Wither Our Verdict

WORDS: Lauren DeStefanoBUY IT: on Amazon for lb6.49

THE BLURB: Sixteen-year-old Rhine Ellery has only four years left to live when she is kidnapped by the Gatherers and forced into a polygamous marriage. Now she has one purpose: to escape, find her twin brother, and go home - before her time runs out forever.

What if you knew exactly when you would die?

Thanks to modern science, every human being has become a ticking genetic time bomb - males only live to age twenty-five and females only live to age twenty. In this bleak landscape, young girls are kidnapped and forced into polygamous marriages to keep the population from dying out.

When sixteen-year-old Rhine Ellery is taken by the Gatherers to become a bride, she enters a world of wealth and privilege. Despite her husband Linden's genuine love for her, and a tenuous trust among her sister wives, Rhine has one purpose: to escape - to find her twin brother and go home.

But Rhine has more to contend with than losing her freedom. Linden's eccentric father is bent on finding an antidote to the genetic virus that is getting closer to taking his son, even if it means collecting corpses in order to test his experiments. With the help of Gabriel, a servant she trusts, Rhine attempts to break free, in the limited time she has left.

OUR VERDICT: Now that vampires are SO 2009, werewolves have had their day and all manner of ghost stories are doing the rounds, science fiction needs a new trend - and it seems it's got one. Enter post-apocalyptic, dystopian fiction. Ok, so it's a mouthful, but it's what all the cool kids are in to these days. Trust us.

Wither continues the trend set by Suzanne Collins' stand-out young adult trilogy The Hunger Games, introducing us to a world where genetic engineering has meddled too long with mother nature, and the human race is doomed to die young. Depressing, yes, but the setting makes for a good story. Our plucky heroine with the now requisite weird name, Rhine, is likeable but flawed; she has a journey full of jeopardy to undertake; and of course there's a boy she shouldn't love, but does. So there's a large amount of predictability here, and it's a bit sappy at times, but what's refreshing is that the book's young target audience is never patronised.

DeStefano's story is actually quite daring. A 16-year-old facing certain death in four years is forced in to a polygamous marriage with an older man, who sleeps with his other two teen wives - one still, really, a child? This isn't safe stuff. But nor is it racy, gratuitous, or inappropriate. DeStefano's lovely prose makes for a beautifully told story reminiscent of The Handmaid's Tale that's both absorbing and compelling - we're even tempted to find out where the trilogy takes our heroine next.

GGSF RATING:

Source: quickpua.blogspot.com