Review: Requiem

Requiem (Delirium, book three)
By Lauren Oliver, read by Sarah Drew
Published 2013 by HarperCollins

WARNING: Likely spoilers ahead. Read my reviews of books one and two.

Lena is not the girl she was a short while ago. What she's discovered and what she's been through have changed her irreversibly. But can Lena take the changes within herself and find a way to change the world around her? She'll stop at nothing to try.

Well, two years later, I finally downloaded the audio of book three and finished the series. I'm really bad about starting series and not finishing them, so that's one of my reading goals for this year, particularly in cases when I know the series has been fully published now. Since I listened to the first two books on audio, it seemed like the natural choice to finish out the series in the same format.

Personally, I think this is the weakest of the trilogy. A great start, a strong follow-up and this feels like limping to the finish line. It feels like, with this book, Oliver drops all pretense of this book being about anything other than a love triangle and, as I said in my review of book two, I just don't care about that nonsense. I was sick of listening to Lena whine about whether or not she loved Julian or Alex. On the bright side, this made me endlessly glad for Hana's viewpoint - at least she was thinking about more than which boy she liked best. Overall, though, the book as a whole is just not as strong as the previous titles. The characters do not really grow in interesting ways, though Hana does at least a bit. The action completely fizzles out, leading to perhaps the biggest letdown of a conclusion that I've read in recent memory. Honestly, I don't have much more to say about the book - it was definitely a disappointment and not a good conclusion to a promising series.