Over the summer, I read the book Wither By Lauren DeStefano. Wither takes place in the future, a world where the cure for cancer goes horribly wrong and causes males to only live to age twenty-five and females to the age of twenty. Rhine Ellery is a sixteen year old girl living in New York, when she is kidnapped and brought to Florida to be put into a polygamous marriage. Rhine, together with her sister wives Cecily, Jenna, and a servant boy named Gabriel, must escape their wretchedly beautiful prison, back into the real world, before their time runs out.
Rhine's relationships with other characters are intricate and interesting. Her youngest sister wife, Cecily, who is only thirteen, has a bubbly stubbornness to her that makes her seem like an antagonist at times, but her intentions are always good. Linden, Rhine's husband, is sweet, innocent, and charming. He has no idea that the wives he didn't select to marry were shot to death in the back of a truck. Rhine loves and despises Linden at the same time. I think that her despise for him is sorely based on her hatred for his father, Housemaster Vaughn. The only thing I can really say about Housemaster Vaughn is that he is creepy. He takes corpses of the people claimed by the virus, and dissects them in his basement, hoping to find a cure. Housemaster Vaughn is the real antagonist in this story.
In Wither, some of the themes can be quite disturbing and mature. For instance, Cecily gives birth when she is only thirteen, my age. The father is twenty-one, which is strange and unacceptable. Also, Jenna, another sister wife, was forced to live as a prostitute before she was abducted for marriage by Housemaster Vaughn.
I recommend this book to eighth graders and high-schoolers. It is an exciting, riveting read that will leave you on the edge of your seat waiting for the next book.
Amelia, do you think the author might be making a commentary on society, which is often the case with sci-fi?
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