Series: The Chemical Garden Trilogy
Author: Lauren DeStefano
Year: 2011
Rhine lives in a future where the world is toxically ruined and flooded; women die at 20 years old and men at 25 due to a genetic engineering problem that affected the human population. This setting completely caught my attention and that's the sole reason why I bought the book without a second thought... the cover art might have influenced a little, I admit it, but juuust a little.
All in all, I liked it... but I'll have to remember not to judge a book for its cover again.
This book tasted like something between a dream and a fanfic. There's a lot of action nonstop that keep you glued to the book and wondering what's gonna happen next... which is awesome... and I like that... but there's hardly ever a pause to explain how this all happened. It feels like the author just wrote down a dream she had without giving much of a thought to the hows and whys of the story. There's very little detail, if any at all. The whole context feels unreal, which is a shame because both the story and the world setting have a lot of potential. Rhine is kidnapped and sold to become one of the brides of Linden Ashby, a rich guy who knows little of the world beyond the walls of his luxurious mansion. Heck, he even knows little of the world inside his mansion, as his wicked father (presumably) experiments with human corpses in order to find a cure for the genetic disease that kills young people.
There are no side stories, no glimpses at the world outside Rhine's view. Even the characters around her seem to have a lot of potential but no depth. There are a myriad anonymous characters all around and few main ones. Rhine finds comfort in her sister brides, Jenna and Cecily, and in Gabriel, a servant she befriends. These characters appear in the story with promising backgrounds but they stay in a rather mute role most of the time.
I didn't like how it ended. I understand it's a series and I think it stopped at the right moment, but not in the right way. It was all rushed, like they were running out of paper so they just described what the characters did without getting into details. Things just happen easily and almost irrationally.
Despite everything, I enjoyed it. I consider it some sort of guilty pleasure. It's a good idea but not a good book... I think the author could have done much better. It's her debut novel, so I look forward to reading more by this author. I'll probably get the sequel... but I'm in no hurry.
To consider:
-Fever, by Lauren DeStefano
