Review of Hana by Lauren Oliver

In the world of Delirium, love is a disease. And like all eighteen-year-olds, Lena and Hana must take the cure.At the start of their last summer of freedom, they were the closest of friends. Until Hana made a decision that tore them apart . . . In Delirium, we heard from Lena. Now, Hana gets to tell her side of the story. And nothing is what we first thought. Hana is a powerful, moving and beautifully told original eBook short story, with a shocking twist that will leave you with your heart in your mouth.


I spent quite a bit of work trying to get Hana, as I don't currently have a bank card and needed to pay with Paypal. I felt it was worth it though – I loved Hana's character in Delirium and was desperate to read the story from her own point of view. Of Lena and Hana's friendship, Hana was clearly the stronger half at the beginning, but drifted away from Lena as the story progressed so I was also curious to see if we'd find out what happens to her.

In Delirium, Lena paints Hana as the ultimate friend – they've known each other since they were children, they go running together as much as possible and when Hana needs to visit Alex, Hana covers for her and occasionally joins her, and the team play hide and seek and scrabble. However, the Hana we meet in this short story is a very different person, with thoughts and feelings that are not very likeable at all. Whereas Hana in Delirium accepts Alex and becomes friends with him, this Hana is really jealous of Lena's relationship and does something that, in my opinion, is one of the most overused clichés in Dystopian novels, which annoyed me even more.

And if that wasn't annoying enough, this seems to be half the book – the other half is dedicated to shoving in a couple of chapters of Pandemonium – and Lena's not doing great. She's doing so badly in fact, that she seems to have developed OCD. It appears to be split into two – now and then. I'm not sure what the point of this is, but it does seem to be the one intriguing part at least!

Overall, a rather disappointing purchase. The whole short story seems to be designed to put people off buying Pandemonium, with cliché after cliché. A couple of gay characters are randomly written in, as if to try and appeal to the gay community too. As there are no gay characters in Delirium, this just furthered my annoyance...

3/5

Comments

  1. hmm...I'm not a fan of reading short stories that are come out in the middle of series.


    It's a shame that this one didn't quite live up to your expectations!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Eek. I've never heard of this one but I'm not a fan of short stories anyways so not disapointed that it's not great haha.

    Giselle
    Xpresso Reads

    ReplyDelete
  3. Too bad that this was a disappointment, as I really liked Hana in Delirium and was hoping to get to know her better! Appreciated your review, and will think twice about picking this one up.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi Vicky,

    I wanted to let you know I got your email about following. I've been following my in RSS since I got your other email, but I don't follow via your feedburner just your regular RSS so that's probably why it's not showing up. Also, I couldn't find your email anywhere on your blog otherwise I would've sent this message that way :)

    If you want to keep good track of your RSS you might think of moving to Wordpress, there's some really handy plugins that keep track of the RSS subscribers, both Feedburner and other ways :)

    All best,
    April

    ReplyDelete
  5. @Fireflywishes - So... are you following me or not? I can't work it out! >.<
    If you look on request a review my email should be on there, however I'll update my About Me to include it too. I'm one of those folks who can't hack Wordpress I'm afraid, plus I quite like Blogger, despite its faults. :P

    ReplyDelete

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