Pandemonium

Lauren Oliver

Delirium, book 2

HarperCollins

ISBN: 9780062101990

Reviewed by Stephanie Gunn

Pandemonium is the second book in Lauren Oliver’s YA trilogy beginning with Delirium.

In the future world of these books, love has been declared a disease – deemed amor deliria nervosa. Several decades after its identification as a disease, and forty-three years before the events of Delirium, a cure was discovered. When people reach the age of eighteen, they undergo brain surgery to cure them of the deliria. Before the cure, they are assessed and matched to the individual they are to marry and have children with.

Lena, the teenage protagonist of the books, had assumed that, like her older sister, she would be cured when she turned eighteen. Lena looked forward to her cure, and to freedom from the disease. Her mother had been driven mad by the deliria, remaining in love with her family and friends despite three attempted cures. In Deliria, Lena’s carefully planned life was upturned when she met Alex, an uncured “Invalid”, and she succumbed to the deliria herself, falling in love with Alex.