Friday, July 29, 2011

Book Review: Wither by Lauren DeStefano


This book came out before I started it, but I took the galley (uncorrected proof) from Printz and read it. I loved it.

The plot revolves around sixteen-year-old Rhine Ellery, who lives in a not-too distant future in which a medical accident causes males to die at age twenty-five and females at twenty. And young women and girls are being snatched off the streets and sold as wives to polygamous mansions. Rhine is kidnapped and ends up with three other brides at the estate of Vaughn Ashby and his son Linden. And she plans to escape.

The prose was quite clear in this, and reminded me of that of The Hunger Games - not in a copious way, but in the sense that they are both well-written and both first-person present-tense. The story was clever, I thought, and I felt for Rhine throughout. I liked how she kept trying to escape and failing, or rather, how convinced I was she'd make it each time. Some really good methods, but you'll have to read the book to see that...and whether she escapes at all by the end. But this is the first of a series (the Chemical Garden trilogy), and I'll definitely want to see what happens next.

Final grade: A

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