Lena is counting down the days until she turns 18 and can have the procedure that will cure her so that she will never again have to fear contracting the disease known as Amor Deliria Nervosa, ie. Love. Her faith in this system begins to falter as her best friend introduces her to fringes of society that she didn't know exist (like music, and parties with members of the opposite sex) and then there's the boy that she meets, who starts to make her think that maybe being cured isn't what she wants after all. Maybe what she wants is to fall in love. And that will have her fighting against what society has planned.
Review:
Lena: While Lena constantly tells herself that she buys the norms of society, almost from the start she is doing minor things that hint that maybe she doesn't. When she starts to develop feelings for Alex she doesn't trust them, or him, which I guess makes since, because she was taught that these were wrong, still she didn't really find the feelings either. At times I found her frustrating because even with all the evidence she found it hard to let go of the society and trust what she was feeling. Her change in attitude was a bit to sudden for me, since she was coming off a nasty discovery that angered her.
Plot:
I was really interested in the concept of this book and wondered how a world without love would work. Honestly, I didn't really buy it. You never got a good reason why a majority of society were willing to give up love, when we thrive on love. I don't buy that you can have healthy, happy, normal kids without love (and for all intense and purposes that's these kids were...they were no more rebellious than normal teens). Also, for people who don't feel love, a lot of the adults showed more emotion than I would have expected. It was interesting concept, but could have been worked better.
That said, I did enjoy how the actual story progressed. While Lena's choices annoyed me at times, how her relationship with Alex blossomed and how he tried to show her sides of the world she didn't know were entertaining to read. Its always important to me that I can't predict every twist of the story, and I defiantly couldn't here. I enjoyed the book enough that I will be more than happy to read the second book, especially because I have come to terms with the way the world works (and I do realize that my issues with how "love" is handled are hard to know for sure since we don't live in that kind of world and never will).
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