Wither by Lauren DeStefano (Chemical Garden)

Book Review:
The Chemical Garden Series: Wither, Fever, and Sever
by Lauren DeStefano

Wither

     By age sixteen, Rhine Ellery has four years left to live. A botched effort to create a perfect race has left all males born with a lifespan of 25 years, and females a lifespan of 20 years--leaving the world in a state of panic. Geneticists seek 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 sold as a bride, she vows to do all she can to escape. Yet 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 has no way to communicate to her twin brother that she is safe and alive.

     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 picked up a copy of Wither about a year ago and didn't get the chance to start reading it until this winter, which was conveniently around the time that the final book in the trilogy was released, allowing me the ability to zip through each of them with just the time between deliveries to wait for the next one.

     At first I wasn't sure how I felt about Wither. I understood that the prose was superb, magnetic, and lyrical; it was impossible to put down. But a part of me thought that the content of the story was (at first) was a lot of the same: rhine is angry that she's trapped, rhine hates linden and is scared of vaughn, gabriel is really cool, rhine misses her brother, oh well maybe linden isn't so bad, cecily is annoying, rhine is angry she's trapped, blah blah. At first it just seemed like an endless cycle of the same thing over and over again. 

     However, going back and rereading the book after completing the third one allowed me see the smallest details that DeStefano worked into this first volume. The smallest mentions in the first book turned up as huge pieces to a complicated puzzle in the last one, and tension grows with the simplest of phrases.

     

Things That I Liked:

     I actually liked that Rhine's feelings for Linden and her new "home" changed and morphed as the book developed. I think that it's important to show that this character isn't a pillar of self-righteousness, and that she can enjoy her surroundings. I think that it's an important detail that more than once she was so caught up in her sister wives and marriage that escaping for her brother would fade into the back of her mind. 

     I like that Rhine isn't a helpless heroine; while she has her moments of being shocked into immobility, that ultimately she is a character of action.

     I like Gabriel and his friendship with Rhine. I also like that, though Linden is clearly enamored with Rhine, he doesn't know how to get to know her, or understand that she had a life before she came to the mansion. Gabriel does understand that, despite living and working in the mansion for nearly half his life. 

     

Things I Didn't Like:

     I didn't like being left in the dark constantly about what Vaughn was thinking/up to down in his funky basement, or the fact that Linden didn't seemed concerned at all that his father disappears into the basement for long hours and doesn't question what he's doing down there.

     I didn't care for Jenna's occasional I'm-smarter-than-you attitude that she would get, but she was my favorite character after Gabriel and I was upset when she dies later in the story.

     I occasionally got very frustrated with Rhine for not confiding in Linden about her life; he is clearly uneducated about the world outside his lifestyle, and I think he would have understood that Rhine was desperate to find her brother and he would have loved her enough to let her go.

     I also got very frustrated with her constantly flip-flopping feelings for Linden/Gabriel. Make up your mind, honey, and stick to it.

Overall Impression:

     Overall, this book wasn't my favorite in the series, but it is a decent hook to get you to read the second one. It leaves you on a satisfactory cliff; I could have been perfectly satisfied having simply read this first book and put the series away. The ending is wrapped up very neatly and, though it clearly hints that there could be more to this story, it closes in a way that the reader would be happy with an ambiguous, imagine-for-yourself ending.

Blonde's Rating: 3.5/5

Amazon Rating: 4.2/5

Goodreads Rating: 3.88/5

Stay tuned to find out what The Blonde says about Wither's sequels, Fever and Sever!

Thanks!

The Blonde