Review: Wither by Lauren DeStefano

Wither by Lauren DeStefano

 

 

Series: The Chemical Garden Trilogy (#1)

Release Date: March 22, 2011

Publisher: Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers

Format: eBook, 368 pages

Source: Personal Bookshelf

Genre: YA, Fantasy, Dystopian

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Overview:

 

  By age sixteen, Rhine Ellery has four years left to live. She can thank modern science for this genetic time bomb. A botched effort to create a perfect race has left all males with a lifespan of 25 years, and females with a lifespan of 20 years. Geneticists are seeking a miracle antidote to restore the human race, desperate orphans crowd the population, crime and poverty have skyrocketed, and young girls are being kidnapped and sold as polygamous brides to bear more children.

  When Rhine is kidnapped and sold as a bride, she vows to do all she can to escape. Her husband, Linden, is hopelessly in love with her, and Rhine can’t bring herself to hate him as much as she’d like to. He opens her to a magical world of wealth and illusion she never thought existed, and it almost makes it possible to ignore the clock ticking away her short life. But Rhine quickly learns that not everything in her new husband’s strange world is what it seems. Her father-in-law, an eccentric doctor bent on finding the antidote, is hoarding corpses in the basement. Her fellow sister wives are to be trusted one day and feared the next, and Rhine is desperate to communicate to her twin brother that she is safe and alive. Will Rhine be able to escape--before her time runs out?

  Together with one of Linden's servants, Gabriel, Rhine attempts to escape just before her seventeenth birthday. But in a world that continues to spiral into anarchy, is there any hope for freedom?

My Thoughts:

 

 

  I've been holding out on reading ANY dystopian novels, since they've become this big thing since The Hunger Games came out.  I chose Wither to be my first, because I remembered the cover from when it first came out.  And for the fact that I already had the rest of the trilogy and wouldn't have to wait to purchase or borrow them.

  So as I started the novel, I had no idea what to expect, never having read a book quite like this one.  But I was pleasantly surprised by how much I liked it.  Rhine was a strong and somewhat likable character.  Sometimes she was entirely too whiny for my tastes.  I mean, her fate could have easily been worse, but all she could do was bemoan her fate.  She had an adoring husband, who she could have easily influenced had she opened up to him a little more.

  Most people had trouble with the world building, but I kind of looked past it to the fact that Linden and his father basically kidnapped 3 girls and forced them to marry him, and still expected them to love him like he didn't do anything like that.  How do you get over something like that?  And especially, how does he even think that's okay?   
  I easily felt for Rhine in her anger and desperation for escape to find her brother.  To me, that's what made the book relatable.  Anger and escape would have been the first things on my mind, though I doubt I'd ever have the courage to go through with it.  I enjoyed this book and can't wait to finish the next in the trilogy, Fever.

 

 

My rating: 4 stars