Meeting Notes: Delirium

Marissa hosted our January book club. She made baked brie, a delicious fig salad, and a fancy homemade lavender cello drink. Everything was perfect... Except for our response to the book. Definitely not one of our favorites. In other news, I created these little star icons (Kayla's good idea), so that you'd be able to see our individual reviews.

Do you love Bess's new glasses?

 

That's me drinking the lavender cello and champagne concoction. 

And Marissa played a prelude to our videos on her piano.

A brief summary from the bookworms:
[SPOILER ALERT]
I know a lot of people five-starred Delirium. And the bookworms nearly unanimously loved Before I Fall. However, we just didn't feel the same way about Lauren Oliver's second novel. As Courtney said, "It was hard to believe it was her second novel, after she'd already written Before I Fall." What we praised in her first effort was the characterization, emotional resonance, and carefully placed lyricism. Delirium had two great characters in Hana and Alex, but unfortunately, Lena, the main character, didn't seem that alive. It could be that the author wanted her to be an unlikely heroine, or maybe she just didn't fully figure Lena out. Also, Lauren Oliver is talented at writing descriptively and poetically, but in this case, we think she overdid it. The drawn-out descriptions pulled us out of the story, and sometimes they were a tad corny or just didn't work. I would also say we were a little disappointed in the storytelling itself. The novel sounds so exciting, but it just doesn't end up being as thrilling as it promises to be. One last little note, I think Delirium might have been shaped and pitched in a way that made it lose complexity. It sounds like it's a novel about a world that bans passionate love, and much of the society literature the author includes focuses on that. But really it's a world that forbids all kinds of love, even between a parent and a child. While the first concept is maybe more intially intriguing, the second is a little more interesting because it's the kind of thing a society would do if it was trying to control it's citizens. On that note, if the world itself had been a little more fleshed out, the threat might have seemed more pressing.
-Bess