Tag Archives: YA

Delirium, Lauren Oliver #50BookPledge

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In Lauren Oliver’s Delirium, love has been diagnosed as a disease, and everyone is required to undergo the cure when they turn eighteen. When I first heard the premise, my cynical brain immediately thought it was brilliant. No more Eponine-style romances for me! Thing is, the procedure doesn’t just kill off romantic love. My sister, who also read this book, called it practically a lobotomy, and that’s what it is: the doctors surgically remove every last bit of passion. You will never been heartbroken, but you will also view your friends and children with cold logic (you’ll give your baby milk because he’s hungry and needs food to live, not because you can’t stand to see him cry). You will no longer feel depressed, but you will also never enjoy your hobbies with as much fervour as before. Hana, the best friend of protagonist Lena, tells her early on, “You know you can’t be happy unless you’re unhappy sometimes, right?” And it’s true. Cliches aside, if you remove all violent emotion, you’ll have to remove the good with the bad.

Unlike Hana, however, Lena can’t wait for the procedure. When she was very young, her mother committed suicide because she was too infected by amor deliria nervosa to be cured. All Lena can remember is her mother laughing and dancing with her (then immediately checking to see if anyone had noticed; too much laughter after all is a symptom of delirium) and her mother fiercely telling her, “I love you. Remember. They cannot take it.” Lena is heartbroken by her mother’s death, and looks forward to being cured and freed from all that pain. I love that the heroine begins the novel looking forward to the procedure, and horrified whenever Hana makes negative comments about it. My natural reaction, once I found out the procedure destroyed all passion and not just romantic love, was to wonder how anyone could think that was a good idea. Lena’s desire to forget a completely different kind of pain made sense to me, and showed me how this procedure could be seen as a good thing, even by intelligent, non-brainwashed-drone individuals like Lena.

But Lena falls in love. Only three months before her procedure, she meets a boy named Alex, who has the scars of the cured, but whom Lena saw laughing when something messes up an evaluation interview. I love how she falls in love with him not just because of his good looks (though he is hot), but because of the tremor of laughter in his voice, and the constant look of amusement in his eyes. In a world where serenity is prized and passion is feared, happiness is enticing. Alex too, it turns out, first develops a crush on Lena when he sees her acting silly during a run — as Lena discovers during class picture day, even her ordinary looks are transformed into great beauty when she’s really happy. It’s wonderful seeing this tale from Lena’s perspective — I worry with her when Hana sneaks off to attend an underground party (with real music! Not the government regulated chipper tunes!), I feel for her whenever she remembers her mom, and I get just as giddy as she does whenever she meets up with Alex. She still worries about ending up like her mother, and I love what Alex tells her about the downside of the cure: “That’s when you really lose people, you know. When the pain passes.” I think of when my grandfather died, how my biggest fear is forgetting how he looks, or how he sounds. Pain sucks, but Alex is right; pain also keeps the past alive.

As you can probably tell, I love this book. It’s an emotional ride, which reminds me of how repressing emotions actually ends up making them burst out even more violently. I love how it goes beyond just a romance, and deals with the value of passion in so many things — friendship, family, music, hobbies, and yes, love.

I remember how violently I felt about things when I was younger, and how much more practical I am today. I remember how, when I was young, an older cousin told me never to fall in love, because it hurt too much, and I remember how I, fuelled by Disney movies mostly, vowed never ever to turn away from love, because I’d rather be hurt than block myself from feeling. I remember changing my mind later on, and chalking it up to maturity. Delirium is about a surgical procedure that removes strong emotions, but I wonder, though not as extreme, do we all subject ourselves to a similar procedure in the name of growing up?

This book will make you believe in love again. At the very least, it will make you realize why numbing yourself against pain, while tempting, can never work in the long term. Delirium ends with a bang, which actually reminded me of a Le Carre novel (I can’t say which, as that would totally be a spoiler). It’s a wonderful, exciting book that I hope will touch you like it has touched me.

By the way, if you plan on getting this book (as you should!), just to let you know, I found out on the Harper Collins Canada website that Delirium: The Special Edition will be published July 20, 2011. It’ll have new cover art, a Q&A with author Lauren Oliver and an exclusive excerpt from her next book! Pretty cool, eh? (Thanks to Harper Collins Canada’s Savvy Reader for letting me know details about Delirium: The Special Edition!)

Hunger (Book 2 of Gone series), Michael Grant #50BookPledge

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Michael Grant’s Gone series just keeps getting better. In the second installment, Hunger, the kids in the FAYZ have run out of food, some of the normal teens have drawn battle lines against the kids with powers, and the mysterious entity called the Darkness keeps sinking its claws even deeper into Lana and Caine. Sam and his crew have discovered fields with vegetables, but there are giant killer worms guarding their territory (sounds ridiculous, but they’re actually quite horrifying… and gross).

Worse, kids in the FAYZ don’t want to work. “I’m just a kid” becomes a common refrain, understandably frustrating Sam’s team, all of whom are kids themselves. My sister, who introduced me to this series in the first place, commented that she found it hard to believe that only Sam’s friends are stepping up, and the rest are content to whine about their hunger and play video games all day. She understood about the younger kids, but wouldn’t the tweens and teens at least band together and help organize something? My initial reaction had been that this situation seemed very realistic, but my sister raised a good point — is Michael Grant, and are readers like me, underestimating the potential for maturity in young adults?

Then again, it’s not just that it was only Sam’s friends stepping up; it was just that those who did step up naturally became part of Sam’s “government.” One of the characters also said something that struck me as logical: the kids have no incentive to do hard labour, because they know that even if they do nothing, Sam’s team will make sure they’re fed. One of my favourite secondary characters from Gone, Albert, comes up with what I consider a brilliant solution: he sets up a market economy, first a barter system, then eventually establishing a currency using McDonald’s Monopoly money. Astrid’s response to this disappoints me, considering how brilliant she is supposed to be: she tells Sam to shut Albert down, saying they now have the opportunity to establish a class-free society, where money doesn’t exist and therefore no one is richer than anyone else. Would socialism have worked in the FAYZ? Possibly, but only if established from the very beginning, before they ran out of supplies and most kids show no motivation to work “for the greater good.”

What I love most about Hunger is that we see the vulnerability in so many of these characters. Sam’s heading for a breakdown: “I’m not their parent,” he constantly tells Astrid, to which she reminds him, “They’re just kids,” who need parenting. Sam, of course, is a kid himself, and even adults would prefer to focus on the bigger issues like finding food or preparing for Caine’s next attack rather than have to deal with complaints of who pulled whose hair and who called whom stupid. Lana, as the Healer, feels a similar pressure. Kids come to her with everything from bloody noses to loose teeth to skinned knees. She’s like a celebrity hiding from paparazzi; everyone demands her attention, and all she wants is privacy. Astrid’s brilliance reveals its cracks. While Sam is the official leader, Astrid definitely holds the power, and a lot of her decisions (shutting down Albert’s enterprise, curtailing Quinn’s initiative in going fishing) reveal short-sightedness. I can understand why some of the kids in the FAYZ have grown resentful. I especially love the bigger role other characters play: Mary’s eating disorder grows much worse, Albert and Quinn reveal economic savvy, Edilio takes a much stronger leadership role, Brianna, Taylor and Dekka become essential to battle, and even Caine reveals his softer side.

Gone was thrilling and action-packed, with characters you grow to admire. Hunger is even more thrilling, and makes these characters even more real and tangible to us. Fantastic sequel, darker and more introspective than the first, Hunger takes the FAYZ kids from trying to survive a battle to taking the first steps in creating a long-term, sustainable society.

Big Girl Small, Rachel DeWoskin #50BookPledge

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I read Rachel DeWoskin’s Big Girl Small mostly because of Shannon’s wonderful review of it in Savvy Reader. At 5’1”, I would never dare to imagine I can understand how a little person feels, but in other ways, I do know how it is to grow up feeling different. I imagine practically everyone has felt different in some way or another. High school is tough enough without being 3’9”, and DeWoskin’s protagonist, Judy Lohden, handles it with sarcasm and wit: “If you’re born saddled with a word like Achondroplasia, you learn to spell.”

In so many ways, the things Judy goes through are things practically every teenager experiences. She is the new kid at a performing arts high school, and worries about fitting in. She has a “teacher crush” on her inspirational AP English teacher and feels sympathetic for her dorky math teacher. She falls immediately for the handsome Kyle Malanack when she sees him at a party: “I think maybe the very not-realness of teenage love makes it the only real thing. […] what’s true about love isn’t a quantity thing — it’s a quality one. And the reason I know that is because I still feel like I’m actually going to die.”

We know from the first chapter that something big and bad is going to happen to her and cause her to run away. What happens to her isn’t much of a mystery for long (Judy drops a lot of hints along the way), but that didn’t impede my enjoyment of the book at all. It just made me feel utterly helpless, watching her moving towards her situation without being able to do anything to stop it: “If the first boy you dare love pulls the worst Stephen King Carrie prank in the history of dating, then you run and hide.” It is however the next part that really struck me as being absolutely true and heartfelt: “Because who can love you after that? Maybe your parents. But how can you face them, when you’ve all spent so much time convincing each other that you’re normal?”

In a way, her parents’ overcompensating for her dwarfism by pretending she’s normal makes things worse; Judy actually appreciates it when her friend Goth Sarah admits she admires Judy for having the guts to go to parties and face all the stares. Yet at times, when reading about Judy dressing up for a party or daydreaming about Kyle, even I forget she’s a little person. The advantage of reading her story is that I sometimes got so lost in the universality of her experiences (I had a crush like that too! I agonized over outfits like that too! I stressed over impressing a teacher too!) and only remembered Judy’s size when she makes a joke about it.

Judy jokes a lot about her size; she gets very defensive about it, yet in a way I can understand. It’s like how some comedians say they crack jokes about themselves because it’s better than having other people poke fun at them. Her jokes are actually also funny, designed to put the person she’s talking to at ease with her size so they can get on with an actual conversation. Her narration is often hilarious, her observations spot-on, and her descriptions vivid. Judy is an interesting, smart and relatable teenager.

She’s also lucky in so many ways. Unlike some other YA books, where the hero/heroine has to face obstacles alone, Judy has a very strong support system. Her parents, while completely clueless at times, clearly love her very much, and even Bill, a middle aged man Judy meets after she runs away, becomes a good friend, being her sounding board and recipient of her story. Judy’s friends Molly and Meghan are both wonderful, supportive friends, and Goth Sarah is simply a standout — quirky and loyal, the best friend a teenage girl could want. I winced whenever Judy would shun Goth Sarah in favour of the more popular Ginger, who while definitely nice and friendly, was clearly (to my twenty-eight year old brain anyway) nowhere near as interesting.

Big Girl Small is a wonderful story, with relatable characters. I would have loved to be as independent and confident as Molly or Goth Sarah when I was in high school. I was probably a lot like Judy — I knew I was good at some things (not singing, which is Judy’s big talent), I was shy and insecure about other things, and I too have had crushes where I thought I would never again feel that way about anything else. I can only hope that I’d handled it with as much wit and aplomb as Judy has.