Wither by Lauren DeStefano (July 2020 Book Review)
How would you act if you knew you were born with an expiration date? How might the world look like if that expiration date was just shortly after you became an adult? To top it all off, there is no way to tell what is going to kill you because it comes on so fast and so sudden that there is no way to treat whatever it is that is killing you. How might that make you act? The story Wither takes this set of circumstances and shows what some people decided to do with this crummy hand that fate dealt them, and how one girl seems determined to fight against this hand, despite there being no real solution in sight.
There are many flavors in the dystopia genre these days. There are the classics where what appears to be a utopia is actually much darker, like in George Orwell’s 1984; there are the stories where a group of people is oppressed or controlled by another group in power, like in Suzanne Collin’s Hunger Games series and a plethora of other options, ensuring each person can find the type that fits their taste. The first installment of the Chemical Garden Trilogy, Wither, appears to be a dystopian novel where all children being born are plagued with some unknown genetic defect (which they call a virus) where males will die at the age of 25 and females the age of 20.
They were a generation of perfectly engineered humans, a true feat of scientific progression. But all progress comes as a price, and the price of these perfectly engineered humans as that their offspring were born with a terrible defect, referred to as an unknown virus in the books. Because of this disease, young women are married off to young men en-mass, in an attempt to have as many offspring born as possible before the quick end of the females. Rhine is one of these females who is captured and taken to be the bride of a House Governor Linden Ashbey when his first wife Roes dies. Rhine and two other females are wed to Linden and then are essentially kept as prisoners in his large estate while Linden comes to know each one of his wives. But, behind the scenes it seems like Lindens father, House Master Vaugh, may have darker and more sinister purposes for purchasing the three young brides for his son.
I remember seeing these books at Barns and Noble while I was in Junior High and High School, the beautiful cover art work always caught my eye as I was browsing, and the synopsis of the story was something that seemed truly unique. This was also a appeared to be a very popular series because it was often checked out from the library with a significant waiting list, and I had other books to read at the time so it got pushed further down on my list. When I saw this book at a library book sale I knew that I finally had a chance tor read book that had been on my TBR for years. However, after reading this book I think I can see why the library had taken it out of circulation, compared to YA dystopian novels that are currently being written, this one does not measure up. It could be because this is a young adult novel and where I am no longer a young adult I may be “too old” to appreciate this story, but I think it is actually that this book is not as well crafted as its peers are. That being said, I do plan on reading the remaining books in the series, not to find out what happens to Rhine but to find out what happens to poor Linden, who I have decided is the real protagonist in the story.
Favorite Quote: “And here we are: two small dying things, as the world ends around us like falling autumn leaves” pg 147.
What I liked about this Book:
I am going to be honest, there were very few thins that I liked about this novel, and when it came time to write this I did find a few things. The first was some of the supporting characters and two of the main characters. The supporting character Derdrei and Gabriel where characters I felt were real and the action they took made sense in the whole context of the world and the story. Deirdre is the aid for Rhine who does her make up and designs the fancy clothes that she wears. She enjoys what she does and while her age is never directly stated, it’s believed that she would be in her pre-teens, making her young in our world, but closer to a 20 something relative to their lifespan in the book, so her maturity fits and makes sense. The other supporting character I liked was Gabriel, he is represented to be in his late teens in the story, around 18 to 19, so he would be a middle aged adult equivalent in his world, and he acts in accordance with that. He’s very logically based and is content just living what life he can until he is 25. The main character of Linden Ashbey and his wife Jenna Ashbey were also characters I thought were really created well. Linden Ashbey is kind to his wives and treats them all with respect, and you can tell throughout the story that he really just wants to make his wives, especially Rhine, happy as they live in the Florida compound. Jenna Ashbey is the oldest of the wives at 19 years old, and while she did not want to spend the rest of her days as a wife stuck in the Florida compound, she accepts this with grace and provides emotional support to her other wives cope with the situation that they have found themselves in. I also appreciated how consistent her character was kept, there were no drastic changes from chapter to chapter as there were with other characters in this story.
What I did not like:
There were many things about this story that I took issue with. The world building was not consistent at all. At first it seems like this should have been a world in shambles, where the poor were fighting among themselves and the rich were separated from it all, but then there would be times where she would talk about how many people had jobs and seemed to live normal lives to some degree or another, and that included the main character Rhine, who had an office job before she was abducted. Then there was the mysterious virus, which honestly isn’t a virus at all. This was presented as a virus that just killed the offspring at age 20 or 25 respectively, but there was no known cause of the virus, or what the virus even was. So, it really seemed more like it was a defect in the genetic code, not a virus, and that was an issue in itself. It seems like there should have been more research done by the author so that the writing was more accurate as to what the actual problem was. The other thing I really took issue with was the character Rhine. She was not consistent at all, one minute her plan is to run away, the next it’s to gain the favor of Linden so that she can escape while he takes her out to a party, and then suddenly without warning she attempts to run away just because a hurricane has appeared. This writing made it really hard to want to see Rhine succeed because she acted so inconsistently and so I found myself becoming annoyed at the way she acted rather than sympathetic to her plight. Linden treats her well, and she repays him by being cold and indifferent and by thinking lesser of her sister wife Cecily when she gets pregnant, thinking she is a foolish child who does not know what she is getting herself into, but she’s Cecily is 6 years away from being dead, so she’s more of an adult than Rhine gives her credit for when you take the world as it has been created, and this also bothered me.
Rating 1:5
I would not recommend reading this story at all, and in fact I would recommend The Hunger Games over this story, which I did not personally enjoy. With the inconsistent main character, the inconsistent and confusing world building and the sloppy at times writing I think this is a book is one that you could read a well written overview and get the key points of the story without wasting time trying to muddle through the authors writing. I know these books were very popular and I do want to read the other two to see if things get better, but mostly I want to find out what happens to poor Linden Ashbey, who I found myself liking more by the end of the book even though he was represented as being an antagonist during the whole book.
