Thanks to modern science, every human being has become a ticking genetic time bomb—males only live to age twenty-five, and females only live to age twenty. In this bleak landscape, young girls are kidnapped and forced into polygamous marriages to keep the population from dying out.
When sixteen-year-old Rhine Ellery is taken by the Gatherers to become a bride, she enters a world of wealth and privilege. Despite her husband Linden's genuine love for her, and a tenuous trust among her sister wives, Rhine has one purpose: to escape—to find her twin brother and go home.
But Rhine has more to contend with than losing her freedom. Linden's eccentric father is bent on finding an antidote to the genetic virus that is getting closer to taking his son, even if it means collecting corpses in order to test his experiments. With the help of Gabriel, a servant Rhine is growing dangerously attracted to, Rhine attempts to break free, in the limited time she has left.
What really called my attention in this book was the whole darkness with it. It kind of reminded me of The Forest of Hands and Teeth. This wasn't the typical happy story in which everything ends happily ever after. It was sad in its own way, and I loved it. The theme was creative, many futuristic books involve a world that's completely destroyed or overrun by technology. This book takes the world we still have today and adds a little future to it in a very creative way, by shortening the people's lives. This book really gets you thinking, like it says on the first line, what would you do if you knew exactly when you would die? If you think about it many people around you would be dead by now. That's what also makes it kind of sad that in the end you know who's gonna die and who's not. I loved the way Rhine narrated the story, it was realistic. And you could really notice that she wrote the truth of what she saw. And also, it's realistic the fact that not everyone likes her, because I hate those books in which everyone loves the main character. I always love the most anonymous character in almost every book I read. I fell in love with Jenna. She was this strong character who was in the middle, Cecily trying to please everyone, Rhine struggling to keep up acting like she was okay with everything and her, who hid nothing. There was one thing that made me kind of mad though, the fact that i almost fell in love with Linden, the fact that he wasn't really a bad guy but just naive, he didn't know any better, and I couldn't help but feeling sorry for him, and even liking him. If I had to use one word to describe this book I would use these: peculiar, brilliant, original and captivating.
5 stars
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