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?
* * *
I've heard so much about this book, and I finally checked it out to read
myself. Honestly, I wasn't impressed. It showed such promise at first
glance -- the story of a teenage girl unwillingly taken captive and
forced to become one of a veritable harem of wives in a rich yet
undeniably sheltered man's estate. I think it was the very concept of
"sister-wives" that first intrigued me, and I do believe the author,
Lauren DeStefano, has done a good job illustrating that life. I liked
all three of the other wives -- Rose, Jenna, and Cecily (Cecily was my
favorite) -- and I liked their very individual stories and views of
their new lives with a single husband. Besides that, however, the rest
of the book felt transparent and unable to keep my attention. So many
books start out as good ideas, but the actual product turns out to be a
flop. Admittedly it's difficult to completely flesh out an idea so it
lives up to all of its promise, but I think in Lauren DeStefano's case,
she could have had all of the sister-wives, slave child-bride,
desperate-bid-for-freedom story without the whole backdrop of a nearly
post-apocolyptic dystopian reality with humanity dying like flies, and
done a much better job of it. While that seems like an interesting
scenario in itself, added to this book it made the actual plot seem thin
and fake and much of the characters' behavior, in respect to their
surroundings, was quite simply unrealistic. Either one of the core ideas
would have made a great basis for a book on their own, but they were
both used at the same time in this novel and that, I believe, dragged
the novel down and kept both ideas from fulfilling their great promise
individually. Perhaps it's just my opinion as well, but it seems that
dystopian young adult novels are rather overdone in today's society, and
I think this book suffered because of trying to fit into that genre.
The novel has focused on Rhine's experience as an unwilling bride in a
fairy-tale environment alongside other girls in the same situation, and I
believe that if the author had written entirely about that alone, the
book would have been brilliant.
