Book Review #17 - Pandemonium (Delirium Trilogy)

Title: Pandemonium
Author: Lauren Oliver
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton (1 Mar 2012)
ISBN: 978-1444722925
Length: 336 pages

Synopsis

I’m pushing aside
the memory of my nightmare,
pushing aside thoughts of Alex,
pushing aside thoughts of Hana
and my old school,
push,
push,
push,
like Raven taught me to do.
The old life is dead.
But the old Lena is dead too.
I buried her.
I left her beyond a fence,
behind a wall of smoke and fame.

Review/Thoughts/Summary

Brilliant brilliant read!!! I was very much looking forward to reading Delirium sequel!
I have to say at some points I was a bit disappointed because I could feel that this was, like all 2nd part of trilogies, an in-between book but the ideas behind it are still good.

The style of writing is completely different. Whereas Delirium was a story you followed, Pandemonium is a 2-intertwined parts called THEN and NOW.

So In Delirium, you end up with Lena being in the Wilds by herself, Alex not having made it through.
So this is the THEN part, you follow her steps from that point onward. How she found a new tribu of Invalids, how they live; they survive, how they communicate with Sympathisers "inside".

The NOW part is about her life in the big city, as part of the resistance, with a new fake identity, a fake life.

Now that I think about it, I don't think by the end of the book, the THEN part joins the beginning of the NOW part!!

Both parts are filled with events on how to survive in both worlds, but as I said, you know it's an in-between book so you just follow steps and hope for the big break at the end of the future 3rd book!

The THEN part is that, just action without much interest. The NOW part is more interesting because she has a mission to accomplish for the resistance. In the process, she falls in love but is torn between her old love for "dead" Alex and her new love for Julian, her mission!
What I loved with this book is that there is actually a massive twist towards the end of the NOW part, which as I said above makes the style of writing and actually the style of the book different from Delirium where there was no real twist (although the twist for Delirium happens in the short story called Hana, see my review #15).

You still connect with Lena, even though so much happened to her, it changed her completely! She went from a sweet loving obedient girl to an illegal activist, and all in 1 year! But both roles are convincing, so I think the writer did a good job on her. You're still loving her through the Wilds, her heartbreak at living withough Alex, in her new life in the big city as an activist. Even when she has to kill someone, it's convincing and not out of place!

And of course, the big twist at the end, when she's finally reunited with Julian and promises him to stay with him, who appears to tell him "Don't believe her"???? Predictable, but it promises the 3rd instalment of the trilogy to be highly interesting, and I hope we don't stray too far away for the initial idea which is Love is a disease. And I really hope we don't fall into the cliché that was the love triangle in the Hunger Games!

My Kindle quotes

Someday all the Wilds will be razed, and we will be left with a concrete landscape, a land of pretty houses and trim gardens and planned parks and forests, and a world that works as smoothly as a clock, neatly wound: a world of metal and gears, and people going tick-tick-tick to their deaths!
-- I like this sentence because it felt real and true. As in, aren't we all living this life already? And what a shame it is! Material world vs Nature.

My ratings

**** (4 out 5) missing 1, because of the in-between story feeling it left me!