Delirium Trilogy by Lauren Oliver | Book Review

Blurb from Goodreads for Delirium:

Ninety-five days, and then I’ll be safe. I wonder whether the procedure will hurt. I want to get it over with. It’s hard to be patient. It’s hard not to be afraid while I’m still uncured, though so far the deliria hasn’t touched me yet. Still, I worry. They say that in the old days, love drove people to madness. The deadliest of all deadly things: It kills you both when you have it and when you don’t.

My Overall Rating: ★★☆☆☆

My Thoughts:

I read these books in April and May and decided to review them as a series instead of separately, because honestly I don’t think I would want to review them by themselves.

To start off with, Love is a disease. That’s a great concept and is what caught my attention and made me read the book in the first place. The first book is told in first person from Lena’s point of view.   She is counting down the days until she gets cured from ever having to deal with the disease that is “Love”. And everything was going good, until on the day she was to take a placement test for her future spouse, she saw a boy. An Invalid, someone how no longer exists in the government system and lives in the Wilds. She can’t stop thinking about him and wondering who he was. Her best friend, Hana, is a girl that is bound and determined to experience as much of life as she can before her cure. This means going to illegal parties and dancing and being close to boys. As the book goes on, Lena finds the boy again, except he is a security guard. They get close, but only as close as you can get while being cured, for the boy at least. As the book goes on we find out more and more about what is really going on.

In book 2 Lena has escaped from Portland and at the cost of a beloveds life. This book switches between the past, aka what happened immediately after she left Portland, to the present, aka her infiltrating a city with the group of people that helped her get better after running through the woods and nearly killing herself from exhaustion and dehydration. The book itself was ok. I still didn’t care for it much. Lena falls for someone else. They get taken and have to escape. At the end of the book the person she thought was dead was not…but he was different.

Finally in book 3 it is told from Lena’s perspective and Hana’s. At this point Lena is with people trying to plan a way to get into Portland again, and they come up with a pretty good one. Hana is counting down the days until she is to be married. At this point she is already cured, but has noticed some things that shouldn’t be happening are. As the book progresses Lena just has one goal in mind. To save her little cousin that got left behind when Lena left the city. Yes her cousin had her parents, but because of Lena they were shunned and no one would do business with them. Hana realizes that she doesn’t want this life and tries to think of how to get out of it. And there is none. Until Portland gets invaded and the people want to kill her new husband. She takes this chance to leave. Lena finds her cousin. And that’s how the book ends.

Conclusion:

One thing that really pushed me over the edge that I didn’t like was the fact the POV changed. Every. Single. Book. I mean, if the book had been told from solely 3rd person it would have been fine. But the entire book series is told from 1st person and I just couldn’t stand it. Also. The ending. That was not an ending in my opinion. I feel like there should have been at least one more full book.