Review: Wither by Lauren DeStefano

Wither by Lauren DeStefano
Published: March 22, 2011
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Pages: 384
Series: The Chemical Garden #1
My Rating: 2 of 5 stars

Synopsis: 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?

My Review: I don't know what to think of this book. I didn't love it but I didn't hate it so it got a solid two stars. 

I thought Rhine was whiny and sort of annoying. She would constantly complain about being locked up in a mansion and about how everything there was handed to her on a silver platter except for freedom. I get that she wants the freedom but I don't need to hear about how bad you have it when you really don't have it that bad. Look at Jenna and Cecily they have it bad. Jenna dies in that mansion of horrors and Cecily gets pregnant and she's only 13! That's just sick and wrong especially because Linden is 21. I have no desire to read about that but for some reason I did. To add to that I didn't really even like Cecily I just pitied her.
I don't even know what to think about Linden. I hate him but at the same time I pity him too. He's as blind as Cecily about Vaughn's House of Horrors. He's also an inconsistent character throughout the book. One moment he acts this way and the next moment he acts completely different. At some points I thought he was a completely different character. I think the author might have been trying to show that he was different around Rhine but it just didn't work.

I absolutely despise Vaughn. He was my least favorite characters and normally I like the "villain" of the story but I couldn't. He was just sick. Words can't begin to describe my feelings toward Vaughn and none of them are good.

Then there's Gabriel and of course Rhine has to fall in love with him because that never happens in Young Adult books. And guess what! She runs away with him...shocker. That may sound like I don't like Gabriel but he's actually my favorite character.

I doubt I'll be reading the next book in the series but you never know.