All You Need is Love

Pandemonium is the second book in Lauren Oliver's Delirium trilogy.  It takes place in a dystopian society where love, aka deliria, is a disease.  Everyone must undergo the cure at 18, and those who are not cured are called Invalids.  At the end of Delirium, Lena and Alex attempt to escape into the Wilds so they will be free to love each other.  Lena makes it, but Alex does not.  The setting for this book goes back and forth between when Lena first arrives in the Wilds "then," and her working for the resistance in NYC "now."

In the "then," chapters, Lena struggles to find her place within the group in the Wilds.  She is very weak to begin with after her flight from Portland.  She slowly learns their ways, and how difficult things are for them.  All the while, she is trying to get over her loss of Alex.  She learns to cope, and to push the heartbreak away as time goes on.  Here we meet Raven, while only slightly older than Lena, is the leader of the group.  She teaches Lena much about pushing away her grief and moving on with her life.

In the "now" chapters, Lena has moved into NYC, and is working with the resistance there.  She has adapted a new identity and is gathering intellegence on the Deliria-Free America  (DFA) group.  It is here that she meets Julian Fineman, the DFA's leader's son and the poster child for wanting the cure.  At a rally she is assigned to always keep her eyes on Julian. When the Scavengers attack and Julian escapes into the tunnels, she follows and along with Julian is taken prisoner by the Scavengers.  During their time together, Lena learns that Julian is not as passionate about having the cure as he appears, and that his motives for wanting it are not what she expected.  Julian learns that not all those without the cure are the same, and that love is not the dirty word he has been taut.

I am not too sure that I am a fan of this back and forth of Lena's timeline.  I almost wish that Ms. Oliver had done the "then" chapters, and then the "now" chapters in chronologically order.  I felt that it dragged at times during the "then" chapters, but I did understand the need for those chapters.  They explained Lena and Raven's personalities better.

The "now" chapters, on the other hand, were pretty fast paced.  You learn that there is more at work than what Lena knows is happening as you progress through them.  The resistance is much bigger, and more  complicated than I first thought as the chapters go on.  Plus you get a couple of surprise characters at the end.

Overall a worthy follow-up to Delirium, and it will be interesting to see where the last book goes with what happened at the end of Pandemonium.

Currently Reading:
Echo
by Alyson Noel