Wither by Lauren DeStefano

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?

Do you remember when you would go to the bookstore and spend hours browsing through the isles looking for a perfect book? Then you find yourself curious about the book and then you you read the summary and it gets you eager to begin reading the book. Once you finally read the book you find yourself not as impressed. I felt that way reading Wither. The book has sex, death, pregnancy and evil intentions. Rhine lives in a society where girls die at 20, and boys die at 25 and scientist fail to find a cure for this virus. People have become accustomed to living in this society either putting their children into an orphanage or selling them into prostitution. Out of what happens to the girls in the novel Rhine was lucky to be with Linden. Rhine doesn't trust anyone. Being inside of the main character Rhine's head just annoyed me, I felt like I was in Bella's head all over again. I had a real hard time trying to like the person who's There are parts in the book that tend to be really bland and needed some tightening up, and also needed a little something extra to spice up the dialogue between the characters. Apart from my issues with the main character, it had some good world building.  Maybe the book would have been better off in written in third person. I didn't find myself drawn to the main character.