Author: Lauren DeStefano
Genre: YA, Dystopian
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pages: 358
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? (More from Goodreads)
"What if you knew exactly when you would die?"
This statement, and the rather attractive book cover, was probably enough for me to snap this book up, brand new, for less than $2.
It's the first instalment of a trilogy called The Chemical Garden, so I would have the choice to abandon the trilogy if I weren't invested in the story. And to tell you the truth, it does get hard at times to move with the story. It felt like a long narrative, where the main character- named after a river, by the way- is painstakingly describing how everything around her looks and feels while reminiscing about her past, or a world that has long disappeared. This narrative is interspersed by some 'feels' toward the characters around her (hatred and sometimes love) and then some action and dialogue usually involving her sister wives. It gets mopey a lot. It's tragic in many places, but I don't know why it didn't have as much of an impact on me. Never mind that the whole premise of the story does not really make sense- more insensible worlds have been created, and made convincing. This one misses.
Perhaps I have been spoiled by my love for authors who can build amazing, believable worlds out of nothing.
What kept me turning the pages is hope. I wanted her to escape. At the same time I wanted her to love her pathetic, sheltered, eager-to-please husband over her blue-eyed butler, but that is made difficult because she is a vessel full of reminiscent hate. Understandable I suppose, if you were kidnapped to be forced into a polygamous marriage, and witness to the senseless death of a few dozen girls who were killed simply because they didn't 'make the cut' as wife material. But that doesn't keep me from gritting my teeth.
I guess she's brave. But she's also fickle.
As fickle as this review is going to be.
If I happen to come across the sequels, I would pick them up. I want to know what happens next, even if my eyes would glaze over with boredom every few paragraphs. I have hope that Lauren DeStefano could achieve more with her writing, because I am invested. She kept me turning the pages, so perhaps if the setting changes a little, I would be able to enjoy the next book even more.
Maybe the upcoming stories will make the world more believable and enjoyable.
There is hope.
~My Rating~
3 out of 5 June Beans!
★★★☆☆
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