To understand Pandemonium, you’ll have to understand a bit of its predicessor, Delirium. Lena is growing up in a dystopian society where love, called “deliria” is a deadly disease. When citizens turn 18, they undergo a procedure that cures them from the affects of deliria, basically turning them into emotionless zombies. Lena is set to have her procedure in a few weeks, when, through a rebelious friend, she meets Alex, a true rebel, who has come from the wilds-lands without the cure. Lena and Alex fall in love,and plot to escape into the wilds. Their elaborate escape plan fails when they try to cross a giant electrocuted fence that separates the city from the wilds. Lena makes it across, Alex does not. This is where we meet Lena in Pandemonium. Pandemonium is a story told in two parts. It flashes back and forth between Lena’s experience in the wild and her adventures back on a mission in her old town. But we’ll get to that later. For now, lets discuss her life in the wilds. When we first see Lena, she is close to death, having run blindly from the point when she gets over the fence. She is taken in and cared for by a group of people living in the wilds. However, life isn’t as easy as it was in Alex and her imaginations: she has to work harder than she has ever before just to survive, and the death of her friends is a common accurance. This part of the story documents her struggle to survive and adapt to a world in which she doesn’t belong. She must grow stronger, but she must also change mentally: she must develop a logical brain that allows her to rule with her head, not her heart. It’s ironic that, while she’s running from a cure, she must develop a sort of cure herself: she must learn to put aside deep emitions to deal with the more practical problems at hand, along the way dulling her pain until it’s only a dull pang in her heart.
The second part of the story documents what happens when Lena and a few friends from the wilds conspire to enter the city and help to bring down the government. The city that they find is nothing like the one they left:he scavengers, another rebel group, have been leading raids on the city, another group, the DFA (Deliria-free America) is fighting for cures at younger ages. Lena must inflitrate the DFA to find out what they are up to, though frustratingly, her friends from the wilds won’t tell her their plans. Instead she is suposed to observe and learn everything she can about them. She attends a rally where she is suposed to watch Julian Fineman, the son of the head of the DFA. She follows him through a door when the scavengers raid the rally, only to find that both of them have been kidnapped. What ensues next is their desperate race to escape from their kidnappers and get back to Lena’s friends. They punch some people, have a few narrow escapes, and meet a strange race of people living underground before they make it to a shelter Lena knows about from her days in the wild. Oh, and along the way, they fall in love. They are finally discovered at the shelter by the authorities, and Julien is taken away and scheduled to be executed. Lena is taken back to her friends, only to realize that the entire kidnapping was a setup to get Julien cast out of the DFA. Distraught, Lena runs to the lab where Julien is scheduled to be killed and attempts to rescue him. Will she be sucessful? Read to find out.
I didn’t love this book, but I didn’t hate it either. The parts of the plot concerning Julien and Lena’s love felt ridiculously cliched to me. It’s the classic Romeo and Juliet love story-Julien loves Lena, Lena loves Julien, but they can’t be together because of where they come from. This has been repeated thousands of times with a thousand other stories, yet authors just can’t seem to resist sticking it in their books. Luckily, Lauren Oliver is able to dress up the story with her signature prose, which can almost make up for the lack of origional plot. One example of this prose, for example, is this passage from Pandemonium: “I read once about a kind of fungus that grows in trees. The fungus begins to encroach on the systems that carry water and nutrients up from the roots to the branches. It disables them one by one-it crowds them out. Soon, the fungus-and only the fungus-is carrying the water, and the chemicals, and everything else the tree needs to survive. At the same time it is decaying the tree slowly from within, turning it minute by minute to rot.
That is wat hatred is. It will feed you and at the same time turn you to rot.
It is hard and deep and angular, a system of blockades. It is everything and total.
Hatred is a high tower. In the wilds, I start to build, and to climb.”
This prose is truely the high point of the novel, and Lauren Oliver writes with a beauty that is a joy to read, presenting her readers with a tale that can be gritty and rough or heartbreakingly gentle on the same page. This is a book for any reader, providing they can put up with the love aspect. Pandemonium is truely versitile in that it caters to action-lovers, romance-seekers, or sci-fi fans. It’s a standard read, not exceptional, but certainly nothing below average.
Rating: 6.5 stars out of 10 stars
Age level: 12 years and older
