By age sixteen, Rhine Ellery has four years left to live. She can thank modern science for this genetic time bomb. A botched effort to create a perfect race has left all males with a lifespan of 25 years, and females with a lifespan of 20 years. Geneticists are seeking a miracle antidote to restore the human race, desperate orphans crowd the population, crime and poverty have skyrocketed, and young girls are being kidnapped and sold as polygamous brides to bear more children. When Rhine is kidnapped and sold as a bride, she vows to do all she can to escape. Her husband, Linden, is hopelessly in love with her, and Rhine can’t bring herself to hate him as much as she’d like to. He opens her to a magical world of wealth and illusion she never thought existed, and it almost makes it possible to ignore the clock ticking away her short life. But Rhine quickly learns that not everything in her new husband’s strange world is what it seems. Her father-in-law, an eccentric doctor bent on finding the antidote, is hoarding corpses in the basement. Her fellow sister wives are to be trusted one day and feared the next, and Rhine is desperate to communicate to her twin brother that she is safe and alive. Will Rhine be able to escape--before her time runs out?
April says:
"Imagine a world where we have created a perfect generation of children: no childhood diseases, no cancer, no illness at all. Perfect, right? But as that perfect generation heads healthily toward old age, it is discovered that our meddling has some repercussions; the children of this perfect generation die early. Very early--females at 20, males at 25.
And because of this, a division in society occurs. One faction fights to return things to a natural order, let us re-evolve out of this bed we made. The other faction believes an answer might be found scientifically, so girls are stolen from their homes, sold into marriage, forced (as much as one can be forced) to have children, and then they die.
Between these to factions, one finds the main character of the series, Rhine, a 16 year old girl taken from her twin brother in NYC and sold to a boy, Linden (21), to be one of his three wives. Linden's father is a member of the First Generation (that perfect crowd), and he has designs on the young women and the children they might yield.
Despite Linden's true feelings for Rhine, she falls for a servant (adding an interesting finite love triangle) to the story. The lines of good and bad are seriously smudged in this first book; and it leaves one ready to pick up the next."
