Wither - Review

Wither (The Chemical Garden #1)
by Lauren DeStefano
Rating: 5/5

Goodreads | Book Website | Book Trailer | Author Website | Author Twitter


Thanks to modern science, every newborn has become a ticking genetic time bomb - males only live to the age of twenty-five, and females only live to age twenty. In this bleak landscape, young girls are kidnapped and forced into polygamous marriages to keep the population from dying out. 


When sixteen-year-old Rhine Ellery is taken by the Gatherers to become a bride, she enters a world of wealth and privilege. Despite her husband Linden's genuine love for her, and a tenuous trust among her sister wives, Rhine has one purpose: to escape - to find her twin brother and go home.


I feel like I'm one of the last people to read this book, even though it was only published in March! It's one of the most reviewed and talked about books in the blogosphere this year. Everybody seems to love it, and now I can add my name to the long list of Wither fans.

The writing in Wither was absolutely fantastic. It's exactly the kind of writing that I'm striving for when I write stories myself. Lauren DeStefano is now my number one role model and inspiration for my writing. I'll have to write down quotes from Wither onto post it notes and stick them to my wall. Every time I get frustrated and don't want to write anymore, I'll take a glance at the notes and think to myself that if I don't write, I'll never get as good as Lauren.

The fact that all three sister wives had different ways of dealing with the new life they'd been thrown into made the story really realistic;

The youngest wife loved everything about it and couldn't understand why the others didn't. The oldest wife hated it all, and wasn't afraid to show it. And then we have the main character Rhine, who hated it but would do anything to get away from there. So she tried to gain her captators' trust by pretending to like her new life.

I read a lot of dystopian novels and have created different categories for all of the many dystopians out there. Wither fits into the "The Declaration by Gemma Malley" category. There's no obvious "fighting and struggling for survival in a destroyed world". It's set in a world like ours but where a small science discovery has changed our way of living, a lot. And both of them are really, really thought provoking.