Wither Review

Wither by Lauren DeStefano

Release Date: March 22, 2011

What if you knew exactly when you would die?

Thanks to modern science, every human being has become a ticking genetic time bomb—males only live to age twenty-five, and females only live to age twenty. In this bleak landscape, young girls are kidnapped and forced into polygamous marriages to keep the population from dying out.

When sixteen-year-old Rhine Ellery is taken by the Gatherers to become a bride, she enters a world of wealth and privilege. Despite her husband Linden's genuine love for her, and a tenuous trust among her sister wives, Rhine has one purpose: to escape—to find her twin brother and go home.

But Rhine has more to contend with than losing her freedom. Linden's eccentric father is bent on finding an antidote to the genetic virus that is getting closer to taking his son, even if it means collecting corpses in order to test his experiments. With the help of Gabriel, a servant Rhine is growing dangerously attracted to, Rhine attempts to break free, in the limted time she has left.

My Review:

This concept is brillant! The people are so young when they die, yet they are so much older than the people who live out their lives in today's society. They are forced to grow up, forced to have children and forced to die. They have no control.

I was sucked in from the first chapter! This book leapt straight into the action and left me desperate to flip the page. I told myself to stop and take a break multiple times and I just couldn't do it.

The side characters are so well-defined that I couldn't find fault in any of them. They were surviving. They knew what they wanted and they made their decisions. I loved them!

Rhine was in an impossible situation, she had been taken from everything and yet she knew blubbering in her room all day wouldn't solve anything. She had the willpower to escape. However, Rhine needed to express herself more in the end. It just felt like she should be screaming about how they had messed up her life and how she shouldn't be here. I just wanted her to fight more.

The ending is a somewhat satisfactory cliffhanger. There's no mid-scene stop and I like that. I'm kind of tired of other books and their necessity to keep the reader on edge.

All in all I'd have to say that this Dystopian novel is one of the best I've read. It's on its way to beating the Hunger Games book (the first book only because the last two weren't anywhere near as good as the first one) as my favorite Dystopian book and if the next installment in the series is even a smidge better than this one I will safely be able to say that this is my favorite series in that genre.

4.5/5

*I received an ARC of Wither from Simon & Schuster this in no way altered my review/opinion.