Wither

I'll admit, I went into this book with low expectations, having read all the reviews, negative and otherwise. That being said, I got about 3/4ths of the way through this book before I had to put it down for my sanity.The two stars I did rate it were purely the idea and writing style, not the execution.[b:Wither 8525590 Wither (The Chemical Garden, #1) Lauren DeStefano http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1311109085s/8525590.jpg 13392566] sets you up pretty early in the book. Maybe its a personal preference, but I like bits and pieces being revealed, not info dumps towards the beginning. However, what really stood out to me was the ethnocentrism in this book, as other reviewers have pointed out. “All we were taught of geography was that the world had once been made up of seven continents and several countries, but a third world war demolished all but North America, the continent with the most advanced technology. The damage was so catastrophic that all that remains of the rest of the world is ocean and uninhabitable islands so tiny that they can???t even be seen from space.”Unless I missed any other ethnicity being mentioned, (this book got really hard to get through.) all I could recall was every character in this book was Caucasian. It reinforced this “AMERICA IS THE BEST!” mentality I didn't particularly care for. Did the USA have a shiny invisi-shield that protected it from the horrid destruction that the other countries somehow missed? This attitude is unfortunately prevalent nowadays and I don't like reading it in YA fiction. Some of the logic also made no sense to me. Since the women live to be twenty, and the men twenty-five, why are women still treated poorly? They are dying out faster than men, there would exist a huge gender discrepancy.It was hard getting through what I got through. Much of the writing in the middle and towards the end became very repetitive; whether or not [a:Lauren DeStefano 4103366 Lauren DeStefano http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1305725851p2/4103366.jpg] created this to illustrate the nature of her captivity is unknown to me. However, her idea for this dystopian novel was a great one, and had it been created with a little more research, a lot more logic and without the ethnocentrism, it could be wonderful. Her writing style is excellent, and I definitely enjoyed how she wrote (just not what she wrote!)