Book: Wither by Lauren DeStefano

Published February 2012 by Simon & Schuster|241 pages

Where I Got It: Nook store

Series: Chemical Garden #2

Genre: YA Post-Apocalyptic/Dystopic

You can find Fever on goodreads & Lauren DeStefano on Twitter and her website

Goodreads Summary: 

The New York Times bestselling sequel to Wither reveals a world as captivating and as treacherous as the one Rhine left behind.

Rhine and Gabriel have escaped the mansion, but they’re still in danger. Outside, they find a world even more disquieting than the one they ran away from. Determined to get to Manhattan and find Rhine’s twin brother, Rowan, the two press forward, amid threats of being captured again or worse.

The road they are on is long and perilous in a world where young women only live to age twenty and men die at age twenty-five, time is precious. In this sequel to Lauren DeStefano’s harrowing Wither, Rhine must decide if freedom is worth the price now that she has more to lose than ever.

What I Thought:

After reading Wither a few months, I finally finished Fever.   I liked Fever,  but really, I have no idea why I liked it.

I think I’m going to start off with what I didn’t like about Fever.

For one thing (and mostly importantly), Fever felt like filler.  It felt really slow, and I felt like not much happened.  I also feel like we didn’t learn much about this world.  We’ll get to that later.

Two, I don’t care about Linden and Rhine, and I didn’t care about Gabriel and Rhine.  The romance (both of them) don’t work for me at all, even though people are getting married to have kids so that people can find an antidote to the young dying so young.  I wished I cared about the romance, and yet, I can’t care.

Three, why on earth would Rhine go in a car with Vaughn?  This makes no sense to me, especially given where she ends up.

And four: Rowan.  All of that trouble to find him, and yet, well, #3.

Wait, five: I didn’t care about any of the characters, even the ones I felt like we were supposed to like.  They were just…there.

And yet, I still find this world interesting.  The carnival?  It was bizarre, and yet it makes sense for this horrible world.  I can totally see places like that popping up all over the place.

And why on earth does Rhine seem to be the key to everything?  Remember reason #1 for why I didn’t like Fever, and how we’d get to world-building?  This is that time.

I know she’s the heroine, and that Vaughn is looking for an antidote, and so Rhine is going to be the key to figuring everything out, but I just really want to know what makes her so important!  I felt like so much more could have been done with her in this book.  But I do find myself wanting to read the last book, just to see what happens.

And I do like the feel of the book.  There’s something very odd yet really realistic about this book that works really well.

Oh, the cover!  It fits the book perfectly, and it does make a lot of sense once you read the book.  I don’t particularly like it, and the first thing I thought was the girl on the cover looks like she’s been drugged. Again, it totally makes sense given what happens in the book but still.

Let’s Rate It:

It’s weird, because I liked this book, but find myself unable to pinpoint WHY I liked the book, so I’m going to go with the vague and not helpful, I just liked it.  Fever gets 3 stars.