Book Review :: Pandemonium, by Lauren Oliver

Pandemonium by Lauren Oliver
Series: Delirium #2
Also in this series: Delirium
Published by Hodder & Stoughton
on September 27th 2012
Genres: Dystopian, Romance, Young Adult
Pages: 329
Goodreads

Unflinching, heartbreaking and totally addictive, this novel will push your emotions to the limit.

Lena's been to the very edge. She's questioned love and the life-changing and agonising choices that come with it. She's made her decision. But can she survive the consequences?

Last updated on 19 January 2022

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My thoughts on Pandemonium

Pandemonium, by Lauren Oliver, is the second in the Delirium trilogy. In the first book, we meet the main character, Lena, and her world. She lives in a time and place (in America at some point) where love is a disease, and soon after young people turn 18, they are ‘cured’.  Lena, before her birthday, meets Alex, an Invalid (someone who has not been cured and lives illegally. They live in the Wilds, out of the city and aren’t supposed to exist). They fall in love, they question everything they know, they run. Alex dies. Lena ends up in the Wilds.

The second book, Pandemonium, carries on directly from the time Lena stumbles into the Wilds at the end of Delirium. I just have to start by saying that this book is written in two parts, alternating each chapter. The first part is ‘Now’, where Lena is living the present, in the city. The other part is ‘Then’ when Lena discovers Invalids in the wild and lives with them, hides with them, runs with them. In the ‘Then’ storyline, Lena meets Raven who is the leader of a group of Invalids living together. Raven patches Lena together and she joins their group. This storyline follows them as they move to a different location, get bombed, suffer loss and hunger, and at times seemed a little bit pointless, to be honest.

The ‘Now’ storyline followed Lena as she lived in the city with Raven and Tack (another Invalid) pretending to be cured so they can infiltrate the city. Events lead to Lena being kidnapped with the famous Julian, a boy who hasn’t been cured himself, and follows them as they escape, are captured by another lot of people, escape again, are looked after by another group of Invalids, find a house to stay in…fall in love.

My thoughts on Pandemonium

At first, the ‘Then’ parts were more interesting to me. I liked the new characters more than I liked Lena walking around the city in the ‘Now’ parts. But after a slow start, when things started to pick up a little, I found myself liking the ‘Now’ parts and sighing when I finished a chapter to begin a ‘Then’ chapter. The ‘Then’ chapters were good to the storyline and all that important jazz, but I found some entire chapters unimportant to the storyline, and difficult and somewhat boring to read. The characters I thought I liked turned out to be annoying and I didn’t think of them as much as at the beginning.

It’s written in first person, as is the first one, and as I mentioned in the Delirium post, it has a bit of a lack of dialogue in it. Oh, it is there, don’t get me wrong, and it’s quite good dialogue…but there isn’t enough of it. Like in Delirium, you could read for ages without bumping into a speech mark. But that’s probably just me. I did miss reading about Hana, Lena’s best friend from the first book. I quite like her character. But alas, she wasn’t in this one.

Overall, it was okay. I didn’t like it as much as Delirium but it was a good continuation all the same. It was nice to see Lena’s world from the Wilds, as opposed to the city side. I wonder what the next one will be like…?