Also appears on Lissa Reads.

She broke my heart!

4.5 stars.


Contrary to just about everyone else, I don’t like this cover.

I like the model and her hair and makeup and dress, and I like the set decoration. What I don’t like is those stupid big circles around Rhine’s ring and the bird in the cage. DeStefano started out as a literary writer, and the stupid circles linking Rhine’s marriage to the caged bird is way too obvious for the subtleties of literary novels. I hate those circles. They ruin a gorgeous cover.

Now that that’s out of my system, allow me to tell you a story.

Once upon a time a middle-class Australian girl moved to England to be with her fiancée. After six months he lost his job, and even though she was well educated she couldn’t find a job in England either. The couple LOVED books, but they had no money to spend on them. They tried to avoid bookshops with their sweet allure of fresh literature, and only dared to enter when they had some spare cash from birthdays or Christmas.

Then one day the girl saw Wither in the bookshop. The book – even with its big stupid circles on the cover – sang to the girl and she knew deep in her heart that she wanted to own it. But with no income, the girl had to be careful of which books she bought. In England, books aren’t taxed, so they’re relatively cheap. Most books are about 7 or 8 pounds, which is about an hour’s worth of working in a not very good job. But even 7 or 8 pounds is a lot when you’ve had no income for two years.

The problem is that Wither was a big book, with lots of white space. It was 10 pounds. And that tiny difference meant that the girl would spend her very precious birthday money on other books like Unearthly and Divergent, which were the average price, rather than on that big book Wither.

Then the girl and her fiancée found out they were moving back to Australia. A short time after that, the girl started talking to the author of Wither, even though she hadn’t read the book yet. The author seemed like the most lovely down-to-earth friendly celebrity she’d ever met on the internet. The author offered to send a review copy of Wither to the girl. After the girl calmed down and graciously accepted the offer, she found some extra money and bought Wither’s sequel, Fever, in a 3 for 2 deal at the local bookshop. Wither would be waiting for the girl when she moved to Australia. Fever came with her on the plane.

So it is with much anticipation and forewarning that I leapt into Wither. I’d read the reviews where people lamented the worldbuilding, and although this was a big deal to some, it was just about the only thing they didn’t like. I knew DeStefano came from a literary background so I expected nothing less than gorgeous prose.

I was right.

Wither is a very atmospheric book, a stifling Gothic tale of a young beauty trapped in a big house with an older gentleman. What makes this different to other Gothic novels is that Rhine is in a polygamous marriage that is linked to the dodgy worldbuilding in that all women die at age 20 and all men at age 25. So young girls are stolen off the streets and forced into marriages, prostitution, or shot. That part makes no sense to me and is why the book loses half a star. I don’t know DeStefano’s logic in this (and I would love to find out HINT HINT) but surely girls would be a valuable commodity in this weird future, so why on earth would anyone shoot them for not being pretty enough? A breeder is a breeder, a womb is a womb. I can understand the girls being reduced to baby factories but I can’t quite wrap my head around them being disposable. After all, that’s the point of the polygamous marriage. Stick five women and one man together and tell them to breed and in a year you’ll end up with five babies. Stick one women and five men together and in one year you’ll only have one baby. So with the culture revolving around polygamous marriage – namely unwilling polygamous marriage – I just can’t quite understand why rejected girls would be shot.

Some people complain that having the United States as the only country left in the world and the polar ice caps melted as not working either, but I’m of the opinion that Rhine is an unreliable narrator. We as the audience can only know what Rhine knows, and if she’s been taught something - say, that the United States is the only country left in the world as the others have been destroyed by wars – then that’s what she’s going to tell us. Doesn’t mean it’s necessarily true. So I’m of the belief that Rhine’s wrong.

Apart from the weird worldbuilding, the actual story itself is breathtaking. Like I said, it’s an atmospheric Gothic polygamous marriage tale, and it’s very powerful. It actually caught me by surprise, especially something that happened to one of Rhine’s sister wives. (view spoiler)[When Cecily gave birth (hide spoiler)] I found it so emotional that even though I was annoyed that I had to go do normal stuff like eat and sleep and work which interrupted my precious reading time, I willingly put the book down and dissolved into noisy sobs in my partner’s arms. I just… I can’t even. I didn’t even like the character and here I found a huge emotional response.

That’s how I judge books. I judge them on how they make me feel. I feel that Wither was amazing, but the worldbuilding needs half a star knocked off. It made me cry. It make me laugh. I loved the pace and the plot and Rhine’s character. She has a very minor flaw that makes her speshul, but apart from that she’s a caring, manipulative, awesome heroine. She never gives up on what she wants, she never loses sight of it and she goes through a lot to reach her goal. She doesn’t need saving, she has goals that extend beyond becoming someone’s girlfriend. She’s realistic and probably one of my favourite heroines. I loved living in Rhine’s head while all those new relationships developed.

I was very pleased when I read the end and I’m very much looking forward to reading Fever.

I received a review copy of this book from the author with an agreement that I was in no way obligated to write a positive review.