Series Sunday: The Chemical Garden Trilogy by Lauren DeStefano

The Chemical Garden Trilogy is really good. It has a lot of adult content, so it's not for young readers. It takes place in a future world where scientists messed with genetics and now females die at twenty and males at twenty-five. This obviously creates some... trying times. There are some things I find a bit over the top, though it's not completely out of the question for the world they live in. Girls are kidnapped very young by Gatherers to be married off, killed, or put into prostitution. Yeah, not exactly my dream future. But I think it's well portrayed and there's just enough weird to not freak me out too much.

The main character is Rhine. She's kidnapped by a Gatherer in the very beginning. She is then married off to a man named Linden Ashby. Even though she is facing something that most would crumble under, she stays strong. She is able to keep what she wants in mind as she plans for escape. Over the course of the series, she only grows stronger. She fights for what she believes in and is rewarded for that after loads of pain and heartbreak. Other characters include Gabriel (whom I happen to like a lot), Linden, Jenna, Cecily, Vaughn, and her twin brother Rowan. This story would not be complete without any of them.

The plot is well developed. It gets a little murky in the second and third book, but I'm able to sort it out by the time I finished. When I read the second book, it didn't seem that it fit in with the rest of the series, but after reading the final book, everything made sense. Let me just say this, nothing is EVER a coincidence. Authors almost never throw in something for no reason. For more information on the author and series, check out these links. Here's Lauren DeStefanos' Facebook page, her website, and the series' website. Having said that, I give this series' four stars.

Synopsis:

What if you knew exactly when you’d die?

By age sixteen, Rhine Ellery has four years left to live. A botched effort to create a perfect race has left all males born with a lifespan of 25 years, and females a lifespan of 20 years--leaving the world in a state of panic. Geneticists seek 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 sold as a bride, she vows to do all she can to escape. Yet 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 has no way to communicate to her twin brother that she is safe and alive.

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?

Titles: Wither, Fever, Sever

Author: Lauren DeStefano

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Series: The Chemical Garden Trilogy

Number of Books: Three