A New York Times, USA Today, and Publishers Weekly bestseller, this exciting finale to Lauren Oliver's acclaimed Delirium trilogy is a riveting blend of nonstop action and forbidden romance in a dystopian United States. With lyrical writing, Lauren Oliver seamlessly interweaves the peril that Lena faces with the inner tumult she experiences after the reappearance of her first love, Alex, the boy she thought was dead. Named an Best Book of the Year, this sophisticated and wide-ranging novel brings the New York Times bestselling Delirium trilogy to a thrilling conclusion.
Now an active member of the resistance, Lena has transformed. The nascent rebellion that was underway 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 infiltrate the borderlands to stamp out the rebels.
As Lena navigates the increasingly dangerous terrain of the Wilds, her best friend, Hana, lives a safe, loveless life in Portland as the fiancée of the young mayor. Requiem is told from both Lena and Hana's points of view. They live side by side in a world that divides them until, at last, their stories converge.
Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
108 of 115 people found the following review helpful.
Engaging, but disappointing ending
By Priyanka
I read Delirium and Pandemonium in a span of about two days and I fell in love. I loved the characters, premise, love triangle...it was all great. I thought it was well written too, if a bit predictable (especially the end of Pandemonium). Requiem starts out great too. The conflict between Alex and Lena is understandable considering what had happened, and there are some really good plot twists (Hana!) and overall it's very engaging. Lena's evolution as a character is one of the best aspects of the book, and for the first half, I loved where the story was going. However, Oliver is really missing one thing -she completely ignores Julian's characterization. After spending a whole book on him, she lets his character go to almost complete waste. He barely has one real conversation with Lena, he always is just simply there, with a sentence or two dedicated to his presence. The only area where he shows any growth was his stance within the group and how that evolves. Other than that, his character falls extremely flat and it's hard to remember why we loved him in Pandemonium. I understand she didn't want to focus too heavily on the love triangle, but essentially ignoring one of the book's main characters was not really the best way to go. I felt the ending is unsatisfying too, mainly because we don't understand the motivations behind Lena's pick. I'm actually very equally divided between Julian and Alex, so it wasn't that her choice dissatisfied me...it was just that we never got a real WHY (or it wasn't addressed enough) and I felt like there was very little closure. Even regarding the revolution - what comes next? It's one thing to be up for interpretation but this was just completely open ended. I feel like the series, being as good as it was, deserves better, as do the characters!
71 of 78 people found the following review helpful.Big Letdown
By heather tracy
As many other reviewers have complained, I too was left so unsatisfied by the ending of this book. I thought it started out great, and the switching between Lena and Hanas perspective was interesting. But then, it just felt like she had to hurry and finish writing at the end. I felt she did not resolve the love triangle, what happened with Hana, or what the results were of the resistance storming Portland. I felt like the story ended a chapter or two prematurely, and that's disappointing because the first two books were so great.
122 of 142 people found the following review helpful.So much for a "fight for love"...
By Patricia
This is actually my first time writing a review because I have never been so disappointed with a book as I have been with the way this series ended.There are way too many things to say about this. Where to start?SPOILERS:Let's start with the fact that the only time you actually experience Alex and Lena happily together is in the first book. You write a trilogy where the entire plot line revolves around the fight for love, the right to experience love, and all you see is Lena and Alex so infatuated with each other in Book 1... and then after that, just flimsy, undeveloped relationships between other characters. I want to see what these people are FIGHTING for! Do they even know? There's flimsy allusion to other characters being in relationships, but you sense none of the passion that you'd expect from the people battling and risking their lives to feel what they feel.Rewinding to Book 2, it wasn't bad. But I mean let's be real, we all knew Alex wasn't really dead. So I'm waiting and waiting this entire book for Alex to show up, and it's not until the very end he pops up. So the natural assumption is "Yay, he's been gone this whole book but now we have a whole book with him and things get to be resolved!" Right? Wrong. Because Alex shows up to be a mute character throughout the entirely of Requiem aside from the total of three exchanges (mostly brief) he has with Lena before the very end when he tells her very briefly that he still loves her (which okay, obviously we knew) and they kiss quickly. That's all. Two whole books of a lead up to..."it's complicated" from Lena and a "I'm not going to leave you again" from Alex. Okay Alex, that's good you're not gonna leave Lena again but I mean, that doesn't change the fact that "it's complicated"! So what happens with Julian? No one knows. What happens with Tack now that Raven's gone? No one knows. Hanna? Lena's family? The country? Fred? Nope. We just get walls getting torn down in Portland. That'd be cool if Portland were the entire United States...and that wall being torn magically killed off every regulator and uncured traitor in the world...I SO agree with the other readers here that the characters were very poorly developed in this book (especially Julian). And Alex might as well not have even been there for the lack of role he played in dialogue or anything really. He basically served just as a diterrance between Lena and Julian's relationship, which was a point so obviously made when he left and Lena claimed to finally be able to be freer with Julian when he was gone. So much for the love you claimed to feel. And let's not forget how the girl literally believed the love of her life to be dead, this supposedly strong girl, and just LET him go off with some other girl because he "said" he never loved her...even though he also said that RIGHT after claiming the thought of Lena was the only thought that kept him going while being tortured! I felt like she used him saying that as an excuse to not have to deal with her conflicting emotions, but my opinion is that if she really loved him as much as she claimed to, or really loved Julian as much as she claimed to- it doesn't really matter to me, I just wanted her to make a decision honestly- she wouldn't have just let things drop. She would have been adamant about explaining her actions despite his very obviously untrue claims about never caring about her.Overall, absolutely nothing was resolved. I spent way too much of my time reading this book hoping for a conclusion to these and many more issues...and I got none. But hey, we at least got the lecture on "tearing down the walls" by the author at the end, right? Maybe that should be changes to "tearing down the pages of this book because I'm so angry"?
