The Cover of "Wither" (Book 2 Review2)

I am currently reading the book Wither by Lauren Destefano. The book is about a girl named Rhine who is taken and forced to be a bride to a wealthy young man along with 2 other girls. The reason is that all women are dying at the age of 20 and men at the age of 25 because of some biological defect. It’s a stretch right? I thought so too. The supposed reason is that this man wants to live out the rest of his life in happiness and ignorance (When in reality, his father wants the girls because he wants to test on them and their children for a cure). This is bleak. And for that reason, the cover is bleak as well.

It’s sort of a dark cover, showing a young teenage girl (Rhine) in a stunning dress but she is solemnly looking away. There is also a bird in a beautiful gilded cage, probably relating to how Rhine is trapped in a beautiful place but is trapped nonetheless-- just like the bird. It is mainly dark colors with some rich undertones of scarlet, plum, and copper that almost implore the audience to see that the book is dark (Everyone dies under the age of 25 for reasons unknown and scary father-in-laws want to experiment on kidnapped brides. That seems pretty dark to me.) But, the rich colors have a redeeming tone to them which, in turn, redeems the book so that it doesn’t seem all that bad.

I personally love the existing cover. It provides just enough insight that you can kind of tell the main gist of the book but it also has an air of mystery around it that entices readers to pick it up. If there were to be another cover, perhaps it could just be the picture of the bird cage. This would allude to the book’s premise.

If you are not careful, covers can break the book but in this case, it makes it.

Movie Adaptation (Book 2 Review 1)

Adapting the book "Wither" into a movie could either be very good or very bad. There are no major special effects that would need to be made but the sets would have to be very eleborate to get the right feel for the scene. I would also say that finding the right actors/actresses would be difficult as well. All of the characters have very distinguishable traits that would need to be met so that they seem true to the character. I think the best thing to do would be to use not well known actors that way the audience can visualize the character instead of visualizing the celebrity as the character. It is always distracting when a big name celebrity is put in a movie because then you only think of them as theirselves instead of the person they are trying to portray.

There are some scenes that must be kept in the movie. One scene is when Rhine (the female protagonist) is walking down the isle with her sister wives to be married to their husband who they have never even seen before. During this scene, one of the sister wives, Cecily, is very excited and bouncy while the other, Jenna, is morose and solumn. It would be important to show these personalities so the audience can understand the different viewpoints of Rhine's situation instead of just her own thoughts. Another scene that must be kept is when Rhine tells Cecily the story of her and her twin brother before she was forcibly taken to be a bride. This would establish the reasoning for why Rhine is trying so hard to escape. The audience needs to understand why she is giving up her new cushy life to go back to harsh conditions with her much loved brother. One final scene that would need to be kept is when Gabriel goes missing but leaves a June Bean. This is subtle but an important part in the story as it is one of the only scenes where Gabriel really shows his affection for Rhine.