Wither by Lauren DeStefano

Picture from Lauren DeStefano's website

I have a horrible habit of reading entirely way too many books at once.  At any given moment I am "currently reading" around 5-6 books, and end up finishing about 1-2 of those books. Needless to say getting the kindle has only served to help foster this embarrassingly bad habit, but I digress...

While browsing through books on Amazon's kindle website I came across Lauren DeStefano's "Wither."  I'd be lying if I said part of the reason for my hitting the *buy* button wasn't due to the beautiful cover art. 

Summary: Rhine Ellery is a sixteen year old girl growing up in a world that's been brought to its knees by a virus that kills girls at age 20 and boys at age 25.  As a result girls are frequently kidnapped to become wives of rich husband in order to bear children in the hopes of coming up with a cure.  The book opens quite graphically with Rhine's kidnapping and subsequent selling to Linden along with two other girls.  Rhine becomes determined to leave the country-sizeed estate that Linden (and his creepy father) own, in order to return to her twin brother.  Along the way she starts to unravel some of the secrets of Linden's world while falling in love with Gabriel, a servant boy whose clearly off limits...

Review: Despite this book having some obvious flaws, I found myself compelled to read on hoping for some sort of conclusion to everything that was going on.  Unfortunately what I failed to read when I purchased this book was that in addition to being part of a new trend (Young Adult Dystopian Genre - google it I swear), its also part of a trilogy thus those hoping for a conclusion are not in luck.  While the story started out strong, I soon found myself growing bored.  Rhine's big moral dilemma between either staying and living out her short years  in luxury vs. leaving and being destitute felt extremely drawn out after awhile.  I found myself being more fascinated with Linden's creepy father and his attempts at trying to cure the virus.  The reader is led to believe that Rhine and Gabriel's romance is something worth risking their lives for.  Unfortunately, I could not bring myself to care about their romance.  It felt too random, especially when compared to everything else that was going on in the book. 

Overall I found the book enjoyable, though the second half felt like a let down.  Obviously as this is part of a trilogy some of the questions I felt were left open in this book may be answered in the preceding ones.  I'm not entirely sure if I was captivated enough to purchase the next few in the Chemical Garden Trilogy (apparently what the entire series is called).  We shall see, this is just one of many YA books that I've bought on my kindle ad will be reviewing in the next few weeks.  I've found I enjoy the ease at which I can read these books, as well as the escape they provide from some of my more textbook reading for class.  Next up is Charlaine Harris's "Dead Reckoning" which is scheduled to be delivered to my kindle tomorrow *sigh* this might be love...