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“The deadliest of all deadly things: It kills you both when you have it and when you don’t.”

 “I don’t like to think that I’m still walking around with the disease running through my blood. Sometimes I swear I can feel it writhing in my veins like something spoiled, like sour milk. It makes me feel dirty.”

 “It has been sixty-four years since the president and the Consortium identified love as a disease, and forty-three since the scientists perfected a cure.”

‘Delirium’

This book made me feel many different emotions. It was terrifying, occasionally funny, and often difficult to wrap my head around. Like ‘The Hunger Games’, it’s a dystopian novel and could appeal to the same readers. Based on the fact that the first line of the book, spoken by the narrator and main character, Lena, states that it’s been sixty-four years since love was discovered to be a disease, readers immediately know the story is set far into the future. Although I love reading writers’ dramatically varying theories regarding what the world will be like in the future, I found it disturbing to read about a bleak future that’s even less appealing than the human race’s past of horrific cruelty. This book was definitely one of those cases, but it’s so well written, and has such a compelling storyline that it’s hard to resist. However, if you are the kind of reader that becomes genuinely afraid for your descendants’ future, I wouldn’t recommend this book.

The civilization that Lena lives in believes love to be a terrible disease that must be cured through an operation in which part of the patient’s brain is cut out. At the beginning of the story, Lena is entirely supportive of her community’s beliefs regarding love, and as a result, we are able to see their leaders’ reasoning. I loved being able to understand how they came to the conclusion that they did; and it was fascinating to see that an interesting story idea, although seemingly completely impossible for our future, did in fact make some sense. There are undoubtedly a number of people in a year that die or hurt others as a result of love through suicide, crimes of passion, and even terrorist actions as a result of religious faith.

In ‘Delirium’, when “uncureds” turn eighteen, it is considered safe for them to undergo the operation. Many look forward to it, unless they’ve already been touched by “amor deliria nervosa”, the scientific name for love as a disease. Lena was a really likeable character, described as being five foot two, and uninterested in girly things. In her own words, Lena says: “I’m not ugly, but I’m not pretty, either. Everything is in-between. I have eyes that aren’t green or brown, but a muddle. I’m not thin, but I’m not fat, either. The only thing you could definitely say about me is this: I’m short”. By making her character average, the author enables many different readers to identify with Lena.

Before their operations, girls and boys are expected to have evaluations, in which they are asked questions about their favourite colours, pastimes, etc. From this information, the evaluators decide exactly what these people’s futures will be. This includes whether or not they will go to college and what they will major in, as well as who they will marry, and how many children they will have.

The story becomes unbelievably exciting as Lena begins to experiment with things that are considered unacceptable, such as music that hasn’t been approved, or speaking to “uncureds” of the opposite sex, which is not at all condoned. She also, unsurprisingly, falls in love, and begins to become a “resister” of what she has spent her entire life believing in. As a result, she begins to learn more about her family’s past, and realizes that rebelling against the restrictive and cruel society they are part of runs in her family!

I hope you will choose to read this book, and thank you so much for checking out my review!

‘Switch’- by Tish Cohen

“I pass a big mirror and stop. Even out of the corner of my eye, even in a dead soldier’s overcoat, something doesn’t look right. I stare at myself and nearly faint.

It isn’t me in the glass.

It’s Joules Freaking Adams.”

Page 66 of ‘Switch’

This is an incredibly funny, creative, and enthralling story about a charmingly awkward teenaged girl switching lives with a girl that she’s jealous of who goes to her school. When I saw this book, I felt that it was too clichéd a storyline, and that it was like many movies and books prior to it. This assumption was backed by the comparison to ‘Freaky Friday’ on the back cover.

However, it became increasingly obvious throughout the book that the author was trying to avoid similarities to ‘Freaky Friday’. For example, the main character’s perspective is the only one we experience throughout the story. The author diverges even further, because the main character, Andrea, and the rude and reclusive Joules barely know each other, despite having been in classes together. At times, I wished I could know more about the life of Joules, the girl the main character, Andrea, switches lives with. At first, we only know a few details about Joules, such as that her dad is a rock star; she doesn’t have very many friends, other than her boyfriend, who Andrea is also in love with, and the guy she was cheating on him with. Despite the lack of friends, Andrea describes Joules as a gorgeous, enviable girl, adding to her mystery. Once the girls trade places, we are only aware of the positive aspects of Joules’ life. Towards the end of the novel, we realize why the author was so secretive about revealing other aspects. Tish Cohen was simply creating suspense for the unveiling of the shocking imperfection that is Joules’ family life.

I highly recommend this book. It was amusing, at times suspenseful, and the characters were pleasantly real. Andrea’s most memorable character trait is her ability to awkwardly babble for long periods of time, as well as her lack of fashion sense, which is shown when she unintentionally wears a thong as a bracelet on her first day of dressing in Joules’ clothing… I recognized that my own nerve-induced verbal ineptitude was very similar to Andrea’s and was able to relate. Her happy ending gives me hope that it won’t always inhibit me when talking to people that make me nervous!

So, essentially, I loved ‘Switch’, and I hope you want to read it now too!

If you’ve already read this book, please comment and let me know what you think!