Review: Delirium by Lauren Oliver

Before scientists found the cure, people thought love was a good thing. They didn’t understand that once love - the deliria - blooms in your blood, there is no escaping its hold. Things are different now. Scientists are able to eradicate love, and the governments demands that all citizens receive the cure upon turning eighteen. Lena Holoway has always looked forward to the day when she’ll be cured. A life without love is a life without pain: safe, measured, predictable, and happy. 
But with ninety-five days left until her treatment, Lena does the unthinkable: She falls in love.

There was a lot of hype for this book before it even came out. I remember reading a few reviews of ARC’s back in October and getting quite excited about the whole thing. But I remained cautious – after all, a book getting quite this amount of love? Surely there must be a flaw somewhere, or it wouldn’t be quite as good as I’d imagined? After all people weren’t just reviewing this, Carla from ‘The Crooked Shelf’ even wrote a love letter to Lauren Oliver after reading this.

But I was an idiot for doubting, and they were all right. This book is incredible. In fact, it’s so good that I’m kind of speechless.
It was love at its best and worst, it was every kiss and fight and look - and it broke my heart completely. Because it was everything that love should be, everything that it is, and the fear over whether love is destroying you or remaking you. And ultimately, every doubt over whether love can ever possibly be enough.

Oliver’s prose is quite simply breath taking, It’s lyrically beautifully in a way I’ve only ever come across once before in a short story by Simon Van Booy – but a whole book with this achingly poignant style was incredible.
She captures perfectly the aching pain and exquisite pleasure of love. The sparks of desire and photograph moments of clarity that comes with first love. I want to read the book over and over, so that her words would imprint on my very soul. I know this sounds incredibly cheesy, but I’m not even joking. I want everything in the world to be as beautiful as Lauren Oliver’s prose makes it.

Lena is so real, so perfectly written – the confusion and angst that come with love, with the betrayals and confines she used to find comforting suddenly tightening around her. Alex is incredible. He has shot straight in to my top ten list of fictional boys that I officially want to marry/steal/make real, because dating fictional boys never ends well.

I never knew how it would end. It can be boring when you can work out what will happen in a book, but this kept me guessing right up until the final two pages. You never know quite what will happen, how it will work out, what Lena will ultimately choose to do.

I can’t really explain coherently my love for this book. It was incredible. It was poetic. It was heart achingly beautiful. And I want to read it again and again and again.

If you haven’t read it, go out and get a copy immediately, because you won’t truly understand why so many people are waxing lyrical about it until you experience it first-hand.

If you have read it, you know exactly what I’m talking about when I say, wow. That was intense, incredible, and utterly perfect.