Tagged: wither
Fever by Lauren DeStefano
Rhine and Gabriel have escaped the mansion, but danger is never far behind.
Running away brings Rhine and Gabriel right into a trap, in the form of a twisted carnival whose ringmistress keeps watch over a menagerie of girls. Just as Rhine uncovers what plans await her, her fortune turns again. With Gabriel at her side, Rhine travels through an environment as grim as the one she left a year ago – surroundings that mirror her own feelings of fear and hopelessness.
The two are determined to get to Manhattan, to relative safety with Rhine’s twin brother, Rowan. But the road there is long and perilous – and in a world where young women only live to age twenty and young men die at twenty-five, time is precious. Worse still, they can’t seem to elude Rhine’s father-in-law, Vaughn, who is determined to bring Rhine back to the mansion…by any means necessary.
In the sequel to Lauren DeStefano’s harrowing Wither, Rhine must decide if freedom is worth the price – now that she has more to lose than ever.
I actually sort of liked the first book, Wither; enough to give it four stars. But unfortunately, Fever didn’t do so well. It suffers from severe Book 2 Syndrome.
I hate to say it after liking the first book, but Fever is just plain boring. Rhine and Gabriel run away and get caught in a creepy brothel-carnival before again escaping into the city to find Rhine’s brother Rowan. There’s a little bit of action in the end and we finally find out what those stupid June Beans from the first book were all about, but that’s it. It’s a slow pace for a book that’s only a little over 300 pages and that’s why it seems like it’s much, much longer. Face it: the plot is just boring and the pacing was too slow.
So let’s talk about characters. Rhine and Gabriel didn’t really change all that much from the first book. Rhine got a tiny bit more cynical, but that’s essentially it. She really has no character development in Fever; she just sort of reacts to events unfolding around her like she pretty much always has. And I hate that in a particularly spoiler-y situation, she still hasn’t learned to keep her mouth shut and stop herself from blurting out the wrong things. Rhine lacks subtlety, as she always has. Gabriel is just sort of your Generic Male Love Interest, there to protect her whenever she needs it and to make out with her but obviously never have sex with her. He looked like he was almost a good character in the first book, but he’s pretty one dimensional in this one.
What about world-building? Well, unfortunately, we learn nothing further about why the genetic modification in children left them with a decreased life expectancy and a horrible new way of life once society realized that. The older generations are still trying to hold it together and the younger generations are essentially contributing to the anarchy of society by not really caring what they do because they’re going to be dead soon anyway. We get to see vague flashes of the people in power, which is fine, but I really would have liked for there to be a little more information about the science of Lauren DeStefano’s world. It doesn’t have to be hard science fiction, but some information would have been nice, even if it were just mentioned in passing.
Essentially, except for the last few pages, Fever was a rather boring disappointment. The next book Sever has potential, but I really wish that DeStefano hadn’t dropped the ball so bad on her second book in the trilogy. It’s a textbook case of Book 2 Syndrome, unfortunately. I’m still probably going to end up reading book 3 despite that, but I am seriously having doubts about this trilogy right now.
I give this book 2/5 stars.
Wither by Lauren DeStefano
(Cover picture courtesy of Goodreads.)
By age sixteen, Rhine Ellery has four years left to live. A botched effort to create a perfect race has left all males born with a lifespan of 25 years, and females a lifespan of 20 years–leaving the world in a state of panic. Geneticists seek 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 sold as a bride, she vows to do all she can to escape. Yet 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 has no way to communicate to her twin brother that she is safe and alive.
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?
(Summary courtesy of Amazon.)
A friend of mine was absolutely gushing over this novel, so she and I did a book exchange. I lent her my copy of Timeless by Alexandra Monir and she lent me her copy of Wither by Lauren DeStefano. As it turned out, it was a pretty good book exchange in which both of us got excellent new reading material.
The premise of the novel sounded quite promising to me: because of genetic modification, kids are now perfect, but have decreased life expectancies. Severely decreased, as in 25 for men and 20 for women. So, in an attempt to both live life to the fullest and carry on the very existence of the human race, wealthy men are now polygamous. Which, of course sets up the plot of Wither: Rhine, a sixteen-year-old girl is taken from her only family, her twin brother Rowan, to become one of the new wives to Linden Ashby, a twenty-one-year-old man whose first wife is dying. Rhine is chosen because of her heterochromia, her two different coloured eyes that her parents who were geneticists gave her and because she looks like Rose, Linden’s dying wife.
I bet you think you can predict the ending. But with that said, I bet you’re wrong, at least partially. I know I was.
Of course Wither includes what seems to be a staple of YA novels nowadays: a love triangle. It certainly seems like it’s your stereotypical love triangle at first, but it is Rhine’s choices throughout the novel that keep it from being predictable. Instead of accepting her fate as one of three wives and falling in love with her husband, she resolves to escape and to stay true to herself and Gabriel, the boy she really loves. Rhine Ellery certainly deserves to be called a memorable character.
My only real complaint is that for science fiction, there is a definite lack of science. We know that each person has a genetic time bomb because of scientists messing around with everyone’s genes, but it doesn’t get much more in depth than that. Then again, most YA science fiction would be classified as ‘soft science’ anyway. Still, I’d like to know a lot more about the science behind this mysterious genetic time bomb.
I give this book 4/5 stars.