Abducted by Wither

I decided to finally listen to the audio version of Wither by Lauren DeStefano because my friend Andrea at The Overstuffed Bookcase is co-hosting the Catch Wither Fever event with her friend Jessie from The Daily Bookmark.  Jessie and Andrea put a lot of work into this event, and even though Wither was not a good fit for me personally, I know a lot of other bloggers have read and loved this series. You can click on this link HERE and it will take you to a post that shares links for several other reviews for the books.

I have this thing where when I read a book, in order for me to enjoy it I have to be able to connect to the characters in the story. Now, on one hand, that is a good quality to have. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is a novel that rely's more on the character development then the action that takes place. So, someone like me who likes character driven stories will enjoy it, while those readers that desire more action may find it boring.

However, this also means that when it comes to novels like Wither, that rely more on the concepts within and the actions of the world the author is creating, and less on the actual characters, for me it was extremely hard to enjoy. If I can't connect to the characters in a story then the struggles they go through mean nothing to me. And, unfortunately, that was the main problem I had with Wither.

The story follows the main character named Rhine after she has been kidnapped and forced into a polygamous marriage. I felt bad for all that Rhine went through, but I felt like at times she acted like she was above her two sister wives. I appreciated the responsibility she felt for her fellow sister wives, but in the beginning she made a couple of comments about how she was nothing like them, and that just didn't sit well with me.

A lot of comments have been made about people not liking the whole idea behind the polygamous relationships in the book. For me, it wasn't that I had any moral objection to the polygamous marriages or that I felt the book was promoting that life style or anything like that. But in this day and age we read so many books that involve love triangles and we are trained to pick a side and usually root for one relationship over another. It was impossible for me to root for Lindon (the husband), seeing on how whenever he wasn't by Rhine's side he was off trying to impregnate two other girls (one of whom was 13)!

And I also couldn't root for Lindon because I never felt comfortable with him. Rhine often refers to him as her "captor", and that is how I always saw him. Whenever she did start to develop "feelings" for him, I felt like it was more that she was suffering from Stockholm Syndrome. Also, I felt that Lindon was a rather weak character. We are told in the book that he only took on the additional wives because his first wife (and first love, Rose) asked him to. We are told that he also believes his wives volunteered to become wives because that is what he has always been taught. We are told that he is also afraid of the water, simply because his father told him it made him sick when he was a kid. Yes, Lindon was ignorant to the truth of what was going on around him, but I got the impression that he wanted it that way. It kind of seemed to me that he was perfectly content to be lead around like a puppet because I didn't seem him challenge or question anything.

A lot of people may say that the reason he acted like a puppet was because he was being controlled by his evil father, but I never got the impression that his father was really that evil. Sometimes he may stand a little to close for comfort, sure, but that was the only problem I had with him. Now, there were references to him dissecting bodies in the basement, but through out the whole book he is known for being obsessed with finding a cure. How else was that going to happen if he wasn't doing something?

That was another thing...the book keeps saying that the reason men take on additional wives is to have a lot of babies and the reason they have to have a lot of babies is to try to find a cure for why everyone is dying so young...but how is that supposed to happen exactly? I don't understand how having a lot of babies will eventually result in a cure. What were they looking for? What were they hoping for? And I understand that Rhine may have belonged to the group that believed they should let nature take its coarse and quit fighting for a cure, so she may not have agreed with the work that Lindon's father was doing, but that still didn't explain why she seemed so shocked by it all.

I also felt that for a novel that had such a creative concept, the world itself that was created in the story lacked imagination. I loved that they got to swim in a pool with hologram fish and sharks and sunken ships, but some of the other technology in the story seemed halted. For example there is one scene where Rhine has to where contacts, but they were described to be exactly like the contacts we use today. Now, given how much eye-wear has changed in the last hundred years, why wouldn't it have changed even more for a story that takes place centuries in the future. And the characters made multiple references to books and movies from our time, but if the story takes place centuries in the future, wouldn't they have other books to make references of? I mean, John Green just released a book with an entirely fictional author and multiple fictional books for his characters to make references to. I would have appreciated it more if the author had chosen to create fictional work to reference instead of continually bringing up books from this century because it made it harder for me to believe that this story was supposed to take place so far in the future. There was another thing I didn't like, about the hurricanes and how much hot chocolate was consumed in this story, but I feel that if I mention it now I'll just come off sounding petty, so I'll leave it alone.

Because I couldn't attach to any of the characters, and was bothered by some of the technical aspects of the story I'm afraid I will have to give this one an abduction rating of...

I really didn't like it, but as I said at the beginning, a lot of other readers have loved it so if you have any doubts about my review feel free to check out theirs and check out the event hosted by Andrea and Jessie by clicking HERE