Product Description

During the summer of 1793, Mattie Cook lives above the family coffee shop with her widowed mother and grandfather. Mattie spends her days avoiding chores and making plans to turn the family business into the finest Philadelphia has ever seen. But then the fever breaks out.

Disease sweeps the streets, destroying everything in its path and turning Mattie's world upside down. At her feverish mother's insistence, Mattie flees the city with her grandfather. But she soon discovers that the sickness is everywhere, and Mattie must learn quickly how to survive in a city turned frantic with disease.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9417 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780689848919
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
On the heels of her acclaimed contemporary teen novel Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson surprises her fans with a riveting and well-researched historical fiction. Fever 1793 is based on an actual epidemic of yellow fever in Philadelphia that wiped out 5,000 people--or 10 percent of the city's population--in three months. At the close of the 18th century, Philadelphia was the bustling capital of the United States, with Washington and Jefferson in residence. During the hot mosquito-infested summer of 1793, the dreaded yellow fever spread like wildfire, killing people overnight. Like specters from the Middle Ages, gravediggers drew carts through the streets crying "Bring out your dead!" The rich fled to the country, abandoning the city to looters, forsaken corpses, and frightened survivors.

In the foreground of this story is 16-year-old Mattie Cook, whose mother and grandfather own a popular coffee house on High Street. Mattie's comfortable and interesting life is shattered by the epidemic, as her mother is felled and the girl and her grandfather must flee for their lives. Later, after much hardship and terror, they return to the deserted town to find their former cook, a freed slave, working with the African Free Society, an actual group who undertook to visit and assist the sick and saved many lives. As first frost arrives and the epidemic ends, Mattie's sufferings have changed her from a willful child to a strong, capable young woman able to manage her family's business on her own. (Ages 12 and older) --Patty Campbell

From Publishers Weekly
The opening scene of Anderson's ambitious novel about the yellow fever epidemic that ravaged Philadelphia in the late 18th century shows a hint of the gallows humor and insight of her previous novel, Speak. Sixteen-year-old Matilda "Mattie" Cook awakens in the sweltering summer heat on August 16th, 1793, to her mother's command to rouse and with a mosquito buzzing in her ear. She shoos her cat from her mother's favorite quilt and thinks to herself, "I had just saved her precious quilt from disaster, but would she appreciate it? Of course not." Mattie's wit again shines through several chapters later during a visit to her wealthy neighbors' house, the Ogilvies. Having refused to let their serving girl, Eliza, coif her for the occasion, Mattie regrets it as soon as she lays eyes on the Ogilvie sisters, who wear matching bombazine gowns, curly hair piled high on their heads ("I should have let Eliza curl my hair. Dash it all"). But thereafter, Mattie's character development, as well as those of her grandfather and widowed mother, takes a back seat to the historical details of Philadelphia and environs. Extremely well researched, Anderson's novel paints a vivid picture of the seedy waterfront, the devastation the disease wreaks on a once thriving city, and the bitterness of neighbor toward neighbor as those suspected of infection are physically cast aside. However, these larger scale views take precedence over the kind of intimate scenes that Anderson crafted so masterfully in Speak. Scenes of historical significance, such as George Washington returning to Philadelphia, then the nation's capital, to signify the end of the epidemic are delivered with more impact than scenes of great personal significance to Mattie. Ages 10-14. (Sept.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
Grade 6-10-The sights, sounds, and smells of Philadelphia when it was still the nation's capital are vividly re-created in this well-told tale of a girl's coming-of-age, hastened by the outbreak of yellow fever. As this novel opens, Matilda Cook, 14, wakes up grudgingly to face another hot August day filled with the chores appropriate to the daughter of a coffeehouse owner. At its close, four months later, she is running the coffeehouse, poised to move forward with her dreams. Ambitious, resentful of the ordinary tedium of her life, and romantically imaginative, Matilda is a believable teenager, so immersed in her own problems that she can describe the freed and widowed slave who works for her family as the "luckiest" person she knows. Ironically, it is Mattie who is lucky in the loyalty of Eliza. The woman finds medical help when Mattie's mother falls ill, takes charge while the girl is sent away to the countryside, and works with the Free African Society. She takes Mattie in after her grandfather dies, and helps her reestablish the coffeehouse. Eliza's story is part of an important chapter in African-American history, but it is just one of many facets of this story of an epidemic. Mattie's friend Nathaniel, apprentice to the painter Master Peale, emerges as a clear partner in her future. There are numerous eyewitness accounts of the devastation by Dr. Benjamin Rush and other prominent Philadelphians of the day. Readers will be drawn in by the characters and will emerge with a sharp and graphic picture of another world.
Kathleen Isaacs, Edmund Burke School, Washington, DC
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

A girl fights to survive in the 1793 yellow fever epidemic.
It's the late summer of 1793 in Philadelphia, and fourteen-year-old Mattie Cook helps her widowed mother and her grandfather run a coffehouse. Mattie resents her strict mother and dreams of expanding the coffeehouse and becoming wealthy. But her mother seems determined to find a wealthy young man to marry Mattie off to. But all of Mattie's concerns soon seem petty when an epidemic of yellow fever begins to spread throughout the city. Mattie's own mother falls ill and sends Mattie and her grandfather to stay on a farm in the countryside, where she hopes they will be safe. But they are turned away and forced to return to Philadelphia when a doctor mistakes her grandfather's cough for yellow fever. Mattie comes down with the fever and nearly dies, but is nursed back to health in a temporary hospital. But she and her grandfather return to the coffeehouse to find that Mattie's mother has vanished. They try to settle back into a normal routine, but a sudden tragedy soon leaves Mattie on her own. Now, in a world turned upside down, in a ghost city a shadow of its former self, Mattie must keep herself alive and care for a little girl orphaned by the epidemic. This was an excellant historical novel that brought to life the epidemic. Through Mattie's first-person narration, I became immersed in the daily events of her life and her fight for survival. Highly reccomended.

fascinating yet distant
This is a fascinating account of a devastating fever epidemic in Philadelphia, then the capital of the United States, in 1793. Nearly overnight-- people contract the disease and die within the hour-- Mattie's life goes from being a slightly overworked teenage daughter of a proprietor of a successful coffee house, to a young woman struggling to survive in a city that's taken on the bleakness of a Mad Max film.

Yet somehow we never come as close to Mattie as we might, or as we do with the main character in Anderson's SPEAK. Mattie's thoughts are so much on survival and on food that at times the book feels a bit like a travelogue of a disaster. Salvation, when it comes, also seems abrupt. In the end, this is a quick way to get an immediate feel for a terrible time in history, but although we are told a lot about Mattie, her family, her hopes and dreams, somehow she stays elusive. Emotionally, the book is a little disappointing, but it's still well worth a read.

History comes to Life
Fever, 1793 brings the sorrowful time in Philadelphia when Yellow Fever devastated the city, to life in a compelling manner. You see the sights of the ravished market,docks, and shops, smell the stench of the dead and dying, feel the despair of those waiting and watching and struggle right along with Mattie as she copes with the loss of her grandfather, the fear that her missing mother may be dead,and her determination to reach out to others and survive.Mattie's spirit brings hope and joy in a terrible time. I could not put this book down.

A librarian from Bucks County