Books › Fever 1793
Fever 1793
280 pages
A gripping, sensory plunge into a city collapsing under an invisible threat, where a young girl must forge her own survival.
What it feels like
This historical survival tale plunges readers into the sweltering, oppressive heat of a city under siege by an invisible enemy. The narrative moves at a brisk, urgent clip, mirroring the escalating panic of the epidemic as the atmosphere shifts from bustling ambition to dread-soaked isolation. The prose is visceral and direct, stripping away romanticized history to focus on the gritty, sensory realities of hunger, fear, and sudden loss. It is a deeply emotional reading experience that traces a harrowing arc from adolescent innocence to hard-won resilience. Readers who devour intense, character-driven historical fiction will find themselves completely absorbed by this gritty testament to human endurance, found family, and the fierce will to survive when the world falls apart.
- Mood
- oppressive
- dread-soaked
- tense
- sweltering
- Tone
- urgent
- earnest
- gritty
- resilient
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- coming of age through crisis · fragility of society · resilience and survival · found family · grief and loss
- The writing
- Direct, sensory-rich, and accessible, the writing grounds historical details in a visceral, immediate reality.
- The arc
- The journey moves from naive adolescent ambition to overwhelming terror and grief, ultimately landing on a hard-won, mature resilience.
- Who it's for
- Middle grade and young adult readers who crave intense, character-driven survival stories and immersive historical fiction.
Content notes
- illness and epidemic
- death of loved ones
- grief
- medical trauma
- starvation
About the book
It's late summer 1793, and the streets of Philadelphia are abuzz with mosquitoes and rumors of fever. Down near the docks, many have taken ill, and the fatalities are mounting. Now they include Polly, the serving girl at the Cook Coffeehouse. But fourteen-year-old Mattie Cook doesn't get a moment to mourn the passing of her childhood playmate. New customers have overrun her family's coffee shop, located far from the mosquito-infested river, and Mattie's concerns of fever are all but overshadowed by dreams of growing her family's small business into a thriving enterprise. But when the fever begins to strike closer to home, Mattie's struggle to build a new life must give way to a new fight—the fight to stay alive.
Description from Open Library.
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