Last time on Wither, Jenna continues withering, if withering is what you call vomiting blood.

We lose her on January 1, in the early hours before the sun comes up.

It’s so good of her to die at just the right moment to have all sorts of symbolic meaning, isn’t it?

Cecily’s stunned by how fast Jenna died.

“Housemaster Vaughn should have been able to prolong—”
“Don’t mention his name,” I say fiercely, but I don’t know why I’m getting upset with her. I haven’t been able to stand the sight of her since Jenna became sick, and I’m not sure why that is.

Oh, so it’s Cecily’s fault somehow. We know whenever Rhine decides something that defies reason and logic, she’s right, and god forbid our perfect virgin sue be mad at someone when it isn’t their fault.

Cecily lies with the body and cries for a while.

and says her name. Jenna, Jenna, Jenna. Over and over, like it will do any good.

Rhine is still a jerk.

They come to take the body away.

Jenna’s hand is pulled from her grasp. “Be brave,” is all Cecily says.

What’s odd about this book is that there’s so much life in the secondary characters – they react to things, you can speculate about their reasons and all that – while Rhine is so incredibly flat.

Cecily then goes to pound the piano while Rhine lies on the floor of her room.

Evil mad scientist brings them ashes to scatter, and Cecily asks if she can keep them instead.

It will make her feel better. I say that’s fine by me, and quietly I resent her ignorance.

There’s flashes of life in Rhine, but she’s such a sue that it’s more obvious that this kind of thing isn’t meant as a flaw. And it’s one thing to like a character who’s flawed and another to like one the story insists isn’t flawed at all.

This line actually sums up the relationship they’ve had all book. Rhine keeps secrets from Cecily, then hates her for not knowing them.

The rapist shows up.

“What can I do for you?” He kneels by the bed, pushes the hair from my face. I stare at him through a mess of tears. Set me free, I think. Send me back to last year. Give Jenna her sisters back.

So she says nothing, naturally.

I cover my face with my fists, but he moves them away, and I don’t put up any kind of a fight.

The sheer wrongness of the relationship is most evident in the little things like this. He’s so persistently controlling.

“There’s a party tomorrow night. Would you like that?”
“No,” I choke out.
“Yes, you would,” he says.

See?

I swallow a lump in my throat and nod assent.
“There. That’s better,” Linden says. But I can see in his eyes that he knows I’m in pain.

There’s no “but”, Rhine. He knows you’re in pain and he wants you to stop it, so he’s telling you to go to a party and be charming instead of sulking unattractively in your room. People can know you’re in pain without it meaning they feel sympathy for you. And it’s only your guess that he even understands how much pain you’re in – just as possible he figures that, like hiding a dead kitten from a cat, you’ll forget about it as soon as it’s out of sight. The fact he seems to think you’ll be pleasant company at a party is a strong point in favor of the latter option.

Rhine says that when Rose died he wanted to be alone. So doesn’t he understand that I want to be alone too?

I just explained this, Rhine. He doesn’t give a fuck except about how it inconveniences him.

he’s not having it. “Move over,” he says softly, and lifts up the blankets and climbs into the bed with me.

Luckily she totally wanted it, just like every other thing he does to her (except sex because only whores have sex) and so she cries against his manly chest for a while and thinks about how his strong arms are stronger than she thought, and I guess this is comforting.

You know, as someone with many large relatives, I’ve never found being grabbed by someone and discovering hey, in addition to forced contact, they’re stronger than I expected and I have absolutely no chance of escape was comforting. And those were people I liked, not murdering rapists insisting they were my husband.

Feeling safe at how strong someone else is is not the default. In fact, I would say that’s kind of the idea – to believe someone is stronger than you but they won’t use this fact to harm you is a good sign of how close you are in order to trust them like that. (And even there I’d say option b, they’re stronger than you but you believe they won’t use that fact to restrain you in the first place <b>because they respect your autonomy as a person</b> is the better one when trying to make a point about how wonderful they are.) Treating it as if being restrained by someone stronger than you is automatically comforting is creepy, and even worse is reversing cause and effect to “if you physically restrain her, she’ll suddenly realize she loves you! Go for it!” The logic is faulty in the same way it is when applied to the idea people are willing to have sex with people they like.

The problem with the romance in this book, of course, is because the author is a horrible person, but in general, I think a weakness of romantic tropes are that people don’t understand the balance of IC/OOC. A good way of indicating romantic interest is for someone to act in a way that doesn’t make sense for them given what we know, so only the addition of them also being in love can reconcile that. But just having them act out of character doesn’t mean you’re portraying romance, and when you start applying romantic tropes to a character’s standard behavior as if it’s an inherent feature of who they are instead of an exception indicating something special about the other person, you start getting really screwy results and often some gender essentialist as a bonus.

On a related note, this is also why the fact something is realistic doesn’t mean it’s good writing. To think of fanfic for a moment, because I like fanfic so much better, a lot of fanfic with D/s elements (which in turn is an awful lot of fanfic) will base the roles on either how the characters behave outside the bedroom, or in badfic, how the writer assumes the character behaves outside the bedroom based on their appearance or some other stereotyped trait. Every now and then someone from the real life BDSM community will pop up to say that’s not it at all, and Seto should totally be a sub because the real life stereotype is that it’s the ones who are really dominant and in control of the rest of their life who sub in bed. The fanfic community then continues to by and large not care, because they want to read about the character still acting in a way close to his usual behavior, regardless of if it’s how someone who acts like he does actually would end up. Similarly, the fact love can cause huge changes in behavior in the real world doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to rely on that for a story – actions drastically at odds with their usual behavior can still read as out of character and lazy even if there’s a justification for it.

On to just the usual worldbuilding fail: In Manhattan there’s not much cause to attend a New Year’s celebration. It’s an occasion reserved mostly for first generations who have the wealth and longevity to celebrate
…
It’s also something of a free-for-all for Gatherers. There are all those drunk, gorgeous, motherless girls who dance and sell sparklers in the park.

So no one celebrates but a couple first gens, but also there’s giant crowds of drunk girls selling party toys to…..who?

Rhine notices Cecily’s wandering around aimlessly because evil mad scientist has grabbed the baby for more tests, so she tells the child slaves to do her makeup too.

For a moment, Rhine remembers Cecily’s a kid, although more precisely, she’s more saying it’s a shame Cecily isn’t a kid but in a different world she might have been.

I feel like I’ve failed her somehow.

The list is actually pretty long, Rhine, with particular standouts being the part where you knew he was going to rape her and just smugly ignored it so she’d get taught a lesson and the part where you supported him locking her up in her room. Oh, and the part where you encouraged her to flirt with him.

The rapist shows up so they can go to the party. He asks if Cecily’s seemed odd recently.

I’m not sure how to respond, because I have noticed a change in Cecily. Even since before Jenna’s death, she has been oddly forlorn. But I think it might have something to do with Vaughn’s constantly taking Bowen from her
…
I also can’t find a nice way to tell Linden that I think he was selfish and wrong to impregnate such a young girl in the first place.

And therefore she says no, Cecily’s totally fine, just a bit tired out.

But hey, she silently thinks that he should have used a condom while raping the thirteen year old, because getting her pregnant was kind of selfish! She’s not going to actually say anything, or do anything about him getting Cecily pregnant again, because it wouldn’t be nice to tell him that. Besides, now Cecily’s fourteen, that’s totally old enough.

More people should realize how hurt rapists can be by being told they did something wrong. It’s very mean not to consider their feelings.

Rhine is, however, capable of telling the rapist that she’s suspicious of what evil mad scientist is doing, because she’s always able to suggest he’s evil. Not that he should let Cecily have the kid more, just general bitching. She asks why evil mad scientist is doing so many tests.

that seems normal to you?” I say.
“What’s normal?” he says. “The first generations didn’t even realize their children were dying until twenty years later when it started happening. Who knows what will happen to our children?”
He has a point.

…okay. So, the first gens are seventy. That’s enough time for them to have gotten to a third generation, especially when they think thirteen year olds are fair game. Do they not even know if the genetic disorder virus does stuff to third gens? For all we know, it fixes itself after a single generation of normal reproduction, like with cloning. I’ve been using second gen to refer to types, assuming kids born to second gens are identical to kids born to first gens. If there’s no evidence of this, why is everyone insisting they’re all going to die at twenty/five on the dot? And why wasn’t anyone worried they’d die younger or suffer other complications?

Anyway, back to apologism, Rhine talks about how the rapist is just as nervous about the party as she is! Poor baby.

He refers to her as his first wife.

First wife. It’s only for a few days longer, but I can pretend, for his sake, that that isn’t so.

Once again, Rhine has given up on even the pretense that her actions are to keep him off guard. She’s all about protecting his little rapist feelings.

She asks about cameras, and he says there’ll be everywhere and maybe she should have worn contacts so no one else will see how special she is.

“Are my eyes what make me special to you?”
“No,” he says. His voice has become soft and dreamy.
He pushes the curls from my face. “They are only a ripple on the surface.”
I smile. For a moment I think this is the way my father felt about my mother, and I could almost swear this marriage was real.

In another version of this book, this would be portrayed as a creeping and insidious horror, where she starts out hating him but slowly starts slipping into making excuses for him and not needing to fake it the longer she has to pretend and she’s confused about if that means she really loves him. But this isn’t any different from how she’s acted most of the book.

The top two platforms are made of some sort of one-sided glass, so that we can see can see the people below but not the people above us. I’m relieved, because this means nobody can look up my dress.

Rhine continues to be bothered by the weirdest things. People looking up her dress or kissing her hand is awful, people dragging her naked into a tub isn’t.

One of the others has brought two of his wives along. I think we’re supposed to dislike him or them or both:They look barely older than Cecily. They’re dressed in matching fuchsia dresses that look like plastic wrap wound around their angular bodies. He introduces them as his wives—twins, each of them pregnant—and when he kisses my hand, both women stare at me with contempt.

Mostly them, I think. It’s rather unsettling. (They’re staring with contempt because they’re so jelus of how pretty Rhine is. The book literally says that, I’m not just assuming.)

Issues aside, he actually seems comparatively nice. We know Cecily desperately wants to go and that, in a different marriage, the wives would be competing to have a chance outside. Here, this guy’s just said fuck convention, you can both go instead of having to fight each other for it. Sure, he’s another child rapist, but they all are, at least he isn’t keeping his locked up.

Rhine makes sure to stick close to the main rapist because she’s so nervous around the other men, who she doesn’t think she can trust.

Speaking of such! Another man comes and asks to trade dance partners. Again, Rhine makes a point of sneering that he’s younger than she is, and then goes on about how he’s ugly and short and fat and has orange hair, ugh. Oh, he’s so inferior to her own wonderful Linden-chan…

“Come on!” the man says. “Just for one dance. We’ll swap wives.”
“All right,” Linden says, taking the red dress’s hand and passing me over to the carrot-head. “But I’m rather fond of my Rhine. Don’t get too attached.”
I feel nauseous. The man smells like an unfortunate assortment of all the meats on the deli platter, and he’s had too much to drink.

“My Rhine” is telling here – Rhine hates the guy on sight and wants nothing to do with him, the rapist doesn’t even think to wonder if she wants to. After all, she’s his, to pass around to whoever he pleases so long as they make sure to give his toy back.

Rhine seethes the whole dance about how dare the hussy dance with her husband? At least she realizes this is at odds with her plan, but it’s less an “oh my god what’s wrong with me” and more of an “oh my why do I feel like this could it be love???” moment.

I become more appreciative of Deirdre’s fashion sense. Most of these other wives look as though they’re wearing tin-foil. Lots of silvers and metallic pinks and greens and baby blues. Platform shoes with six-inch heels and exaggerated pearl necklaces that look like they weigh a ton. Most of the women wear so much makeup that the lights make them appear radioactive. Their teeth are glowing.

Is this just really common in books? It seems so similar to the Hunger Games but maybe they’re all drawing from some common source. Regardless, I wish it would stop.

She dances a bit with the wives anyway, and she says it’s nice because they’re just fooling around because they don’t know how to dance. It does not occur to Rhine to think this means they’re other similarly kidnapped girls, to wonder at their stories or if they want to escape.

we hold hands, and our laughter disappears in the music. I’ve always had cause to fear New Year’s celebrations because of the Gatherers; I’ve always had to worry about who would be breaking into my home. But I’m safe here

The gatherers already came for you. This is why you feared them, ending up in a place like this as a “reluctant yet beautiful” bride. It’s like saying you’re safe from fear of being grabbed by a murderer because one’s already cutting your throat.

It’s almost midnight, so everyone pairs up and the rapist reappears.

“Where’s your girlfriend?” I say, before I can stop myself.
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Nothing,” I say as he turns me to face him. “I just forgot you have a weakness for blondes.”
“Oh, her?” he says. “Her husband’s father is a contractor I’ve been working with. I thought it would benefit me to stay on his good side.”

See, no one can compete with Rhine, she is alpha-sue. He was just pretending.

Or, the rapist continues to be a smooth talker.

Indeed, he goes on to say he felt super jealous at her dancing with the other guy.

He tilts my chin, forcing me to look at him. Of all the Governors and Housemasters here, he’s the only one I would allow to touch me in this way.

As established, Rhine doesn’t actually get much say in that anyway, and it’s amazing how no matter how many times she repeats some variation of him forcing her to do something but she’s totally fine with it really it stays just as creepy.

He says he loves her.

And it only seems fitting that, in this moment of illusion, the words just come out of me. “I love you, too.”

On the brighter side, only four more chapters to go. Like the Hunger Games, this is precisely 27 chapters. You can see why I’m so suspicious it’s copying things.