The journey is hard, and without food, medicine, proper clothing or first aid, more rebels die. Some of the rebels die, and Lena and others barely escape with their lives. But the government bombs the homestead before the rebels can leave. She sends scouts ahead to mark the way and bury food. With cold weather approaching, Raven decides it is time for the rebels to move to another homestead in the South for the winter. After Lena is nursed back to health at a rebel’s homestead, she slowly becomes a part of their community, learning that life in the Wilds is much more physically demanding than life in the city. Near death, Lena is rescued by a group of rebels led by a young woman named Raven and her second in command, Tack. The last time Lena saw Alex, he had been shot as an army of men descended on him. Alex gave himself up so Lena could escape into the Wilds to avoid “the cure,” which is a government mandate for delirium. Lena is wracked with guilt and sadness over losing Alex, the rebel boy she fell in love with, even though love (amor deliria nervosa or delirium) has been declared a disease by the U.S. The story begins right after Lena’s dramatic escape from Portland, Maine, which left her wandering, injured and alone, through the Wilds, the unregulated area outside the city. I’m not sure I could have stood the torture of having to wait a year to find out Lena’s fate.Pandemonium is told from two perspectives: “Then,” when Lena first enters the Wilds, and “Now,” when Lena is living in New York City pretending to be cured while spying for the resistance. Thank goodness I’ve already got my hands on a copy of the trilogy’s conclusion: Requiem. ‘Holy sh*t’ is the phrase that springs to mind. Plus, if you thought the cliffhanger at the end of Delirium was bad, wait until you get to the last page of Pandemonium. Lauren Oliver has a way of really making you connect with the characters, which makes reading her work an experience, like you’re sprinting alongside them rather than watching them from afar. Pandemonium is jam-packed full of action, and plenty of moments where you can actually feel your heart squeezing in your chest (to me, that’s a sign of a truly good book). It’s a pretty mean feat to be able to pull this off without making things complicated and confusing, but Lauren Oliver has achieved it perfectly. Delirium was a pretty straight forward story with a narrative that took us from A to B, but Pandemonium shakes it up a bit with a ‘then’ and ‘now’ structure that takes the reader back and forth in time chapter by chapter. In fact, Pandemonium is one of those rare cases when the sequel is ten times better than the first in the series, and I had already given Delirium a five star rating.Īnd it’s not just the new characters that make Pandemonium such a great read, it’s also the new structure that Lauren Oliver has introduced. I don’t want to spoil anything here, but I will say that Pandemonium adds some new characters into the mix that lead Lena’s story in a whole new direction. She’s questioned love and the life-changing and agonising choices that come with it. I hoped that this sequel would pull us back up again, and that it did, but in a way that I absolutely had not expected. Lauren Oliver left us with an enormous cliffhanger at the end of Delirium, Pandemonium’s captivating predecessor. Pandemonium (book two of the Delirium trilogy) – Lauren Oliver
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