Love and Other Annoyances: DELIRIUM

Love is beautiful and wonderful and amazing.  Sometimes.  It is also the root of some of our very deepest pain.  If you could protect yourself from the pain, would you give up the wonders?  Lauren Oliver’s dystopia Delirium is about a society that has decided that’s exactly what they want: a nice, even existence with sensible life pairs that are assigned at eighteen, pairings that will never cause either party any pain.  It’s a society that has found a cure for love.  One catch: you don’t get to choose whether or not you want to take the antidote.  It’s required.

Enter Lena Haloway, a seventeen-year-old who has been counting down the days until her eighteenth birthday, the day she will receive the cure.  She lives with the fear that she might catch the disease of love before she gets the antidote, a disease that could jeopardize the life of safety and contentment she’s long seen as her due.  And then, on the day of her evaluation, Lena finds herself saying that Romeo and Juliet is “beautiful” when she’s supposed to say “frightening.”  And then she says that her favorite color is that of the sky “Right before the sun rises…the pale nothing color,” when she’s supposed to say “Blue.”  When a herd of cows painted with the words NOT CURE. DEATH comes storming through the labs, Lena catches a glimpse of a laughing boy, and her world starts to fracture.

I love a book with a great question at its center, and that’s definitely the case with Delirium.  I mean, I love “love,” but I’m not sure I’d say that if I were suffering a broken heart.  Is passion always better than security?  Is freedom better than safety?  Is one perfect kiss worth the pain of loss?  I know what I’d say—and it’s pretty clear where Oliver stands—but I not only followed Lena’s evolution with a rather ravenous zeal, I’m also looking forward to seeing where her decision takes her in the sequel: Pandemonium.

Take A Visit to DEAD END IN NORVELT

It’s been a while since I last blogged.  Part of that is that I’ve been busy doing miscellaneous other things, from writing to teaching to snowmachining, but part of it is that I’ve found it difficult to follow up on my response to The Fault in Our Stars, as it’s pretty rare to encounter a book that you know will be one of the best you read all year, especially when you read that book in February.

But if you’re going to follow up on such a book, probably a good place to go is to a Newbery-Medal winner, right?  And that’s exactly what I did, with Jack Gantos’s Dead End in Norvelt.

Dead End in Norvelt stars an awesome kid named Jack Gantos, who finds himself very, very grounded after shooting a gun his father brought back from World War II.  In Jack’s defense, the kid had no idea the gun was loaded when he aimed at the distant drive-in movie screen for some participatory, non-sanctioned viewing.  On the other hand, Jack’s also a kid who, when his mother asks him, “[D]oes your dad know you have all this dangerous war stuff out?”  Jack replies, without skipping a beat, “He always lets me play with it as long as I’m careful,” which, as he himself points out a second later, “wasn’t true.”  In fact, Jack quite clearly recollects his father telling him that “This swag will be worth a bundle of money someday, so keep your grubby hands off it.” 

This book reminded me a little bit of The Teacher’s Funeral, in that it’s set in the midwest, and in a different time period (granted, the two books are set years apart, but it’s all history to the modern reader, especially the modern reader under age sixteen).  It’s funny and sweet, and I think it would appeal to kids who like books with crazy facts in them about everything from war to mummies, as those are just the kinds of facts that appeal to young Jack.  Plus, there’s a bunch of dead people, and obituary writing, and mystery, plenty of bloody noses, and an old plane that might just get off the ground again.  It’s all just kind of great, a book that takes flight from the very first scene, with a little boy and a Japanese gun and a distant drive-in movie screen.