Wither - Lauren Destefano (Something There...)

(Author's Note: this is a more loose and informal book review than I usually tend to write, since it ties in with a point I wish to make)

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?

I feel I need to make a comment on the current publishing trends here, and a great tool is a novel I read recently.

I've just finished the YA dystopian novel Wither by Lauren Destefano. I didn't expect to like it, because I'm not huge on science-fiction, especially bio-punk and its cohorts, with their genetic anomalies and horrible diseases and breeding issues. Not usually my thing. Especially because a lot of dystopian sci-fi isn't very funny. Not that it needs to be a comedy, because I don't actually like those either, most of the time, but I like some hilarious one-liners and such every now and then. So I didn't expect Wither to do much for me. I only read it because I wanted to see a) what all the fuss was about and b) what the fuss about dystopias in general was about.

I loved it. I found myself creating a team (egads, yes, I did - I'm so ashamed). I was Team Linden. Which is probably gross, since he's got 4 wives and one of them was 13 when she got knocked up with his kid, but in a world where girls die by age 20, that's not so squicky to me. Anyway, I found myself wishing Rhine and Linden could be together. I found myself snarling at Vaughn. Gabriel, I was kind of meh about, but I found myself loving Jenna and Cecily. I actually enjoyed the book. Which completely shocked me because the end was not what I wanted, and there are no funny parts in this novel seemingly at all. So what happened?

Lauren Destefano must have some weird supernatural powers because everything that turns me off about a novel - an ending I don't like, a wimpy love interest (Gabriel is so wimpy, it's like... is this even a romance at all? Why is this love story even in here? And Linden is kind of a wimp too), and a distinct lack of humor - is in this book, and I want to own the thing. Considering my incredibly crummy bank account, and how broke I am, this is huge. I will never buy a book without reading it first, and I have to LOVE it to want to buy it (case en point, Nevermore by Kelly Creagh - best book EVER).

Lately the YA market has been flooded with things that I thought were just ridiculous (Another Pan by Dan and Dina Niyeri), derivative (Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick), or about things that for personal reasons I couldn't read (Falling Under by Gwen Hayes). I was getting so frustrated because I was missing the electric sizzle spark of romance and danger that I found in novels like Daughters of Darkness by LJ Smith, Twilight (yeah, yeah), Nevermore, the Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Clare, and the Iron Thorn by Caitlin Kittredge. Only two of those books have come out recently - 2011, or thereabouts. All of them are paranormal or fantasy, which is apparently waning. So I was getting antsy. I was getting frustrated. I was getting annoyed. It seemed like none of the books being published had what I wanted without having other things that made them sooooo lame.

Wither doesn't have that, either. Which is annoying. But it is still amazing. Even The Hunger Games (the book, not the trilogy) is amazing. So I went to my local library (thanks for the recommendation, Reading Rainbow) and reserved books like Vanessa Roth's Divergent, and other dystopias like Eve, Blood Red Roads, Uglies, Legend, Enclave, and even Matched, which didn't seem like it had a really strong conflict to me, but it has a sequel, so maybe I'm missing something. Over the next week or two I'm going to delve into the world of the modern YA dystopias and see what's to be seen. Maybe I'll learn something. Maybe Wither is the rule, not the exception. I don't know. But at least now I've got more stuff to read. Yay!

Still... we need more humor in the modern YA novel, no matter what the genre. For examples of this rare phenomenon, check out Cassandra Clare's works (specifically, Will and Jace's dialogue in the Infernal Devices and Mortal Instruments), Varen and Danny in Kelly Creagh's Nevermore, and Glass by yours truly (which still needs to get picked up, le sigh).

- LA Knight