Wither

“Eventually I realize that I am holding on to him just as tightly as he holds on to me. And here we are: two small dying things, as the world ends around us like falling autumn leaves.”

I've heard a lot of mixed things about this book, but when I saw it for $3 last summer I had to buy it. I'm not sure exactly what my expectations were for this book, but I can say I was really intrigued by the premise. The idea that girls die at 20 and boys die at 25 is fascinating. And I love the commentary on it happening because humans tried to cheat evolution and become the perfect beings.

Our main character in this book is Rhine. She is taken from her twin brother in NY to Florida where she is forced to marry Linden. Linden also marries two other girls. This made sense to me since with people dying at such a young age it makes sense to have multiple wives to bear children. What really irked me with this was how easily the girls accepted the whole sister wives thing. I understand they didn't want to marry Linden, but they seemed totally fine if he was lounging around with all three at the same time.

Lauren DeStefano's writing is beautiful. She definitely writes a very description heavy prose. These descriptions and thoughts are sliced with short instances of dialogue. At first it was really odd to me that there was so little dialogue, but after a while I did not notice it as much. For the most part DeStefano did a great job of keeping the mystery and plot going throughout the book. I definitely am convinced that Rhine being a twin with heterochromatic eyes is extremely important. The plot was quite slow and boring at times in this book, but I think it was to help set up the world and what Rhine is going through.

While this book has a horrible cover (I'm sorry if you like it but I find it to be horrible), the premise of the world is what convinced me to buy it and subsequently read it. The only thing the cover has going for it is the typography, it is really nicely done. After finishing it and digesting my thoughts I have come to a very “meh” feel. It was enjoyable at times but at other times it was either annoying or dry. I may or may not continue on with the series. Granted it will probably be a yes if I can find the books at good prices. Basically this was an interesting idea but I'm not sure it was the book for me.

AWESOME book. I loved this book. I love the idea, the writing, the characters, everything. I love the characters that DeStefano has created with Rhine, Gabriel and Jenna. I'm still on the fence a little bit about Linden and Cecily. She's definitely written the Housemaster to be disliked, however. I'm curious to see where the other two books will take these characters.

When I first saw the cover for Wither I had high hopes that the story would be just as captivating, that it would be hard for me to pull my eyes away, and it was. This story was a beautifully written dystopian novel that really showed the inner struggles of a girl who seemed to have everything a young girl should want - a grand lavish mansion, beautiful dresses, a personal attendant, and the devotion of a man who loves her but without true freedom. Like the cover depicts, Rhine is a bird trapped in a beautiful cage, an illusion.

Yet, despite what has happened to her I have to admit Rhine's life before being captured by the Gatherers was awful. She's an orphan and was living with her twin brother in the basement of her family home because it was the safest place to hide from beggars, thieves, and men who steal young girls off the streets and from their homes. Both her and her twin had to work to keep from starving and they each had to take turns at night keeping watch for intruders. Given the circumstances of Rhine's life I could easily have pictured this story going a completely different route if Rhine's situation was just a little different and if her character was just a little different.

I, like Rhine, had to constantly work at not forgetting how she had gotten to the lavish lifestyle that she is living, to not forget that she was stolen away, her freedom taken, and her brother left alone miles away in a factory strewn Manhattan because it is very easy to forget when her old life is completely hidden away. She doesn't forget though, no matter how many times people tell her to not run away, that it's dangerous, that the life she is living isn't so bad, and that if she just behaves she can have “anything” she wants. Rhine doesn't give in no matter how tempting the words are because she knows that this world she is in cannot give her her brother, and her freedom.

Wither is a story that shows the beauty and darkness of the human heart, it was really a story about the characters, not just Rhine herself but her sister wives, her husband Linden, her ambitious father-in-law, and many other characters that weren't just there to fill the space or carry the story along but who truly added to the tale. Unlike a few other dystopians Wither isn't about the action and the external forces but about the will and strength of the people.

I'll admit, I went into this book with low expectations, having read all the reviews, negative and otherwise. That being said, I got about 3/4ths of the way through this book before I had to put it down for my sanity.The two stars I did rate it were purely the idea and writing style, not the execution.[b:Wither 8525590 Wither (The Chemical Garden, #1) Lauren DeStefano http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1311109085s/8525590.jpg 13392566] sets you up pretty early in the book. Maybe its a personal preference, but I like bits and pieces being revealed, not info dumps towards the beginning. However, what really stood out to me was the ethnocentrism in this book, as other reviewers have pointed out. “All we were taught of geography was that the world had once been made up of seven continents and several countries, but a third world war demolished all but North America, the continent with the most advanced technology. The damage was so catastrophic that all that remains of the rest of the world is ocean and uninhabitable islands so tiny that they can???t even be seen from space.”Unless I missed any other ethnicity being mentioned, (this book got really hard to get through.) all I could recall was every character in this book was Caucasian. It reinforced this “AMERICA IS THE BEST!” mentality I didn't particularly care for. Did the USA have a shiny invisi-shield that protected it from the horrid destruction that the other countries somehow missed? This attitude is unfortunately prevalent nowadays and I don't like reading it in YA fiction. Some of the logic also made no sense to me. Since the women live to be twenty, and the men twenty-five, why are women still treated poorly? They are dying out faster than men, there would exist a huge gender discrepancy.It was hard getting through what I got through. Much of the writing in the middle and towards the end became very repetitive; whether or not [a:Lauren DeStefano 4103366 Lauren DeStefano http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1305725851p2/4103366.jpg] created this to illustrate the nature of her captivity is unknown to me. However, her idea for this dystopian novel was a great one, and had it been created with a little more research, a lot more logic and without the ethnocentrism, it could be wonderful. Her writing style is excellent, and I definitely enjoyed how she wrote (just not what she wrote!)

Wither er en dystopisk bok med en veldig interessant verden. Alle jenter dør når de fyller tjue, alle gutter når de blir tjuefem. Så her styres verden av unge voksne. Handlingen foregår for det meste i Florida, men vi får bare se det Rhine får se – altså huset og hagen der hun blir tvunget til å bo.

Å bli fanget av folk som tar deg med og tvinger deg til å gifte deg med en mann som allerede har andre koner høres ikke særlig hyggelig ut. Rhine må gifte seg med Linden, men han har allerede ei kone fra før (hun er i ferd med å fylle tjue og er altså dødssyk av viruset) og gifter seg med to andre, Jenna og Cecily, samtidig som henne. Det eneste hun tenker på er hvordan hun skal komme seg vekk fra huset, tilbake til Manhattan og tvillingbroren Rowan.

Handlingen var ikke så veldig actionfylt, men vi fikk virkelig et innblikk i det livet de hadde. De kjedelige dagene hvor alt er likt, desperasjonen til Rhine, følelsene hennes for Linden og tjeneren Gabriel, rømningsplanene hennes, frykten for det ukjente som foregår i kjelleren. Det kunne bli litt langdrykt av og til, men interessant og skremmende å lese om. Av og til syntes jeg Rhine kunne bli litt vel kald mot Linden og søsterkonene sine, og at hun var ganske egoistisk til tider. Det irriterte meg litt. Men hun var bra skrevet og veldig menneskelig.

Det blir interessant å lese neste bok; Fever, etter den slutten som var i Wither.

Goodreads Says: 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?

I want to start this review by saying that the only way to describe Lauren DeStefano's writing would be to sum it up in these few words: Poetic, hypnotizing, lyrical. It reads in this fashion from the beginning to the very end. I had no intention of reading this book. I knew that it just wouldn't be for me but after reading a random blog entry on the author's blog I decided that I liked her attitude and her writing and wanted to check her out after all. As talented as she is with words I had a hard time getting into this world. By no means is this book horrible.

Lauren DeStefano asks you to push every cell in your body into the outer realm of your comfort zone. This is a story where GIRLS are being kidnapped and forced to marry boys or young men in order to procreate and help to save a dying human species. Reaching far beyond your comfort zone comes into play when you have a 13 year old gushing about getting married and excited about getting pregnant and talking about having relations with her husband two, three times a day. Yet, this I could deal with. Even the polygamy no worries!

I had problems with some of the holes in the story. It is never fully explained how society deteriorated into what it was in Rhine's present day. The attempts were made but it was in pieces and never came together in the end. It was rather strange too that kidnapped girls who are not bought to become sister wives are killed in a world where the human species is trying to survive. It also didn't make sense that so many kids were being had knowing that they would become orphans by the age of 6 if not earlier. I know that the author tried to make this an argument in the book. I just think that it is more plausible for people to want to sterilize or control births if there are more orphan criminals running loose than there are adults. Which brings me to a thought about how for the most part Rhine describes her former life as being kind of crazy because of the orphan criminals always having to watch your back but at one point she goes to a movie theater and says this is like back home. I think I was left at is it chaotic/dangerous or not.

My biggest problem was that I felt some things were redundant/repetitive and how most of the book was just a day by day run down in the lives of these three (princesses) girls and their new husband but nothing new would be revealed. It was rather stale. How about finding out for once what Vaughn was really doing in the basement or revealing something to Linden to get a reaction out of him? Something... I think there were missed opportunities to really develop the characters and this world more.

I am curious to see what comes next in Fever, I just need a bit of a break in between.

This book was sooo good. Some people had said the book wasn't but I am so glad that I read it. There are many things I liked about this book. The first is that the beginning of it started out with a gripping and suspenseful scene. I would not have guessed what the characters journeys would become like. Another thing that I loved is how each of the characters are different and they bring their own spin to the story. Overall, I really did enjoy this book and I can't wait to read the next book in the series.