In our brave new future, DNA engi­neer­ing has resulted in a ter­ri­ble genetic flaw. Women die at the age of 20, men at 25. Young girls are being abducted and forced to breed in a des­per­ate attempt to keep human­ity ahead of the dis­ease that threat­ens to erad­i­cate it. 

16-year-old Rhine Ellery is kid­napped and sold as a bride to Lin­den, a rich young man with a dying wife. Even though he is kind to her, Rhine is des­per­ate to escape her guilded cage — and Linden’s cruel father. With the help of Gabriel, a ser­vant she is grow­ing des­per­ately attracted to, Rhine attempts to break free, in what lit­tle time she has left.

How to review Wither. Well, this book got me out of a bit of a read­ing slump, I wanted some­thing light, easy to get into and enter­tain­ing, which is exactly what I got. I read Wither within a sin­gle evening cover to cover and enjoyed it — but there isn’t any real sub­stance to it.

With all the hype sur­round­ing this book, I was hop­ing for some­thing really spe­cial. Unfor­tu­nately Wither, in my opin­ion, isn’t one of the bet­ter dystopian YA’s to hit the shelves recently. There was no pas­sion, no inten­sity, no sus­pense. The world build­ing is flimsy, which might not be an issue for some read­ers, but I also found the major­ity of the char­ac­ters lack­ing (aside from Jenna, who was my favourite).

Rhine lacks the intel­li­gence, spark and drive to be a hero­ine, par­tic­u­larly the kind of kick-ass hero­ine I like to see in my dystopi­ans (I mean, the girl does decide to run away in the mid­dle of a hur­ri­cane). For some­one who claims she is deter­mined to escape her kid­nap­pers, it sure takes her a long time (roughly a year I think) to actu­ally do any­thing about it. For a girl liv­ing on bor­rowed time, you’d think she would have a stronger sense of urgency. I dis­liked the way she treated Cecily and I dis­liked how for the major­ity of the novel she did noth­ing, except to mope around the house, go to par­ties and get drunk with her hus­band, all the while pre­tend­ing to her­self she was look­ing for a way to get home to her brother.

Lin­den was per­haps meant to be a sym­pa­thetic char­ac­ter — he also spends a lot of time mop­ing around his man­sion and cry­ing on Rhine’s shoul­der at night because his first wife, whom he sup­pos­edly loved, has died. That’s when he isn’t busy get­ting his thir­teen year old wife preg­nant and hav­ing a bit of fun in his third wife’s bed. No won­der he isn’t get­ting very far with his house design­ing, I doubt he has much time for draw­ing. There was poten­tial for a com­plex, mul­ti­lay­ered char­ac­ter here, but Lin­den just comes across as naive and fool­ish. Obliv­i­ous to what is going on in his own home, he believes a group of fright­ened, restrained, starved, pos­si­bly beaten, girls are there by choice as they are paraded in front of him for him to take his pick of. He wasn’t an all out evil char­ac­ter, but he wasn’t a par­tic­u­larly nice, or inter­est­ing one either.

The romance in Wither is odd, in that, I would argue there wasn’t really any. Gabriel barely fea­tures, I couldn’t tell you any­thing about him or why he and Rhine care for one other. We are told there is a con­nec­tion between them but it is never shown, and a few child­hood sto­ries doesn’t build a believ­able romance. I didn’t really see much of a friend­ship there, let alone any­thing more. As to Rhine’s con­fused feel­ings towards Lin­den, it’s pretty much what I expected from a char­ac­ter like Rhine. Need­less to say, I wasn’t inter­ested in either poten­tial love interest.

There are also a lot of incon­sis­ten­cies in Wither. If girls are in such high demand why shoot a van full of them just because one rich man doesn’t want them as a wife? If the human race is dying out, plenty of men would have wanted these girls and paid a lot for them. It makes no log­i­cal sense that they would have just been dis­posed of in that way and it nagged at me the whole time I was reading.

Why are young girls kid­napped at all? I can see it hap­pen­ing but it also seems that the major­ity of chil­dren are liv­ing on the streets or in orphan­ages in extreme poverty — I think a good por­tion would jump at the chance to be mar­ried, even to a stranger, if it meant they would be given a roof over their head and food, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing how short and bleak their lives were.

Why was there not more wide­spread chaos and panic? For the most part, Wither is very a very calm, plod­ding novel. Rather than any­one fight­ing for their own sur­vival, we have three girls liv­ing in a man­sion, ago­niz­ing over their designer dresses and going to par­ties.  Wither suf­fers from a lack of ten­sion and any sense of dan­ger. I would have liked to have seen more of the out­side world.

Speak­ing of, the world build­ing in Wither is unsat­is­fac­tory. A third world war led to the melt­ing of the ice caps and the utter dev­as­ta­tion of every­where apart from North Amer­ica because they were the most tech­no­log­i­cally advanced? This novel takes place in New York and Florida. How exactly is it that these areas aren’t under water? How does Rhine travel between the two? And why does North Amer­ica sur­vive and no where else? It doesn’t make a lot of sense and is a flimsy explanation.

I also didn’t quite under­stand how it was that every­one had become a vic­tim of this strangely pre­cise virus and all within the same gen­er­a­tion? Surely only the rich and priv­i­leged would have been able to afford this kind of advanced genetic engi­neer­ing? It’s also highly unlikely that there wouldn’t have been groups reli­giously or morally opposed to this type of exper­i­men­ta­tion — where are their chil­dren, grandchildren?

In no way do I want to read about a young girl being sex­u­ally assaulted, but when your whole premise revolves around your pro­tag­o­nist being kid­napped and forced into mar­riage for breed­ing it is unre­al­is­tic and far too easy to have her live with her hus­band for a year with­out him once demand­ing, or forc­ing her to pro­vide him with a child. If you’re not will­ing to go there, don’t write a book where the whole plot line piv­ots on this very issue. I expected to see Rhine fight­ing for her life, her body and her free­dom. For a novel that depicts the col­lapse of women’s rights it’s strangely hard to feel out­raged or even con­cerned about the dete­ri­o­ra­tion of soci­ety since we never really see or expe­ri­ence it in the book.

In the end, I was dis­ap­pointed that Wither com­pletely ignores or sim­ply brushes over these com­plex, con­tro­ver­sial issues to instead write what felt like a pretty story.  This should have a been a very dark novel, there’s polygamy, child slav­ery, child pros­ti­tu­tion, kid­nap­ping, poten­tial mur­der, oppres­sion of women,the break­down of soci­ety, but DeSte­fano chooses not to really explore any of them, except, arguably, polygamy. Per­haps I sim­ply feel this way com­ing as a slightly older reader. YA can, and has, tack­led these themes well and per­haps that’s not the direc­tion DeSte­fano wanted to go down with Wither, but surely it is the nature of a dystopian to question?

Not every­one will have prob­lems with Wither as I have. I per­son­ally like books that hit you hard, and that’s not what I got with Wither. Aside from that, I didn’t find the char­ac­ters engag­ing enough or the plot line excit­ing enough to make this a great read for me, though there will be many read­ers who love it. If you are look­ing for a less intense, light dystopian with a hint of romance than I would rec­om­mend Wither. Its not, by any means, a bad book, sim­ply not quite what I was look­ing for.