Requiem (2013)

The final book in the Delirium trilogy ends, I’d say, reasonably well.  As I said in my Pandemonium review, I’m not crazy about some of the relationship developments, and for me personally, I think the story here is a bit more generic YA dystopian lit than the first two books, but in general, it hits some good beats, and the split narrative works in its favor.  Spoilers ahead.

Lena’s involvement with the uncured resistance movement is thrown for a loop by some tremendous personal upheaval.  Namely, just as she’s started to open herself to Julian, the boy whose life has been turned upside down and has joined her in the Wilds, she discovers that Alex, the boy she’d given up everything and left her home for, is still alive.  Contrary to everything she’d believed to be true, Alex was captured, not killed, in their attempt to escape, and he’s now made his way back to find her a bit ambiguously with Julian.  Lena has no idea what to do or how to handle her confused feelings regarding both boys, and all the while the rebellion seems to be coming to a head; choices have to be made and stands have to be taken, but Lena’s in a tough state of mind to think clearly about how she wants to align herself.

After splitting the story in time in the second book, jumping back and forth between two points of Lena’s post-Delirium life, Requiem experiments further with the narrative.  Here, chapters alternate between Lena’s usual perspective and that of Hana, Lena’s best friend back home.  Lena was the only character physically carried over from Delirium to Pandemonium, so it’s nice to return to Portland in this book and see characters who weren’t around in the last installment.  And even better, by this point, Hana has undergone the procedure to “cure” the deliria, so we get something entirely different:  a view into the mind of one of the cured.  We see the changes in Hana from book one, the effects the procedure has on her, the bits of her old self still simmering underneath, and her fears that the cure didn’t “take” the way it should have.  Unlike the final Divergent book, where the split narrative didn’t really work for me (if you have two different first-person perspectives, their voices should be distinct enough that I don’t forget whose chapter I’m reading,) the device expands Requiem and lets it explore interesting new territory.

The whole Lena-Alex-Julian mess is less successful.  I get that opening yourself to love involves both the sublime and the painful, so it makes sense for Lena to experience the struggle of liking two boys at once, not wanting to hurt either, and feeling guilty over the whole situation, but it feels much more commonplace to me than where I’d hoped they were going, a story between Lena and Julian about learning to love again.  I’m all but allergic to love triangles anyway, and after thinking the story was going in a different direction, it’s a disappointment to see the overused story-eater rear its angsty head once more.  And it makes me sad that Lena has to go through this crap.  It’s not Hunger-Games-love-triangle unfortunate, but it’s pretty unfortunate.

As for the dystopian side of the ending itself, I think it does a decent job.  With stories like this, it’s hard, because the tendency is to want the big rebellion to culminate in sweeping change, but watching corrupt systems topple doesn’t mean instant fix, and it’s difficult to end a story with all that complication in a way that’s manageable.  Here, the story doesn’t try to wrap up this aspect too neatly; it suggests without stating, and it avoids the temptation to skip ahead and show what it’s like after the dust settles.  The book ends in flux, pointing the characters in a particular direction but not arranging them neatly or orderly.