The Chemical Garden: Wither | Lauren DeStefano
Published by: HarperVoyager, March 22nd 2011
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 tells the story of Rhine, a girl kidnapped to become the bride of a rich man to procreate in order to find a cure to save humanity. Basically, girls as young as thirteen are baby-making machines and mad scientists are experimenting on newborn babies to find a miracle cure.
I expected more from Wither. I love the premise, the world, the writing - but it was lacking. It never really gripped me, though managed to keep my interest just barely enough for me to finish it. Mostly DeStefano's writing was the saviour of this novel but nothing ever really happens.
The book becomes stagnant around 10% and nothing major happens until the very end. It's not a book for a fan of the action-packed, fast paced dystopian novels. It reads a lot like a classic literature novel with a haunting dystopic twist - which I suppose is exactly what it is. It's a bleak look at a future destroyed and a race dying, but it's not much else.
The world building was subtle and incredibly well done. The writing was lyrical at times and beautifully haunting throughout. But other than that? I read it but I can't say I overly enjoyed it. I liked it enough to read the second book but my expectations aren't that high.
I liked the characters but didn't love them, and the only one I formed any kind of attachment to was Linden, who was left behind at the end of this book.
And the fact that every country and continent but America had been destroyed was a little far fetched to me. What makes North America so special that it survives? An army? Surely North Korea and China would also survive. Advanced technology? China again, Japan too. Likely the UK and Europe and Australia as well. Probably Russia too. I guess I'm just a little tired of all the US-centric stuff, though it wouldn't surprise me if we don't ~dramatically~ find out the rest of the world still exists in the rest of the trilogy.
To sum up: a decent enough read, just don't go into this expecting action and fast pacing like I did.
Characters ★★★☆☆
Setting/world building ★★★☆☆
