Review: Wither by Lauren DeStefano
What: Wither (The Chemical Garden #1) by Lauren DeStefano
Who: Simon & Schuster
When: March 22nd 2011
How: Purchased.
“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?”
Wither is set in a dystopian future where an attempt to cure the human race of all ills has failed. The result? Females die at the age of twenty, and males at the age of twenty-five. As you can imagine, the race to procreate is on. Some young men are even stealing girls off the streets, forcing them to be their brides, and bear their children. The world is a not-so-nice place.
Rhine Ellery is sixteen years old when she is kidnapped, shoved in a van, and taken to the middle of nowhere. A young man, Linden, chooses her to be one of his next brides. Rhine hates every thing about her situation, except the help; Gabriel. Desperate to escape Linden’s mansion, and his creepy father, Vaughn, Rhine is determined to find a way out.
The main reason I picked up this book is because of the cover. It is seriously beautiful.
Overall, I quite liked this book. I liked the weird, dystopian-esque feel about it.
However, I did not like how quickly the story progressed. For such a small book, it covered almost a year of Rhine’s life, although it did not seem like it. I would be reading it thinking that a few days, perhaps weeks, had passed, and all of a sudden the narrator would say it had been months. It was slightly confusing.
I feel as if there could have been a little more character and relationship development, and perhaps a few more descriptions of places, and people. Although, I enjoyed the descriptions of the girls’ makeup and clothes, and the holograms.
The relationship between Rhine and Gabriel escalated too quickly for me, and left me questioning if they really would run away together. I also found Rhine’s feelings a little hard to decipher at times. Sometimes she would hate Linden with a passion, and at other times, it was as if she really cared about him. So I am left wondering if she likes him, or if she hates him.
Overall, it was a nice, quick, and easy read, and I enjoyed it.
I will definitely read the others in the series.
© 2013, Chiara @ Books for a Delicate Eternity. All rights reserved.
