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Title | Wither
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Author | Lauren DeStephano
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Cover Art | ---
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Publisher | Simon Schuster Books for Young Readers - 2011
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First Printing | Simon Schuster Books for Young Readers - 2011
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Title | Fever
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Author | Lauren DeStephano
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Cover Art | ---
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Publisher | ---
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First Printing | ---
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Title | Sever
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Author | Lauren DeStephano
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Cover Art | ---
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Publisher | ---
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First Printing | ---
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Category | Science Fiction
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Warnings | None
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Main Characters | Rose, Jenna, Cecily, Linden Howard, Rhine Ellery, Gabriel
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Main Elements | Dystopia
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Website | ---
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 Wither
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?
This book was available for free for one month on rivetedlit.com so gave it a try. It was...well, in the end I did like it enough to want to find out what happened next, but not enough to buy the books so still needing to borrow it from the library more than a year later. We have here a tale of selling young girls to be sexual slaves of their rich male owners, which can be pretty tough to read. On the other hand, Linden is as much a victim of all this as the others, forced to breed with the girls whether he really wants to or not, to prevent the human race from dying out. After all, you can only have so many kids between say 14 and 20, and then, who will care for the children who will be at most 6 years old when you die? As a premise goes, that's a complicated question to answer.
And of course as the story unravels we find there is more going on behind the scenes, experiments on live subjects in an attempt to solve a problem that we created ourselves.
Now...to find the rest of the trilogy...
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