Wither

By age sixteen, Rhine Ellery has four years left to live. A botched effort to create a perfect race has left all males born with a lifespan of 25 years, and females a lifespan of 20 years--leaving the world in a state of panic. Geneticists seek 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 sold as a bride, she vows to do all she can to escape. Yet 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 has no way to communicate to her twin brother that she is safe and alive. 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? - Amazon

My Review
I started this book earlier in the year and stopped because someone else had wanted to read before they moved. It was hard to give it up but in the end I gave in. I am just now done with it and I can't even explain how much I loved it. The first paragraph is chilling and the author certainly has a way with words ("They keep us in the dark for so long that we lose sense of our eyelids"). I liked how the characters and situations in this story were not simply good or bad but various shades of grey. Housemaster Vaughn is a villain but the purpose behind his horrific acts is to find a cure, an ends justifies the means kind of guy. Even though Rhine was forced to become part of a polygamous lifestyle, she uses Linden to make her own life more comfortable. It was interesting to see how inner morals either bend or break when survival is at stake. There isn't much of a love triangle between Rhine, Linden and Gabriel in the usual sense but that's a good thing. I did wish that Rhine would have stayed. I didn't really like Gabriel. Linden was so innocent, couldn't she see that? It really wasn't that bad, to me and Linden's father was weird... he left me quite curious and wanting to know what he meant. Linden had really started to love her and care. Rhine should have told him what happened to the other girls who didn't make it. What happened to Rose after she died. Maybe she does in the sequel, I don't know but I'm veeeeerrrrrryyy curious to know what happens! I saw that most people didn't like it - but I, myself loved it.