Wither

Lauren DeStefano

Mar 2011 · Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

What if you knew exactly when you’d die? The first book of The Chemical Garden Trilogy.

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?

Ratings and reviews

I own all three books and I can say they all went flying the first book took me 10hours to read and since I was on a road trip with cadets at the time I didn't know that there was a second book I had to wait months before the second one came out same with the third one I can never get sick and tired of them. They are my favorite . :)

The positives: it was well written, and I enjoyed the setting and story premise. The negatives: very little occurred, I disagreed with the protagonist on some actions that were considered evil, the knowledge some characters possessed (whether too much or too little) was sometimes unbelievable, and it really could've used more mystery (and had the ability to).

The book is written with a type of mystery that I was absolutely craving to read. It takes you into a new world with Rhine and you become attached to her future as you do to the book. Soon, you've finished it and are onto the next book. Filled with color and creativity through metaphors and similes, this book shows you a futuristic world in which you don't want to tamper with. I highly recommend it :) P.S. It's worth the price

About the author

Lauren DeStefano is the author of The Internment Chronicles and the New York Times bestselling Chemical Garden trilogy, which includes Wither, Fever, and Sever. She earned her BA in English with a concentration in creative writing from Albertus Magnus College in Connecticut. Visit her at LaurenDeStefano.com.