Review: Wither by Lauren DeStefano

Book Details:
Wither
By Lauren DeStefano
Genre: Young Adult
Published 2011, Simon & Schuster BFYR
Hardback, 358 pages
ISBN: 9781442409057


Synopsis:

          By age sixteen, Rhine Ellery has four years left to live. She can thank modern science for this genetic time bomb. A botched effort to create a perfect race has left all males with a lifespan of 25 years, and females with a lifespan of 20 years. Geneticists are seeking 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 kidnapped and sold as a bride, she vows to do all she can to escape. 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 is desperate to communicate to her twin brother that she is safe and alive. Will Rhine be able to escape--before her time runs out?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?

The world that Lauren DeStefano builds in this book combines several dystopian concepts - genetic engineering and reproduction, a virus of epic proportions, anarchy and survival of the fittest. 70 years ago mankind finds a way to make "perfect" babies, and then their babies suffer the consequences - death at 25 for men and 20 for women - with no cure on the horizon. Prostitution, polygamy, human experimentation, wide-scale murder, the prevalence of orphanages, and a country divided on whether mankind is worth saving are all issues in the plot. Plus, all of this takes place after a world war has destroyed all but North America - or so the history goes.
The main character, Rhine Ellery, is forced into a polygamous marriage at the age of 16 to the rich Linden, age 21, along with the flighty 14-year-old Cecily and ex-prostitute, 18-year-old Jenna. Rhine's main goal is escape, but each girl in the marriage has her own motivations and goals. I found their relationships with one another far more interesting than each one's relationship with Linden. Poor Linden lives under the illusions that his aging father feeds him while suffering from the loss of his first love, Rose. While Rhine makes part of her goal to avoid consummating the marriage with Linden, her sister wives have other ideas, but ironically, jealousy among the wives is not the green-eyed monster that I think many would expect. While Cecily is typically self-absorbed and high maintenance, she still wants her sister-wives to bear children, and even Jenna, who hates Linden from the first day, sees no hypocrisy in sharing a bed with him. I also admired Rhine for her extreme patience and endurance with Cecily's immature and naive behavior, though I don't think I would have chosen denial over full disclosure to both Cecily and Linden.
Rhine's secret relationship seems to find it's power in free-formed friendship, without any expectations or requirements. Simply put, Rhine wants her freedom, and she will find it in any form she can grasp. Except for Rhine's memories, almost the entire book takes place on the grounds of Linden's mansion, so I am anxious to see what will happen in the next book in the series, Fever.

The Cover: It's the cover that really interested me enough to read this book, not just the girl and the dress, but the graphic design - so very unique.


First Lines: "I wait. They keep us in the dark for so long that we lose sense of our eyelids. We sleep huddled together like rats, staring out, and dream of our bodies swaying."
A beginning that is both dark and enticing, I am thoroughly intrigued.


Favorite Quote: “Fall has always been my favorite season. The time when everything bursts with its last beauty, as if nature had been saving up all year for the grand finale.”

Read For: Young Adult Challenge, Dystopia Challenge

My Favorite Reads: Year of Wonders

Alyce from At Home With Books writes the meme My Favorite Reads that features a review of a book read pre-blog. Since my blog is so new, I decided to join this one.






 My pick for this week is:

Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks
"When an infected bolt of cloth carries plague from London to an isolated village, a housemaid named Anna Frith emerges as an unlikely heroine and healer. Through Anna's eyes we follow the story of the fateful year of 1666, as she and her fellow villagers confront the spread of disease and superstition. As death reaches into every household and villagers turn from prayers to murderous witch-hunting, Anna must find the strength to confront the disintegration of her community and the lure of illicit love. As she struggles to survive and grow, a year of catastrophe becomes instead annus mirabilis, a "year of wonders."


Inspired by the true story of Eyam, a village in the rugged hill country of England, Year of Wonders is a richly detailed evocation of a singular moment in history. Written with stunning emotional intelligence and introducing 'an inspiring heroine' (The Wall Street Journal), Brooks blends love and learning, loss and renewal into a spellbinding and unforgettable read."

Even though I don't usually read historical fiction, this one peaked my interest. I had no idea that the village of Eyam actually existed when I read it, but the idea of a village instituting a self-imposed quarantine seemed both plausible and intelligent. Watching the village through the eyes of Anna was a bit like the morbid attraction of a massive car crash. In addition, I knew so little about the Black Plague that I thought this would give me an imaginative recounting of living during such a tragic time in history.
I found the opening to the book to be confusing and seemingly irrelevant to the main plot - only at the end is the opening scene explained, but the complete scenario still seems disconnected from main plot and an added tool to simply move the main plot along by giving Anna a way to leave the village. At the same time, the faith and endurance that some of the characters exhibit is both profound and inspiring. I don't know that I could have had the same courage to face almost inevitable death as these characters did, or even with the same attitude of complete acceptance that Anna displays.


Memorable Quotes:

"Like the ore that must be melted all to liquid to find the pure metal, so must we be rendered in the fiery furnace of this disease. As as the smith tends his furnace, all through the night if need be, to secure the valuable ore within, so is God here, near to us, nearer, perhaps thean He has ever come, or ever will come, in all our lives."


"Good yield does not come without suffering, it does not come without struggle, and toil, and yes, loss."

"And so, as generally happens, those who have most give least, and those with less somehow make shrift to share."

"How do we tumble down a hill? A foot placed incautiously on an unsteady rock or loosened turf, an ankle twisted or a knee buckled, and of a sudden we are gone, our body lost to our own control until we find ourselves sprawled in indignity at the bottom. So it seems apt indeed to speak of the Fall. For sin, too, must always start with but a single misstep, and suddenly we are hurtling toward some uncertain stopping point. All that is sure in the descent is that we will arrie sullied and bruised and unable to regain our former place without hard effort."
 
 
I found an interesting interview of Geraldine Brooks about the book here.

Could you have the courage to quarantine yourself  such as these villagers did?

My Favorite Reads: The Birth House

Alyce from At Home With Books writes the meme My Favorite Reads that features a review of a book read pre-blog. Since my blog is so new, I decided to join this one.



 My pick for this week is:

The Birth House by Ami Mckay

Summary:

"An arresting portrait of the struggles that women faced for control of their own bodies, The Birth House is the story of Dora Rare—the first daughter in five generations of Rares.

As apprentice to the outspoken Acadian midwife Miss Babineau, Dora learns to assist the women of an isolated Nova Scotian village through infertility, difficult labors, breech births, unwanted pregnancies, and unfulfilling sex lives. During the turbulent World War I era, uncertainty and upheaval accompany the arrival of a brash new medical doctor and his promises of progress and fast, painless childbirth. In a clash between tradition and science, Dora finds herself fighting to protect the rights of women as well as the wisdom that has been put into her care."

I discovered this book not long after I gave birth to my first daughter, whom I had tried (and failed) to have "all-natural." By that time I was very well read on the topic of midwives and natural births, so this fictional book fit right in with my interests. I also found it interesting that the author was inspired to write this book after buying a house in Nova Scotia that had a history as a birth house. While reading the book, I felt a kinship with the pregnant women in the story and became quite angry at the "doctor" that came into town promoting his new science, which was really a sad excuse to take money from the town's inhabitants and hide his own inexperience and lack of knowledge on the subject of childbirth. The doctor even tries to bribe Dora to stop practicing midwifery even as he allows a woman to die in childbirth. The method the doctor employs in the book is the same method by which my grandmother gave birth, and reading the fictional accounts of this method caused me to feel sorry for my grandmother that she did not have the same joyful experience that I did with my first daughter, even after hours and hours of labor. In addition, the pages of the book also hold reproduced historical news clippings, advertisements, and letters that add an authenticity to the book with a scrapbook-style feel. Overall, the book is highly-emotional, and I shed more than a few tears over this wonderful piece of literature.