Monday, June 25, 2012

Delirium

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Author: Lauren Oliver
Genre: Fiction/fantasy
Pages: 401

Lauren Oliver's Delirium is your typical Romeo and Juliet story. Girl meets boy. Girls falls in love with boy. Girl's family tries to keep the two apart. However, this Romeo and Juliet story has a twist. Lena, the story's protagonist, lives in a future where love, or amor deliria nervosa, is considered the most deadly disease. Love is an infection that must be prevented in order to protect society from chaos and instability. Every person is mandated to be "cured" from the deadly disease when they turn 18, and only after this they are able to be matched with a pre-screened partner who has also been cured.


Lena is your average girl who conforms and doesn't question adults or the government. That is until she meets Alex, an uncured from the Wild. Now, Lena wants nothing more than to love Alex. Even if it means death!


Delirium is slow-paced dystopian read that picks up speed toward the second half of the book.  I can't say that I loved this book and was a little disappointed with the book's lack of action and suspense. I felt the story draged at times and couldn't help but feel this was in part because the author wanted to make Delirum into a trilogy. Despite the book's shortcomings, Oliver makes up for it with an irresistible plot line. Who can resist a story about a girl falling in love in society where love is forbidden and considered a deadly disease? Not me!


Teen readers will enjoy reading the blooming relationship between Lena and Alex and connect with Lena's frustration of being constantly controlled and told what to do and think.


Overall Grade: B+
Watch Lauren Oliver talk about Delirium

Reviews and Awards

“In [Oliver’s] dystopian America, love has been outlawed as the life-threatening source of all discord. Lena’s gradual awakening is set against a convincing backdrop of totalitarian horror. The abrupt ending leaves enough unanswered questions to set breathless readers up for volume two of this trilogy.”-Kirkus Reviews
“Strong characters, a vivid portrait of the lives of teens in a repressive society, and nagging questions that can be applied to our world today make this book especially compelling and discussable.” -School Library Journal


“Oliver’s deeply emotional and incredibly well-honed prose commands the readers’ attention and captures their hearts. With a pulse-pounding tempo and unforeseen twists and turns, Lauren Oliver has opened the door on a fantastic new series; the second book can’t come soon enough.” -New York Journal of Books
  • New York Times Bestseller
  • New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association  bestseller  
  • #2 Spring Indie Children's Pick
  • Amazon's Best Teen Book of the month for February 2011
Teacher's Corner

Related Resources

Books


Wither.  2011. By Lauren DeStefano. (1442409061).

By age sixteen, Rhine Ellery has four years left to live. A botched effort to create a perfect race has left all males born with a lifespan of 25 years, and females a lifespan of 20 years--leaving the world in a state of panic. Geneticists seek a miracle antidote to restore the human race, desperate orphans crowd the population, crime and poverty have skyrocketed, and young girls are being kidnapped and sold as polygamous brides to bear more children.
When Rhine is sold as a bride, she vows to do all she can to escape. Yet her husband, Linden, is hopelessly in love with her, and Rhine can’t bring herself to hate him as much as she’d like to. He opens her to a magical world of wealth and illusion she never thought existed, and it almost makes it possible to ignore the clock ticking away her short life. But Rhine quickly learns that not everything in her new husband’s strange world is what it seems. Her father-in-law, an eccentric doctor bent on finding the antidote, is hoarding corpses in the basement; her fellow sister wives are to be trusted one day and feared the next; and Rhine has no way to communicate to her twin brother that she is safe and alive.
Together with one of Linden's servants, Gabriel, Rhine attempts to escape just before her seventeenth birthday. But in a world that continues to spiral into anarchy, is there any hope for freedom?



Article 5: Compliance is Mandatory. 2012. By Kristin Simmons. (0765329581).

The Bill of Rights has been revoked, and replaced with the Moral Statutes.
There are no more police—instead, there are soldiers. There are no more fines for bad behavior—instead, there are arrests, trials and maybe worse. People who get arrested don’t usually come back.
Seventeen-year-old Ember Miller is old enough to remember that things weren’t always this way. Living with her rebellious single mother, it’s hard to forget that people weren’t always arrested for reading the wrong books or staying out after dark. That life in the United States used to be different.
In the three years since the war ended, Ember has perfected the art of keeping a low profile. She knows how to get the things she needs—like food stamps and hand-me-down clothes—and how to pass the random home inspections by the Federal Bureau of Reformation. Her life is as close to peaceful as circumstances allow. That is, until her mother is arrested for noncompliance with Article 5 of the Moral Statutes. And what’s worse, one of the arresting officers is none other than Chase Jennings…the only boy Ember has ever loved.




Movies

The Hunger Games (2012)

Every year in the ruins of what was once North America, the Capitol of the nation of Panem forces each of its twelve districts to send a teenage boy and girl to compete in the Hunger Games. A twisted punishment for a past uprising and an ongoing government intimidation tactic, the Hunger Games are a nationally televised event in which “Tributes” must fight with one another until one survivor remains. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen volunteers in her younger sister’s place to enter the games, and is forced to rely upon her sharp instincts as well as the mentorship of drunken former victor Haymitch Abernathy when she’s pitted against highly-trained Tributes who have prepared for these Games their entire lives. If she’s ever to return home to District 12, Katniss must make impossible choices in the arena that weigh survival against humanity and life against love.

Pleasantville (1998)

Pleasantville is a 1950s sitcom enjoying cult status on a contemporary cable channel. David loves it, but his sister Jennifer is too hip. When a mysterious TV repairman gives them a new remote control, the pair are transported into the world of Pleasantville like it or not. They find themselves trapped in an alternate reality where the town exists in black and white–in a white bread world without passion or violence.




Lesson Plan for 10th Grade Students

Delirium by Lauren Oliver

Teachers can use Delirium by Lauren Oliver and related resources to expose students to elements of creative writing such as character development, setting, plot, dialogue, style, theme, as well as figurative and descriptive language.

21st Century Learner Standards

2.1.6    Use the writing process, media and visual literacy, and technology skills to create products that express new understandings.

3.1.3    Use writing and speaking skills to communicate new understandings effectively.

3.1.4    Use technology and other information tools to organize and display knowledge and understanding in ways that others can view, use, and assess. 

Objective: After reading Delirium and/or related resources, teacher should review elements of creative writing such as character development, setting, plot, and figurative and descriptive language. Working in pairs, students will come up with their own dystopian short story and then visually present it in Xtranormal, a Web 2.0 tool that turns words into 3D movies. 








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