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 suffocated by a lie.
There was a time when love was the most important thing in the world. People would go to the end of the earth to find it. They would tell lies for it. Even kill for it.
Then, at last, they found the cure.
Star Rating
This series has been on my TRL for a long time and, having thoroughly enjoyed Lauren Oliver's new offering, 'The Panic', I decided to finally read the first book in this popular series.
What if love was a disease? This question sums up the dystopic idea behind this brilliant novel by Lauren Oliver. The protagonist, Lena, lives in a terrifying vision of the future where society has banned love, here known as 'The Deliria.' The government, otherwise known as the Consortium, believe love to be a terminal disease with symptoms such as depression, insomnia and anxiety.
'The deliria moves around us with invisible, sweeping tentacles, choking us.'
In order to save people from this harrowing disease, scientists have perfected a cure - to rid people of the emotion 'love' and match them with a partner for life. Lena's procedure to receive the cure is in exactly ninety-five days, on September 3, her birthday. Of course, with nearly all YA novels, the reader realises early on that Lena will meet a boy and fall in love. It is this knowledge that makes the novel all the more exciting as we begin to predict how Lena will escape the cure and live the life she wishes to lead with her true love Alex.
Lauren Oliver is an extremely talent writer who uses a very poetic style. At times I felt that her similes were a little overused and with such a strong plot line these were sometimes unnecessary. However, through her descriptive writing, Lauren Oliver manages to create very real characters that the reader can empathise with completely. All the way through the novel I found myself wondering what I would do if I was in a similar situation. On one hand Lena wants to please her family and conform to rule but she loves Alex and can't imagine life without him.
Towards the end of the novel there is a horrifying scene involving Lena's family that was very reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale.' Lauren Oliver had succeeded in creating a haunting vision of the future. With it's excellent, cliffhanger ending Lauren Oliver sets this novel up perfectly for the next in the series which I will be sure to be reading!
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