Review: Wither

Wither
Chemical Garden #1
Lauren DeStefano

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?Rating: 4/5

My Thoughts: 

This book was very interesting.... The concept- that almost everyone dies at a young age, so people try to procreate and take care of all that as soon as they can- is so original. So there is Rhine, she is just one of the many girls who are kidnapped daily and sold to wealthy men or sold into prostitution. She is bought by a man to become his wife along with two other girls who become her sister wives. Even though she develops an odd but comforting relationship with her sister wives and 'husband', Rhine struggles everyday to find a way out of her prison and back to her twin brother who she left behind. I really enjoyed this book. There were a few slow parts that I skimmed over but the rest of the book made up for that. Also, this book was really sexual, as a book about this can only be, but it was handled in a very mature way that didn't make it awkward or difficult to read. In all, this was a very original book and a great read.