The Chemical Garden Trilogy Book #3: Sever by Lauren DeStefano

Another final book of a series that I actually liked, something is wrong with this picture. And while the other two books of this series were disgusting – but in a good way I swear – this one wasn’t.

Rhine has survived Vaughn’s experiments thanks to help from Linden and Cecily. They rescued her from the basement, and it turns out that Vaughn lied about Linden renouncing her. He didn’t even know that she was back, but because of her lies and disappearance, he doesn’t believe her about anything she says. Which includes everything that his father has been up to. Mostly, it’s because he’s hurt by what she’s done, but it’s also because it’s his father and he trusts him with everything. Either way, Rhine knows she can’t go back to Vaughn’s mansion. In fact, as soon as she’s recovered she needs to leave Florida and go to Rhode Island, where her brother was last seen. He’s involved with the bombings of factories and research laboratories in charge of creating the cure. But like with everything in Rhine’s world, nothing is what it seems.

This book was fantastic. Thankfully, a lot of the gross needles and experimentation scenes weren’t involved in this book. Characters who you met in the last book make appearances again and I was floored – sort of – when I learned about who Madame’s daughter really was. I loved the character of Reed – Vaughn’s brother – who is everything his brother isn’t. I especially liked the character development of Cecily, she has become so strong since the first book! There was also a plot point that reminded me a lot of the ending of Catching Fire and the beginning of Mockingjay. My only complaint about this book was that the ending was sort of anti-climatic. Things got tied up way too tidily for my tastes, but it wasn’t a bad ending.

Final Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. For a person who isn’t a big fan of endings I’ve enjoyed the final books in series a lot more than I usually do of late.

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The Chemical Garden Trilogy Book #2: Fever by Lauren DeStefano

In my review for the first book in this trilogy, I said that Wither was disgusting, but it was a well written kind of disgusting. My review for the second book will probably read just like the first one, because as expected the second book was just as, if not more, disgusting than the first.

Rhine and Gabriel have escaped Linden’s mansion. Fever picks up right where Wither left off with the two on the run. They’ve left the boat and have gone ashore only to be kidnapped by a madam in the scarlet district in South Carolina. Rhine reminds the madam of her daughter and that is why she isn’t made into one of the girls who have to sell herself every night. Instead her and Gabriel become a ‘look, but don’t touch’ act. There’s a lot of drugs involved in this novel, something called angel’s blood, that reminds me a little of heroin. Gabriel is given steady doses to keep him calm about the situation that he and Rhine are in.

Eventually, Gabriel and Rhine do get away from the scarlet district, with a young charge named Maddie. They venture north to Manhattan to find Rhine’s brother. After a few twists and turns, they get there only to find her home blackened by fire. Rowan seems to have burned down the house and moved on, thinking that his sister was dead. Not knowing where else to go, they try and find the address written in the book that Maddie brought along with her. It turns out it’s an orphanage, but the woman who runs the place, Claire, is Maddie’s grandmother.

Things take a turn for the worst though when they show up at this place. Rhine becomes ill. It almost resembles the virus, and Gabriel and her know that it has something to do with her father-in-law Vaughn and his experiments. Gabriel wants to go back to the mansion to get a cure, but Rhine refuses to go, knowing that if she does she’ll end up a test dummy for even more experiments.

Like I said at the beginning, this book was just as disgusting as Wither was. Vaughn does show up at the orphanage to take Rhine back to Linden’s mansion and she does wind up as an experiment host. The descriptions of her hallucinations were just…shudder worthy and then some. When you find out that the other experiment that Vaughn is working on involves trying to get pre-pubescent girls to conceive children you just want to throw up for hours on end. I won’t even mention the eye injection scene…oh wait, I already did…but yikes. I could have done without the last fifty or so pages of this novel, but damn. It was written really well.

Final Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. The second book was just as good as the first one. Vaughn is one disgusting villain and I’m curious to see how all of this ends.

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The Chemical Garden Trilogy Book #1: Wither by Lauren DeStefano

Another dystopian YA novel, and this time the content made me sick. But before you assume that I didn’t like it, let me explain. The content of this book made me sick, but that was because it was well written to be that way.

In this novel, humans have somehow perfected making children without any anomalies – i.e. cancer and other diseases – but a big problem emerges when these humans start having children of their own. These children and others like it are born with a virus – a shortened life span virus. Girls in this world live to only be twenty. Boys live to their twenty-fifth birthday. Because of this shortened life span, girls are being kidnapped and married off to produce more babies so that way there isn’t a shortage in the population. When Wither begins, our narrator has just been kidnapped with a bunch of other girls and is brought in for inspection. She and two others make the cut, but the others don’t and are killed on the spot.

Rhine, Jenna, and Cecily are brought to a mansion where they meet their new husband – Linden. He’s already married to a woman named Rose, but she is about to die from the virus, even though Linden’s father – Vaughn – is trying to come up with an antidote. What Rhine learns is that Vaughn is almost like Dr. Frankenstein with all his experiments that he does down in the basement. Rhine knows that she has to get out and get back to her brother, but if she tries and gets caught Vaughn will have her killed. Then there’s also the issue of the domestic who brings her breakfast, Gabriel, who she’s starting to develop feelings for…

So I know I shouldn’t have loved this book as much as I did. Another dystopian novel with a main character who’s almost like Katniss from The Hunger Games series, but…. I don’t know, there was just something about this novel that made me fall in love with it. It might have been the way DeStefano wrote about the sister wives and the character of Cecily who is thirteen and very eager to perform her wifely duties. The idea made me so terribly ill, I had to put the book aside for a day. It could have also been the way that she wrote about Rhine developing a friendship with Jenna, Gabriel, the house staff, and Linden. There was a moment near the end when I thought that Rhine was actually going to forget about not letting Linden have his way with her and just let it happen. That’s how close they got.

Final Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. Different take on a genre that we’ve been bombarded with lately. Loved the characters. Curious to know what’s going to happen in the next book now that *spoiler* Gabriel and Rhine have run away.

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