Pandemonium by: Lauren Oliver (2012)
The Delirium Trilogy, Book 2
375 pages
Genre: YA
Publisher: HARPER
Warning: This review may contain spoilers for the first book
in the trilogy, Delirium.
Summary: Lena has
escaped the harsh confines of her society where love is considered to be a
disease, and has made it into The Wilds. Without Alex, Lena has no idea where
she is headed except that she has to keep running. As soon as she seems to lose
hope and life, Raven, the leader of the homestead she becomes a part of, saves
her life. Lena learns how to survive and finds out more about the resistance.
Review: Pandemonium starts off exactly where Delirium left,
thrusting the reader right into the story with a lot of action. This is a
wonderful way to captivate the reader and gives the book a good start.
This novel is told in two time periods, the “then” and the
“now.” The “then” time period gives the reader information about Lena’s life in
The Wilds after she escaped her oppressive society. The “now” time period gives
us glimpses of her life once she has filtrated back into that society. Although
at times reading these two time periods simultaneously became frustrating, in
reality it made the book that much better; it made it a page turner. These time
jumps also give us a chance to really see the difference between the Lena today
and the Lena who just escaped into the wilds. We get to see Lena grow and
continue to try to figure out who she really is.
The only issue I have with this book is Lena and her idea of
love. Obviously because of her age and the society she was raised in, it makes
sense that Lena would act like a love struck teenager, but I think it is just a
little too much. I don’t want to give anything away, but I just want to warn
you that although we all enjoy a good love story in our coming of age dystopian
young adult novels, sometimes too much teenage love angst is just too much. However,
when you read a good book it makes you feel a whole range of emotions, and this
one did just that. I was fuming, shocked, sad, and more with every turn of the
page.
In the end Pandemonium does exactly what it should do, makes
the reader impossibly impatient for the last installment of the trilogy. (I still think I enjoyed the first book better) If you
are a Delirium and Lauren Oliver fan you will enjoy this book. Be warned, once
you pick it up you won’t be able to put it down until it is finished.
Rating: 3.5/5
Rating: 3.5/5
You are so right that this one is un-put-down-able & I am impossibly impatient for Requiem! When I first finished this one, I gave it 4 stars, but I've found that it's stuck with me a lot more than a other books I've read and I ended up bumping up my rating of it. I think I'll reserve my overall rating of the series until I see how everything turns out!
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