Fever 1793

Title: Fever 1793

Author: Laurie Halse Anderson

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Publication Year: 2000

Professional Source: Kent County Library

Genre (subcategory, if appropriate): Historical Fiction (for young adults)

Audience: Young adults

Awards: Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction

Critical response:

Fever 1793 is a domestic story of Matilda “Mattie” Cook, a fifteen-year-old girl living in Philadelphia at the height of the 1793 yellow fever epidemic. Readers will journey with Mattie on an emotional rollercoaster as the story begins with Mattie worrying about normal hassles, like whether or not she will be allowed to see her crush, and turns into a story of loss and fear where the only thing that is scarier than the disease itself are the actions of desperate people who do not wish to get sick.

Throughout the book Mattie, though young, has to learn to fend for herself in order to survive. At the beginning of the novel, she is already working in her mother’s coffeehouse and thinking about marriage, since marriage is the best way to ensure a better livelihood in the future. However, when the epidemic strikes, Mattie goes form serving coffee to customers to looking after her grandfather, defending her home against thieves, and even taking in an orphan child she finds starving in the city—thus fitting the child as a miniature adult historical model of childhood.

At first it seems like the narration is surprisingly formal considering that it is told from the perspective of a teenage. The main character, Mattie, uses words and phrases such as “ninny,” (33) “droll,” (37) and “dash it all” (12)—all vocabulary that people do not use in modern times. These examples are small reminders of the time period that the story is set in—a time where people spoke and behaved in a way that is slightly more formal than the way people do in modern times.

The story itself is not overtly didactic. It is meant for the reader’s pleasure and excitement. However, there is an appendix at the end of the book, after the story’s conclusion, that contains information about the real epidemic of 1793. Any readers that want to learn more about the epidemic or other events in the book need only to flip to the pages in the back to find more facts about that time period and the references where the author got the information from.