Melanie's Book Addiction: Q&A With Lauren DeStefano

I have a special treat for you all today. Lauren DeStefano, the author of Wither and the upcoming release Fever, was kind enough to answer a few of my questions.

If you were actually living in the world you wonderfully created, how do you think you would react? Do you think you would accept your faith or run away like Rhine?

I have absolutely no idea. I'm pretty lazy and it doesn't take much to keep me complacent, so there's a good chance I'd just stay. I don't know where Rhine got all of her conviction, but I don't think it was from me.

Can you describe your favorite scene in Fever?

It's an enormous spoiler, so no, but it's towards the end, it takes place in a moving vehicle, and there's blood.

What was the easiest and hardest part of writing Fever?

The hardest part was getting started. I rewrote the opening chapters over and over. I wrote a good 30,000 words and I knew they weren't working, and after a great bit of denial I scrapped them and started over. As for the easiest part, I've been staring at the blinking cursor on my screen for a good three minutes now, trying to come up with a response. The truth is, the whole experience was very difficult. Fever isn't my first published novel, but it's the first novel I began writing knowing for sure it would be published. When I wrote Wither, as with all the other things I'd written before it, there was no guarantee. It took a lot of getting used to.

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?Together with one of Linden's servants, Gabriel, Rhine attempts to escape just before her seventeenth birthday. But in a world that continues to spiral into anarchy, is there any hope for freedom?

Rhine and Gabriel have escaped the mansion, but danger is never far behind.

Running away brings Rhine and Gabriel right into a trap, in the form of a twisted carnival whose ringmistress keeps watch over a menagerie of girls. Just as Rhine uncovers what plans await her, her fortune turns again. With Gabriel at her side, Rhine travels through an environment as grim as the one she left a year ago - surroundings that mirror her own feelings of fear and hopelessness. The two are determined to get to Manhattan, to relative safety with Rhine’s twin brother, Rowan. But the road there is long and perilous - and in a world where young women only live to age twenty and young men die at twenty-five, time is precious. Worse still, they can’t seem to elude Rhine’s father-in-law, Vaughn, who is determined to bring Rhine back to the mansion...by any means necessary. In the sequel to Lauren DeStefano’s harrowing Wither, Rhine must decide if freedom is worth the price - now that she has more to lose than ever