This review was first posted on http://www.rubysreads.com. 
 I am but one among many this week (and likely throughout next month) who is reviewing Lauren Oliver's Delirium. I've decided, in the name of all those other reviews, that I'll keep mine short. Or try to. I think I might have a touch of long-windedness. 
 Delirium is that sweetheart of 2011--the YA Dystopian/love story. In Oliver's Dystopian future, love is considered a disease--for which a cure has been discovered. Oliver paints a future that's bleak and terrifying--thereby making her book a successful Dystopian. It also has likable characters. The heroine, Lena, is a seething mass of emotions. Part of her believes in the cure and fantasizes about a time when all the anxieties of youth will be erased with the swipe of a scalpel. But there's also a part of her that notices that the cure makes mothers indifferent to the pain of their own children and husbands and wives ambivalent to each other. It's emotional neutering. 
 Delirium provided lots of food for thought. All love is eradicated in Oliver's dystopia, mother love included. For me, this raised an age-old question: if a child is raised in an atmosphere of indifference--i.e., without love--can he or she learn to love without being taught? Because Lena's mother was incurable, Lena grew up with a mother who loved her. But what about all the other children raised in households of people whose emotions have been effectively removed from their psyches? This was an interesting psychological question that I hope the series explores in later books. 
 The other thought I had about Delirium was that I wanted to know more about how people came to view love as the root of all evil. What happened? And since I just wrote a paragraph about it, where were all the mothers? I can't conceive of mothers, as a whole, submitting to a procedure that would rob them of their love for their children. Which suggests to me that something pretty catastrophic must have happened to bring about a future like the one Lena lives in. Perhaps we'll learn more about this in the next book. I sure hope so. 
 As for the love story, I liked Lena and Alex's relationship. It's allowed to develop and it's given time to mature. If they weren't star-crossed lovers, they'd be boring. Lena and Alex are pulled to each other, but their relationship is refreshingly free of the soul mates/desperate love stuff that can sometimes induce eye-rolling. I also liked the way that history was reinterpreted--like Romeo and Juliet being turned into a cautionary tale. But I was confused as to why Alex was living in Portland. His motives weren't even really hinted at. I mean, I get why he came there. But why did he stay? Alex knows a lot of illicit stuff, but is he part of a resistance of some sort? If he knows how much the government has altered history to reflect the idea of love as a disease, why would he want to go to school at one of their colleges? Because there's no other option? 
 My final thought about Delirium was that I'm glad that it's not a stand-alone. It reads okay as a beginning, but I think it leaves readers with too many questions. Of course, books in a series should have unanswered questions. It's one of their major draws. But, with Delirium , I found myself more confused that intrigued. Which suggests to me that Oliver ought to have filled in a few blanks before she wrapped up the first installment of the series.