By mostly I mean I was still sad about Bitterblue ending up until the second page of Wither. It is such a beautifully rendered story. So, the story is about how man has conquered cancer, but it came with an unexpected price. The next generation of children were given a limit on their life-span. They will never reach the age of 80. They will be no such things as grandchildren, unless of course you're a first generation (the one's first freed from cancer). They won't go through a mid-life crisis in their mid-thirties. And the female population won't even be able to legally drink, or obtain a four-year college degree. As the male population will never live past the age of 25 and girls not past the age of 20.
With the world being as it is, girls are kidnapped and either, killed, sold off to prostitution, or forced to wed into polygamous marriages. So, what's a girl to do? For Rhine, she hid from the world, and was under constant protection from her twin brother. But after a costly mistake, she gets torn away from him, and forced into a marriage she never wanted, along with two other girls, to a wealthy twenty-year-old skinny guy who is still grieving after the loss of his previous wife, and is as much a captive as they are. Their warden, Housemaster Vaughn, their husbands father, who is searching for an antidote at any cost.
One of the girls loves being a sister-wife, the other only hoping to die, but for Rhine . . . she plans to escape. As you get deeper into the story, relationships between the sister-wives grow, feelings and loyalties are questioned and tested, and for Rhine, desires grow . . . for someone not her husband. It's a thoughtful book, with human characters forced to face the issue of mortality at too young of an age.
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