Lena Tiddle is ready for her eighteenth birthday. By then, she'll be done with high school, matched with the boy she'll someday marry and ready to start college. But more importantly, on that day, she will undergo the permanent surgical cure for amor deliria nervosa -- better known as love. But a few months before she is scheduled to receive the cure, she meets a boy who makes her question whether love is such a bad thing after all -- and whether she might be falling in love with him.

DELERIUM delivers an evocative, often poetic, sense of language, even as Oliver keeps ratcheting the tension and increasing the risk Lena and her friends face. Theirs is a dangerous society filled with guards and dogs and random raids. Love, as defined here, is a broad category of feelings. In addition to romantic attachment, the cure is supposed to remove everything from the rapturous response to art to familial affection to the pain of loss. The cure is mandatory and Lena's mother was forced to undergo the painful procedure three times (when the cure didn't "take") before she committed suicide rather than face it again.

The best thing about this book is Lena herself. She finds herself in a world that is very much a reaction against our own. Her historians quote high divorce rates and widespread drug use as a way to dull the pain as a reason why the cure is necessary. Most YA protagonists start railing against the distopia they find themselves in the minute they find out there is another way. In Lena, Oliver offers a unique -- yet very real -- perspective of a teen who still believes what she has been taught (that emotions and attachments are dangerous virulent things that can kill you) and suffers profound guilt when she finds this at odds with her own feelings.

Book Summary

Ninety-five days, and then I'll be safe. I wonder whether the procedure will hurt. I want to get it over with. It's hard to be patient. It's hard not to be afraid while I'm still uncured, though so far the deliria hasn't touched me yet. Still, I worry. They say that in the old days, love drove people to madness. The deadliest of all deadly things: It kills you both when you have it and when you don't.

Lauren Oliver astonished readers with her stunning debut, Before I Fall. In a starred review, Publishers Weekly called it "raw, emotional, and, at times, beautiful. An end as brave as it is heartbreaking." Her much-awaited second novel fulfills her promise as an exceptionally talented and versatile writer.