Hana (Delirium Trilogy, #1.5) (Delirium Story, #1)

by Lauren Oliver

[clementine]

Hmm. I just sat down and read this one in one sitting (not much of a feat considering it's, y'know, not even close to being an actual novel.

Normally I would find this sort of thing gimmicky, but it kind of worked. I'm of two minds here, really - on the one hand, I think that Hana was a more interesting narrator than Lena, with more to offer (which I do realize contradicts what I said in my review of Delirium, but I did feel like this limited experience of Hana's POV was more poignant), but I also think that if you're going to write the same story from two different POVs, the voices better vary wildly, and they didn't. So, it fell a little short for me in that regard.

Hana was far more interesting in this book, because she comes across are much more vulnerable and confused, whereas in Delirium she was presented as this confident girl with a rebellious streak who knew what she was doing. The two sides of her meshed well, I think - I didn't feel like she was so completely different that Oliver failed to reconcile the two characters in a believable way.

But, yeah, it really threw me off how similarly she and Lena were written. Obviously Oliver has her own writing style - which, I must say, is quite a pleasure to read - but that works better in books set in totally different worlds. When she's recalling the same events in the same world through the voices of two characters who are best friends, it does NOT work.