Wither

This post first published July 4, 2011. 

Author: Lauren DeStefano
Published: March 2011
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing
Series: The Chemical Garden #1
358 pages (hardcover)
 
For most people, when they hear a book isn’t that great, they’ll probably decide not to read it. When friends tell me a certain book isn’t that great, a lot of the time I do the opposite: I read it, because I’m curious. Plus, it’s science fiction and deals with genetic engineering and that kind of stuff, and I love books like that. So that’s the story of why I decided to read Wither.

The future of North America is bleak in this book. Science has eradicated every disease that’s plagued humankind (cancer, etc.) but there is a serious downside to this — the children of these new disease-free humans (called the First Generations) can’t live past the ages of 20 (females) or 25 (males). This has, somehow, resulted in humans kidnapping young girls all over the country and forcing them into polygamous marriages for the wealthy. The girls are expected to be baby factories, keeping the human race alive until scientists can discover the cure for the virus.

Wither centers around sixteen year old Rhine Ellery who is orphaned. She lives with her twin brother Rowan in Manhattan, working for pennies in order to survive this harsh world. One day Rhine gets kidnapped and before she knows it, she is now one of the many wives of Linden Ashby, a wealthy man, whose father is Vaughn, a prominent doctor/scientist/First Generation who is trying to discover the antidote to the virus that claims people’s lives before they hit adulthood. Despite having almost anything she wants now, Rhine wants nothing more than to escape and find her brother.

The biggest issue I had with this book is the story world. Much like Divergent, it’s simply unbelievable why society would decide to move in this particular direction, based on how our world works today. The story takes place in the USA (names such as Florida and Manhattan are still used), and I know it’s supposed  to be far in the future, but despite that, I don’t see how polygamy can become legal all over the place, how kidnapping girls is the norm, how the SIX OTHER CONTINENTS can disappear off the face of the world in a fictional WW3 … (although to be fair, I read here that the Americans believe they’re the only ones left on the planet, and there’s like this huge conspiracy or something. But then, where’d the Internet go, in this future?? Surely someone would have have run into other people on the Internet if it still existed. There’s dozens of ways people can discover they’re not the only people left in the world). Where is the government in all this? The police?? Also, in the book, they kill the ‘undesirable’ girls. I’m not sure what made them undesirable, but this really bugged me because if everyone really was panicking as much as they did in this book and trying to pump babies out to save the human race, wouldn’t you need all the wombs you can get?

Besides the story world, I also found the concept of the cure/virus kind of … plothole-ish (can I make that an adjective?) At first I thought the idea was really neat, and I was looking forward to reading about it in the book, but it soon became clear that the idea was not thoroughly fleshed out. Think about it: they eradicated all diseases. Every single one. Okay. But the book does not explain exactly how was that done. So my natural assumption is that they got rid of the diseases in people who had them. Okay. But what about the people who never had any diseases, the so-called ‘natural humans’ who were perfectly healthy already? There is no reason that they cannot mate naturally and keep having offspring, and the human race basically goes on as usual. So I was pondering on this and I thought, “Okay, maybe they innoculated every single human being in North America, regardless if they are healthy or diseased, with this new medicine or whatever it is.” But somehow that doesn’t seem plausible either (case in point: when the swine flu pandemic/hype was here where I live, the government offered free vaccinations for every single citizen … and way less than half took advantage of it). My point is, the concept is a cool idea for a story, but it’s not explained, so I’m stuck here trying to come up with my own theories as to how this could all work. And that really distracts from reading the book properly.

The actual plot of the book isn’t that bad, though it is a little on the dull side. Most of the narrative consists of Rhine living in her gigantic mansion with the husband she shares with two other wives. She keeps wanting to escape but doesn’t make much of an effort to do it until the very end of the book. So you can probably get away with reading the beginning of the book, skip the middle and read the end, and wouldn’t really have missed much. I mean, it’s alright, but it’s a bit of disappointing.
The main character, Rhine, is really bland. She has no personality and I don’t understand much of her thinking processes. However, other than Rhine, I actually liked the rest of the cast. The other wives were interesting and had something unique about them, whether it was their backstory or personality. The two males — Linden, the husband, and Gabriel, the servant — weren’t bad either. Gabriel was really cute with hiding the candies in Rhine’s meals, and heroic in trying to save Rhine in the hurricane; Linden was a super devoted husband (despite having three wives to look over) and to be honest, I don’t know why Rhine didn’t fall in love with him, he seems like a good guy. Super naive, but still good. It’s the father, Vaughn, that’s the creeper, really.

Wither had potential. I thought most of the characters were decent, I had no qualms with the writing, and the plot, in all honesty, isn’t that bad. It’s the story world that really drags this book down. It’s definitely not thought out properly, leaving you to fill in the gaps yourself, which totally distracts from reading the book. You can’t properly immerse yourself into the story because you’re too busy asking questions in your head.

As a side note, I read the last chapter while listening to Charice’s song, “Note To God” and I have to say, they went together really well, heh.

My Rating: 2/5