Wither by Lauren DeStefano

Title: Wither	Loved it	Graded
Author: Lauren DeStefano
Genre: Dystopian, post-apocalyptic
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Elements: Polygamy, romance
Series: Book 1 of the Chemical Garden trilogy

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?

DeStefano has quite the way with words. Every sentence is lyrical, and there's a nostalgic, fantasy feeling to the whole book, as if I'm in a dream experiencing the wonders of Rhine's situation.

It's a double edged sword, because WITHER covers some touchy subjects, prominently polygamy and child brides, and it's not supposed to feel at all dreamy. I have to edit: I felt more horror and disbelief that I felt it was dreamy. The whole story is tucked nicely under the dystopian genre, but that's more of the set-up, which brings us to the main story: Rhine's life as one of Linden's unwilling wives in caged luxury.

So we've got a romance that is beautifully written and believable, the way the characters meet and react to one another. We've also got the beginnings of a love triangle, and perhaps on Linden's behalf, the hopes of a love square. It's all so prettily written, even the gritty parts, that I quite fell in love with the book.

And then I went online and came across some other reviews. Those reviews went deeper and questioned the science and geography, as well as the logic behind the behaviour. I'm not particularly knowledgeable about science or geography, but I had to agree with the logic.

There's a scene where women, or girls really, are taken from their homes and sold to become wives in a household. What results from that is that the desirable ladies become wives, whereas the undesirables are discarded with a quick shot.

The question here was: why kill women, who were in shortage, even if they were considered undesirable by the kidnappers? From then, the questions grew and the whole plot started to unravel. I agreed with them.

Here's where you might say: but you should review it based purely on your own opinion.

And my answer is right there in the ratings. I loved the book despite its faulty science and logic. I went to seek out reviews to see whether others loved the book like I did, and I came across some unfavourable reviews. I can't deny that those reviewers had a point, and having read the reviews, I reassessed how good I thought the book was.

If you're interested, here's the post about world-building, which is well-thought out and reasoned. Another about the science, and another.