Wither by Lauren DeStefano (Book Review)

Summary: 

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?

                                                                 My rating - 3

My Review

I tried to love this book, I really did. But I was very disappointed with it. Like a lot of people who read this book, I had trouble with the world-building. I won't go into details because I want to make this review short, but look at 1/2/3 star reviews on Goodreads, and you will see what I mean. 

Another thing I wasn't so keen on about this book was the main character. She was a bit too whiny and selfish for my liking, which is the type of character I like to avoid, and she can't decide which of the two love interests she prefers. Also there's another character called Cecily who is one of her sister wives and only 14 years old, who gets pregnant and Rhine seems to think that she's worst off than Cecily is. 

My favourite characters were definitely the other sister wife Jenna and the servant Gabriel who is one of the love interests. I think they were a lot more interesting than Rhine was. 

I had to keep putting this book down because it didn't really interest me and did tend to get a bit boring. It took a lot longer for me to read than I expected. The ending for me, was a lot more interesting than the rest of the book, so I will be picking up the sequel Fever, but this time I'll be borrowing it from the library rather than buying it.