FEVER 1793
By Laurie Halse Anderson
Aladdin, 2002
Last week I was browsing at the library and saw Laurie Halse Anderson’s FEVER 1793 on the sixth grade Summer Reading shelves. Since I had just finished AN AMERICAN PLAGUE, a non-fiction account of the same event, I picked it up. How would this fictionalized account of the yellow fever epidemic compare to the non-fiction version I had recently praised here?
FEVER 1793 held up. It is a great read, and Anderson packs a tremendous amount of historical detail into her novel. Somehow she slips in the strange theories that people had about the cause of the epidemic, the flight of most high-ranking government officials, the bravery of the Free African Society, the takeover of a Bush Hill mansion in order to create a hospital for the sick and dying, and hundreds of other historical facts … and none of it slows the narrative.
I was utterly wrapped up in the story of Mattie Cook, Anderson’s young protagonist, who is trapped in fever-stricken Philadelphia. Mattie’s story personalized the plague in a way that was hard to shake. What would I have done if my mother came down with the plague and sent me away to the country? Would I go? Would I refuse to leave? And if I didn’t make it to the country, but returned home to find my mother missing, what would I do? Could I survive on my own? Could I find a way to help myself … and possibly some of the people suffering around me? These are the tough questions that Mattie has to face as she comes of age in the midst of a deadly plague. How can you not want to know what happens?
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And that, my friends, concludes Mosquito Week here on my reading blog. Heaven only knows what I will come up with next.
Happy reading!