Book Review: Requiem

Requiem by Lauren Oliver
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Meh.

I liked each book in this series less than the previous book. (Warning, this will contain spoilers for the preceding books.)



Nope.


I have no words. This book just didn't do it for me.

Okay. A few words. Too much of it was cliché.

The "moral of the story" in the end was decent, but I think she was trying to be way more poetic than it actually came across.

The action was weak. The moments that I could tell were supposed to be tense or heartbreaking just didn't affect me like a well written book would have. She didn't make me care about the characters enough!!!

One of the major pitfalls for this book was that there was WAY too much swearing. I feel like Oliver thought she needed to increase the amount of swearing exponentially in each book. For me, when an author uses too much swearing in their writing, it just puts their writing in a lower class. And don't tell me that they need swearing to show the hardness of the characters. Dickens wrote about plenty of hard characters who were brilliantly portrayed, and he didn't fill his books with foul language.

I felt like Oliver used swearing especially as a crutch. Whenever something intense was happening, one of the characters started swearing. Somebody dies, something's scary, something makes them angry, and it's "#$%^^, %$##*, *^%$#@!" Those moments would have been so much more powerful, more moving for me if she had fleshed it out with some actual dialogue or some actual body language! There are so many better ways she could have written those moments! Instead, she decided to alienate her reader by forcing foul words into his/her head.

I appreciated that the ending wasn't wrapped up in a tidy little bow. I applaud Oliver for that point. I really thought she would end it with everything wrapped up and blue skies, which would have been way too predictable.

Honestly, I don't hold very high esteem for this series. I say, if you're looking for a great YA dystopian series, read The Hunger Games. If you've read that and are looking for more and don't mind if it's not quite the same caliber, read the Divergent series. If you've read both of those and have to get your hands on something else even if it's just a worthless fluff read, I guess you could read Delirium. But stop there. It's not going to get better if you keep reading.

Content: This book has violence and plenty of swearing. The "sh" word used repeatedly throughout, and the F-bomb dropped more than several times--wouldn't qualify as a PG-13 movie.

So is it just me? Do you find swearing in a book to be a distraction and a sign of a weak writer? Or do you breeze over it so that you don’t even notice? Have you read this series? What did you think?