strange and random happenstance: Virus

Sever (The Chemical Garden Book 3) by Lauren DeStefano
Published by: Simon and Schuster
Publication Date: February 12th, 2013
Format: Hardcover, 384 Pages
Rating: ★★
To Buy

Rhine is now officially her father-in-law's medical experiment. Brought back to the family compound, her husband doesn't even know she's being "treated" in the basement, along with many other people who were supposedly long gone. Even when finally faced with the truth of his father's crimes, Linden can't quite cope and chooses to believe the lie he's lived his entire life. Yet he is savvy enough to try to protect his two remaining wives by hiding them at his uncle's house. After all that Rhine has been through she is surprised to see that two of her fellow captives are willing to help her find her brother and put right what went wrong.

Rhine's husband Linden and her sister wife Cecily help in the hunt for Rowan. Finding Rowan won't be as hard as Rhine thought. In the aftermath of her disappearance and supposed death in a medical experiment, Rowan might just have cracked, as his anti science rantings and bombing of medical centers would indicate. But maybe, just maybe, there's a giant conspiracy afoot which will make friends of enemies and hopefully end this death sentence hanging over all the world. Twenty is too young to die.

And then the series became a rip off of M. Night Shyamalan's The Villiage, which was a rip off of Running Out of Time... but with a bit more of a lean towards the Margaret Peterson Haddix book, and I threw my hands up in the air in exasperation. If it wasn't for that unexpected bloodbath at the end in which I took not just a little bit of joy, there would be nothing memorable about this book other then the faint melancholy I feel for what this series could have been. The unbelievability of the underlying reason for everything that happens means that everything in the book is on an unstable base and is therefore unbelievable as well.

Just because a book is set in a dystopian society doesn't mean that you get to ignore logic. The whole point of dystopian versus fantasy is that it is a possibility. Something could go wrong with our society, a virus, a massive power failure, a war, something that could go wrong does and we are plunged into a future nightmare. You can't just decide that I have this cool idea as to how society could became a certain way and force it on society. People have a hive mind mentality, they won't go against this hive mind, and what DeStefano suggests happens is so against the hive mind, it's unacceptable as what drives the plot.

So, now is the time if you haven't seen The Village to stop reading, because besides spoiling this book I plan to spoil the movie, neither of which are worth your time, so really, I'm doing you a favor. OK, so in the utterly predictable movie The Village, a group comes together and basically removes themselves from society. They have seen the horror that humanity has became and want to live a safe, insular life without any outside influence. The group makes this decision for their safety, their heath, and the safety and future of their children. Self exile for the continuation of the species. This is feasible on a small scale, because they are like-minded individuals who are brought together through grief and come to a similar conclusion.

With Sever we learn that the ENTIRE United States decides to eschew technology and anything outside the contiguous forty-eight states in exchange for perfect health and children with genes that will mean they live out their lives at the physical peak of humanity, which, of course, backfires on them. They even re-write history so that the outside world no longer exists. What country does DeStefano live in? The US going all "Village" and giving away it's love of gadgets and technology and access to the world for perfect health? Um no. We sadly live in a world where a person would kill someone for an iPhone, there's no chance in hell this would ever happen. To disconnect from the outside world, well maybe, but give up gadgets? No. The hive mind will prevail!

I can't believe in a virus that is caused by a situation that could never, ever, ever, happen. I'm sorry, I just can't buy into the world of this series anymore, which, by they way, it's title doesn't make any sense. "The Chemical Garden" um... yeah, not working. I thought it would be cool if maybe it was poisonous plants that did this, but using it as a pun on a hospital nursery, lame. Yet it is to do with what is in that nursery that the moral question the series is asking originates from. All this comes down to is the question of what would we do for our children? I'm not saying that the breeders could actually get everyone to agree to this world by playing the "children our our future" card, but I can see where they are coming from.

The Village was for the future and the children, and look what those parents did to give them a better world. Would we be willing to let our children suffer pain if it helped in the long run? Is Vaughn's evil experiments and dissection of his dead daughters-in-law excusable because it was for the greater good? It's kind of like trying to pardon a Nazis... medical advancement versus what is morally right. I'm sorry, but if I'm getting joy out of watching your characters die and comparing your book to a bad movie, there is no way that I'm really going to bother with these weighty issues. I'm just going to take your books to the used bookstore and get it off my shelves. I need the space for better books, not to dwell on philosophical conundrums.

Posted by Miss Eliza at 12:00 AM 0 comments

Labels: Chemical Garden Trilogy, Dystopian, Fever, iphone, Lauren DeStefano, M. Night Shyamalan, Margaret Peterson Haddis, Running Out of Time, Sever, Summer Series, The Village, Virus, Wither

Wither (The Chemical Garden Book 1) by Lauren DeStefano
Published by: Simon and Schuster
Publication Date: March 22nd, 2011
Format: Hardcover, 368 Pages
Rating: ★★★★
To Buy

Rhine is one of three. There were more girls, lots more. All snatched off the streets and locked in a van and driven for inspection by their future husband. The ones that weren't chosen had a fate that still haunts Rhine as she remembers the gunshots in her nightmares. The world is dying. Aside from the first generation who are gracefully aging, all females die at twenty and all males at twenty-five. Rhine has four years left to live and she doesn't intend to be trapped in a cage for the pleasure of her husband while her old life and her twin brother are out there, waiting for her return.

But Rhine and her sister wives, Jenna and Cecily, are kept under lock and key in their palatial rooms taken out just for special occasions, and never, ever, allowed to leave the property. They wait on their husband's whims while their fear of their father-in-law, Housemaster Vaughn, grows daily with rumors of his medical experiments in the basement. While Jenna and Cecily have accepted their new lives, Rhine can't, Rhine won't. She will gain her husband's trust and then make her move. With the help of a servant, Gabriel, she hopes to escape, no matter what her conflicted feelings about her husband, Linden, are whispering to her heart.

If Shirley Jackson was writing YA today, this is what her book would be like. There's just such a compellingly creepy vibe within this dystopian world that's part Logan's Run part Mormon nightmare that harks back to classics such as The Turn of the Screw and The Haunting of Hill House but written for the sensibility of today's teens who were raised on a steady diet of reality shows. There is a scary believability to the story that makes it that much more terrifying. The isolation of this small group of women as sister wives might seem to some preposterous, but I say, look to the past and you can see terrifying echoes of what was and what could be again.

As recently as the Victorian era women were literally property. Their husbands owned them and could do what they liked with these all too human possessions, from turning them into baby factories, using them as accessories, to locking them up in an asylum if they got out of hand. DeStefano has just taken what was and amplified it ever so much to pile on the creep factor. By taking away all choice in marriage (again, something that was rare anyway), by cranking down the ages of the brides, by allowing marriages to have more then one wife, and by adding medical experimentation, she has created a heightened reality that scares me yet I could totally see it happening, even today in some hidden compound in the woods.

Wither varies from other dystopian books in that while this virus that has somehow become a ticking time bomb in the genetic code making women die at twenty and men die at twenty-five is front and center, it isn't, in my mind, what the book is about. World plagues are common fare for post apocalyptic books and this does give Wither the every moment is precious and each moment left in captivity is one less moment of freedom vibe. Yet looking deeper, this isn't about the plague, or a downtrodden society, or a lack of creature comforts, which the characters actually have far more of in captivity then in freedom, it's about the encroachment of human rights and what all these things that have happened to society mean to woman, and a select few women in a large house in Florida, and four wives in particular.

While I mentioned earlier the Victorian mentality that is revived here, it also pays to just look at the world around us as it is. Women's reproductive rights seem to be a fine topic of discussion in the government where men who know nothing feel they have every right to say what happens to my body. Vaughn is just a totem of these people's views with his experiments and his liberties with his daughters-in-law's bodies. A plague killing us young, yeah, could happen eventually, but our rights to our own bodies, that could happen sooner rather then later and that really scares me.

Yet the acceptance of this world and this life would be the scariest of all. By having three wives we are able to see how three different people react to a similar situation. Jenna views it as a comfy prison to live out her remaining years, Cecily views it as her dream come true, while Rhine... Rhine is where it gets interesting. While Rhine never gives up on her plans to escape captivity, by having her as the book's narrator we get more insight into how she feels. While it is obvious that the wives come together with their traumatic bonding, a situation like this can not help but bring up Stockholm Syndrome.

Rhine has lived in a society where it was highly likely that at some point she was going to be snatched off the street and forced into some kind of bondage, either prostitution or marriage. So she already has an expectation of capture. Therefore, once captured, her expectations and reality will clash, and the question becomes, will she submit to her fate or fight? She does maintain a fight deep down, but also she is able to sympathize more and more with, not only her fellow wives, but with her husband. She grows to care for Linden. It is not known if Linden knows the full horror of what has happened to Rhine and how her life was destroyed by becoming his wife, so Linden could either be a co-conspirator or a victim like Rhine, but either way, Rhine does come to "love" Linden... her small acceptance of this life is the scariest, yet also sadly understandable, aspect of Wither.