Requiem

 

Author: Lauren Oliver 

Release Date: March 5th, 2013
Publisher: HarperCollins Children's Books 
Genre(s): YA Dystopia  
Pages: 391

*3rd and final book of a series*

Read this review only if you’ve read the previous two books! I've covered up the spoilers for Requiem ONLY. (Highlight the page to see them:))

Summary (Goodreads): They have tried to squeeze us out, to stamp us into the past.

But we are still here.

And there are more of us every day.

Now an active member of the resistance, Lena has been transformed. The nascent rebellion that was under way in Pandemonium has ignited into an all-out revolution in Requiem, and Lena is at the center of the fight.

After rescuing Julian from a death sentence, Lena and her friends fled to the Wilds. But the Wilds are no longer a safe haven—pockets of rebellion have opened throughout the country, and the government cannot deny the existence of Invalids. Regulators now infiltrate the borderlands to stamp out the rebels, and as Lena navigates the increasingly dangerous terrain, her best friend, Hana, lives a safe, loveless life in Portland as the fiancée of the young mayor.

Maybe we are driven crazy by our feelings.

Maybe love is a disease, and we would be better off without it.

But we have chosen a different road.

And in the end, that is the point of escaping the cure: We are free to choose.

We are even free to choose the wrong thing.

Requiem is told from both Lena’s and Hana’s points of view. The two girls live side by side in a world that divides them until, at last, their stories converge.

Review: 

In a word? Disappointing.

  

It wasn't like I had very high expectations for this book (learned my lesson on that!... Sort of xD), but still.   Delirium was good, Pandemonium was okay, but this book...

To put it simply, the third book had way too much stuff in it to be put into the second novel (but I think Oliver could and should have done that, instead of writing a third book), but way too little substance to be a whole book.  Does that make sense? It's a weird little sentence, but that's the best I can do to describe this book.  It had way too much stuff, but it had little substance.  (You'll understand if you choose to pick up the book. Whether I recommend you do or not... eh.  More on that later.) 

So. Alex.   

In a sentence? I didn't like him.

In a short paragraph?   Alex is back, and he’s changed- sort of.  If changing means his actions used to make sense before but now they don’t make any sense at all, then he’s changed a lot.  Otherwise, I guess he’s pretty much the same Alex, even if he seems different. 

Confused yet? 

Me too.

Now the deal with Lena. 

I loved her in Delirium, started to feel a slight animosity toward her in Pandemonium, and hated her in Requiem.  She did absolutely nothing in this book- wait I take that back.  She narrated to us what other people are doing.  (That’s something, right?)  Requiem’s Lena was totally different than the Lena from the previous two books, and I hated her wishy washiness. What happened to that strong, confident girl?  (It seems she disappeared during the time it took to release this book.) Even though it was clear from the beginning which guy she was going to choose in the end (Alex or Julian), I didn’t like how she was stringing the other guy (who she CLEARLY wasn’t going to choose) along.  I understood she needed someone to lean on at that time, but she could have been straight up honest with that guy, and, given his personality, I was pretty sure he would have understood.  

Julian was eh in this book as well.  I never really liked him nor hated him (though I did think he was a bit creepy in the previous book…).  Even though he was a nice guy (maybe too nice?), he was very bland.  He didn’t really do anything interesting in the book either. 

The love triangle aspect was weak.  I usually don't like love triangles (this opinion changes by my mood, but in general, it's a dislike), but if done well, I'm all for it.  Here, it seemed like a last minute thing, and it was obvious from the start who she was going to pick in the end.  (Calling it a love triangle would be pushing it, actually. )

Hana was an okay character.  She was interesting certainly (after all, we get to see what's going through a brain of the cured), and out of all the characters, she was the most fully developed.  Even so, her chapters were just as boring as Lena’s; Hana did do something- more than what Lena did- but it was very dragged out.  Her ending, as well as Lena’s, was left open-ended, and though that ending was a nice touch (it's very hopeful), it wasn’t quite nice enough to redeem the book. 

As for the style: 

I didn’t like how there were two people narrating this book (Hana and Lena).  Except in rare cases (Unwind and Flipped), I hate reading in this style because, often, the two or three people narrating sound exactly the same (such was the case here).  And that switch between the chapters messed me up.  It wasn’t like we were seeing the same situation in two points of view; we were seeing completely different things in two points of view.  As soon as I would sort of understand where one chapter was going, the book would switch to the other girl.  I always had to go back and forth, and that was a bit annoying. 

Final thoughts?  It was overall disappointing, nothing really redeemable about this book.  The only thing that sort of got me was when a certain character died, but even then, I was so detached from the book emotionally, my reaction wasn't that strong. I recommend it for die-hard fans, but even then eh.  You might think it’s good but I doubt it would be an "awesome."

Happy reading!:)

Rating: 1.5 out of 5