Requiem

I received an E-ARC of this book from the publisher for possible review.

I was lucky enough to get a finished copy at a charity event, which I am giving away -- enter on my blog, YA Romantics! US only, ends 3/4/13.

To me, this series defines high-concept: what if love were viewed as a disease? After finishing Requiem, it seems to me that this entire series is an exploration of different types of love. In Delirium, Lena faces the prospect of her impending cure, then falls in love with Alex and risks everything to be with him. In Pandemonium, Lena faces life after a loss, and learns more about herself as a person as she faces life in the wilds, helps infiltrate the DFA (Deliria-Free America) and grows close to Julian. If Delirium is about show more first love and Pandemonium looks at love after loss, then I'd say that Requiem explores the idea of love as sacrifice.

Lauren Oliver's writing is beautiful and lyrical in all three books and I've enjoyed this entire trilogy. But after finishing the series, I'd say Delirium was my favorite. I preferred the single point of view, loved all the incredibly creative excerpts from The Book of SHH and other sources, and just found it more gripping to read about life within this dystopic society than life on the outside in the Wilds.

Like Pandemonium, Requiem has shifting points of view. While Pandemomium shifted chronologically from chapter to chapter, alternating between "now" and "then" in Lena's point of view Requiem shifts between Hana's point of view and Lena's. I will probably be in the minority on this, but I much preferred Hana's chapters in Requiem, probably because they reminded me of Delirium. Hana has been cured, and she's not quite herself, but I still found her situation complelling. Like Lena in Delirium, Hana is counting down the days to an important date -- her wedding to the mayor's son -- and as that date grows closer, her anxiety about the ceremony and her groom begin to grow. She starts sneaking around Portland, investigating a hunch. She's also keeping a BIG secret from Lena.

Lena's chapters in Requiem follow her work with the resistance in the Wilds. There are a lot of characters (most from Pandemonium, a few new) that I couldn't always keep straight, and a lot of hiding and skirmishes and moving from point A to point B. It was frustrating to me that Lena uses her group's precarious situation as an excuse to refuse to talk about or deal with the dramatic event at the end of Pandemonium. While I suppose this was realistic -- the group is trying to plan a rebellion while evading Regulators -- it was also frustrating.

In Requiem, Lena and Hana are each haunted by the past and tormented by guilt. There's a story -- borrowed from the Old Testament and the adapted in The Book of SHH -- that preoccupies both women. Thinking about that story -- in either version -- made me a little nervous about the ending of Requiem. Basically, the SHH version of the story ends in tragedy and the Biblical one in self-sacrifice. I won't tell you which way things go in Requiem, but I'll be very curious to see how other readers react. show less

""We are all punished for the lives we have chosen, one way or another."

So, I normally like to start my reviews with a confession...so here it is.

I was afraid to read this book. There it is, I've confessed it.
I was...I was so worried it would disappoint me. That I would have been happier to leave book 2 with that HUGE cliffhanger...and just let it be.

But, driven to know how this ended...I did it. I gathered a group of friends and we read it together - just in case we needed to huddle together at the end and cry lol

and I loved it. I loved seeing Lena stumble her way into the new her. this life is different, Lena is different, in the world with no rules and love is erratic and chaotic.

and I loved being with Hana. She's made choices and show more her life has been steered and....here she is, for better or worse.
I liked seeing "the cure" from her perspective.

I think Hanna summed it up best with her line above. They've made their choices to get to this point.

and here it is.

and now I'm okay leaving this world and these characters to their world. I know that everything is as right as it can be here. and I loved the journey we took to get there.

Thank you, [a:Lauren Oliver|2936493|Lauren Oliver|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1291156327p2/2936493.jpg]. This one was just wonderful! show less

Note: There are no specific spoilers for this book, nor for either of the two preceding installments.

This is the third book of the trilogy that includes Delirium and Pandemonium. I tried to read this one without doing a re-read, but ended up feeling the need to revisit the end of Delirium and all of Pandemonium. This book is not a standalone, nor is this review. It assumes you know the background of the trilogy. Nevertheless, you can read this review without fear of significant spoilers for any of the three books.

Requiem is told in alternating points of view between Lena, who left her life in Portland for freedom in “The Wilds,” and Hana, Lena’s best friend, who did not leave. Both of them are paying the consequences for their show more choices in different, and painful ways.

This book is quite full of action and excitement, and as the tension escalates to the denouement it reminded me a lot of the “Tonight” ensemble medley from “West Side Story,” with the inevitable showdown anticipated from competing perspectives of the various parties involved.

I raced through to the ending, and I think other readers did too, which may be why there have been so many complaints about the story’s screeching halt. But I will talk about why I did not want to throw my book, below, in the Discussion section.

For those readers who don’t like the idea that this series incorporates the usual YA/dystopia/trilogy/triangle, I would counter that the triangle turns out to be much more complicated and realistic than most of them. To me, it serves to highlight the complications of having the choice to love or not (the issue which is actually the whole basis of this dystopia), rather than only being a fatuous inclusion of a common trope. (It is, i.e., a meta triangle, just as the ending is a meta ending.) As Lena observes about how life is for most citizens who have opted to take the “cure” from loving in this dystopic future:

"…relationships are all the same, and rules and expectations are defined. Without the cure, relationships must be reinvented every day, languages constantly decoded and deciphered.

Freedom is exhausting.”

Amen to that!

Discussion: I loved this book. I loved it even more than the preceding two books in this trilogy. However, as I indicated above, many reviewers have ripped on this book for having basically a non-ending.

Therefore, you might be surprised at how much I loved this, because I am a huge fan of tie-it-up-with-a-bow endings. But. The open-endedness of the conclusion is, in my opinion, part of the whole point, on a meta level. And not even meta: there is actually quite a bit of exposition about it by the author (through the interior monologue of Lena). Life, she opines, is not about knowing. It’s about not knowing, but having faith and trust in what will come. She says:

"Take down the walls. ... You do not know what will happen if you take down the walls; you cannot see through to the other side, don’t know whether it will bring freedom or ruin, resolution or chaos. It might be paradise, or destruction.

Take down the walls.

Otherwise you must live closely, in fear, building barricades against the unknown, saying prayers against the darkness, speaking verse of terror and tightness.

Otherwise you may never know hell, but you will not find heaven, either. You will not know fresh air and flying. …

Take down the walls.” show less

Hana annoyed me as for a long while I really wasn't interested in her life, and then when she began to question things she seemed to go back and forth a lot. it annoyed me that she seemed to have no sense of loyalty even before she was 'cured', so I wasn't sure what difference the cure had actually made to her personality. Lena also annoyed me a fair bit with her obsession with Alex and her poor treatment of Julian. I felt Julian deserved better as he was the one who was there for her throughout. Lena was ridiculously protective of Julian and treats him like an idiot most of the time, taking out her own angst on him. Alex is moody and nasty to Lena, yet she still pines after him so much that it becomes annoying and very unrealistic with show more all the other stress that is going on around her.
Despite Lena insisting she knows how to handle herself I didn't feel like there was much evidence of that. The ending was a bit of a cop out with nothing really happening or being resolved and just a few trite 'everything will hopefully be okay, but I don't really know' sentences.

I enjoyed the action the most, where things were actually happening rather than hearing all Lena and Hana's angst. I liked hearing about Lena and Hana being strong, sneaking around and finding things out for themselves. show less

Read from May 24 to 25, 2013

I was expecting a little more from this one. While I appreciate the story, I would have enjoyed a bit more of a resolution and more obvious differences in voice between Hana and Lena. I did like seeing Lena go out on her own and save herself. Too often in these kinds of books it seems our heroine needs a boy to save her, so that was refreshing. Hana also ended up being a surprise -- but was she cured or not? How exactly does the cure work? I feel like I forgot a lot from the previous two books. Finally, MORE from Lena's mom would have been nice. I would have liked to see their relationship develop a bit more.

In short: I was disappointed with the lack of closure in Requiem by Lauren Oliver, but I did like it overall.

It was with a bit of nervousness that I entered into Requiem, knowing that it had had some mixed reviews and people especially seemed to have a problem with the ending. I absolutely LOVED Delirium when it was released and was completely blown away by Lauren Oliver's gorgeous prose. Its sequel, Pandemonium, was pretty good, though I felt that the story had lost a bit of the magic that had kept me enthused about the characters and the plot in Delirium. For me, Requiem falls a bit below Pandemonium in ratings - not a terrible read and pretty exciting in parts, but in other ways, it was pretty disappointing.

For me, one of the most show more important factors in evaluating the overall satisfaction of the final book in a series is whether the major questions were answered and whether most loose ends are tied up by the series' close. On this point, Requiem kind of fails for me and I'm sorry to say that I agree with the majority reader opinion in not liking the ending as it stands. Some people may like the open-ended ending, as it allows them to form their own conclusions about the future of the characters and plot, but for me, I needed more resolution, especially for the love triangle. Where was my closure? I feel like we are owed that for sticking with the series to the end. Unnecessary epilogues annoy me, but I feel like this is one case where I really would have liked to have seen one.

And I'm sorry to say I wasn't in love with Lena's character in Requiem. I liked her quite courage and wilfulness in Delirium and I really loved her growth to a strong, mature person in Pandemonium, but I feel like she regressed a bit with two boys in the picture in Requiem. I really hate that she was stringing along one of the boys while actually liking the other one more. Oh, love triangles - why must you make assholes out of people? I didn't have any particular preference for either of the boys going into Requiem, but that doesn't mean that I didn't experience dissatisfaction with the outcome due to Lena's handling of the situation.

I don't mean to be so hard on Requiem because I did like it overall. I liked the action scenes and I liked the inclusion of Lena's ex-bestie Hana's point of view into the story as it provided an opposing viewpoint of the resistance. There were just the few faults outlined above that I found couldn't get past. Still, it is always such a treat for me to get to experience Lauren Oliver's writing. I have yet to be disappointed by it and count myself as a life long fan. Middle Grade, Young Adult, Adult - I will read whatever she has planned and am guaranteed to be blown away by her writing skills. show less

I’ll start by saying it didn’t start great. The first few chapters moved slowly, and there was so much Lena angst over Alex and Julian that I considered putting the book down instead of slogging through the next 350 pages. Luckily, it improved.

After the initial slow start, the story moved along briskly. I commend Oliver for writing building action that moved the story along and kept me reading. After dragging my way through another trilogy conclusion that never seemed to end (*cough*REACHED*cough*), it was nice to WANT to keep turning the pages. I also thought her pacing was great—the way the installments of the two storylines got shorter and more urgent until they finally met was perfect. This was a definite improvement over the show more two storylines of Pandemonium that never overlapped, so much so that I have to think she listened to some of those critiques.

Speaking of the two storylines, I LOVED the decision to switch back and forth between Lena and Hana. Lena wavered back and forth between interesting and downright irritating, and every time I got sick of her anxiety over the boys, the chapter ended and shifted narrators. After Lena, I found Hana to be a nice change of pace, and she was refreshingly angst-free, especially given her situation. Oliver wrote the fog of her dampened emotions beautifully. In the crowd of physical, in-your-face, constantly-in-motion heroines crowding the teen fiction market, Hana stood still and made me feel her story. The climax of this storyline was perfect, in an oh-no-she-DIDN’T kind of way. I was energized after that and kept turning the pages excitedly until…

BOOM. It just ended. Without having read many of the other reviews, my guess is this is a negative that is repeated over and over again. There are a few different plotlines going on in this book, some stories within stories, and we get an ending for maybe one or two of them. The rest is left hanging. I understand Oliver wanting to end her series on a high note, but it feels like this was a fake ending she’d send to her publisher as a joke: “and we’ll pretend they all lived happily ever after even though this was never resolved and neither was this, and we’ll just tuck this one away and hope they forget.” The biggest unresolved plotline I had trouble with was the obvious one…

*SLIGHT SPOILERS* The freakin’ love triangle is never resolved. Lauren Oliver, I became a fan of your writing in this series, but I can’t continue being a fan if you’re going to pull crap like this. I’m betting I’ll get comments about this saying it *was* resolved, but I just reread the last couple pages and I still interpret those as indecision. You can’t build up a love triangle and then leave it hanging under the guise of, ‘I’m jazzed on life and everything will work itself out.’ That’s a copout, and a pretty major one at that.*END SPOILERS*

If I could, I’d probably knock this down to 3½ stars because of the lack of resolution, the recurring Lena angst, and the spoiler paragraph. As it is, I give it four stars for Hana, the pacing, and the action. show less