DELIRIUM by Lauren Oliver

I love dystopian novels because I find the writer’s point of view about the future exciting.

Lauren Oliver, the author of the trilogy DELIRIUM, believes that in the future, love is a disease and the people will be cured through a procedure. All of this is happening in 2091. It doesn’t seem that far away.

“In school, we learned that in the old days, the dark days, people didn’t realize how deadly a disease love was. For a long time, they even viewed it as a good thing, something to be celebrated and pursued.”

At eighteen-years-old, each person is evaluated by a group of evaluators (before they have the procedure to get rid of the so-called disease <<deliria nervosa>>) and for each of them, it will be matched four or five other people with a similar score. In the end, they will marry one of them.

“Of course you do hear occasional horror stories: cases where a poor eighteen-year-old is given to a wealthy eighty-year-old man.” ( 🙁 )

Unfortunately for future-people, like in any totalitarian society, not everything is perfect.

“That’s one of the downsides of the procedure; in the absence of <<deliria nervosa>>, some people find parenting distasteful. Thankfully, cases of full-blown detachment – where a mother or father is unable to bond normally, dutifully, and responsibly with his or her children, and winds up drowning them or sitting on their windpipes or beating them to death when they cry – are few.”

Even though all the books from the trilogy (“Delirium”, “Pandemonium” și “Requiem”) were written before Donald Trump became the President of the United States, there is a common thread:

“Fifty years ago the government closed the borders of the United States.
The border is guarded constantly by military personnel.
This is for our own protection.
Safety, Sanctity, Community.
This is our country’s motto.”

Kindle, 2013