of those where you could lose yourself in the act of reading. But it never happened again. I don’t foresee myself ever picking up this book again, or reading the sequels, so three stars it is.
If you’d like to pick up a copy for yourself, you can buy Delirium on Amazon, add Delirium to your Goodreads, and follow Lauren Oliver on Twitter. (Apparently her debut novel Before I Fall was a lot better so I might give her another chance and pick up that one at some point.)
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Corinne 乙女
