Fever

Wow, this book was like an ache in the chest.

Nearly the whole time I was thinking: oh things have to get better they HAVE to get better. But they didn't. It was such a bleak painting of a novel, one horrid thing after another and it just made my heart break.

I also felt, while I liked it a great deal, that it had the "middle book" syndrome. Because while there was stuff going on, nothing happened in the overall scheme. Sure, secrets were revealed and relationships tested, but the amount of plot moved forward was small. It's just a bridge from the first to the last.

But DeStefano's writing is engaging and evocative and I couldn't put this book down! The wait for the third is going to really test my nerves . . .

Oh, this book. This was another kick in the teeth, but it was so eye opening. We went from the first book where all harshness was outside (if it wasn't the terrible mystery-threat going on in the basement) to the up close and personal view of what it is like to live in this world when you aren't being controlled, captured and cared for.

It's rough and tumble. It's amazing. The love story still shines through, along with the complex emotions the main character has for everyone she's with, she leaves behind, she finds herself with. I am very much looking forward to seeing how this story comes together for an ending.

Review Courtesy of Dark Faerie Tales

Quick & Dirty: The sequel to Wither brings back everything we love about Rhine as well as the dystopian world DeStefano built with her wonderfully detailed descriptions. It’s a wonderful book and far more fast paced than the first one!

Opening Sentence: We run, with water in our shoes and the smell of ocean clinging to our frozen skin.

The Review:

Everything there was to love about Wither–the worldbuilding, the narrative voice, the characters–is resurrected in Fever and even better. If that’s possible. Fever picks up almost right where the first book finished, with Rhine and Gabriel jumping ship and ending up somewhere on the coast of South Carolina (the mansion, we’re told in Wither was in show more Florida).

This book is much more location based instead of character and relationship based, maybe because the main character’s relationships have already been established. Rhine and Gabriel are trying to make it two Manhattan to find Rowan, but Vaughn is right behind them. There are two phases two the story, when they are at Madame’s Carnival of Carnal Delights and when they finally make it to the city. The carnival is the debilitated skeleton of what we think of as a carnival, with the Ferris Wheel and Merry-Go-Round the only recognizable features. It’s used by Madame’s prostitutes to service their clients, and the girls are color coded by name and tent based on price, beauty, etc. The Madame, needless to say, is crazy. She’s first generation and watches her girls die with the same blase you’d see if someone killed their plant.

But it’s at the carnival we see Rhine taking up responsibility the same way she did in Wither. For Gabriel, for the little malformed girl they meet. One of my favorite things about Rhine is that though she grows as a character, she stays consistent. She’s constantly thinking of her twin Rowan, and we learn more about him as being out in the real world sparks more memories of him. As we read about her memories the reader starts to get more worried for Rowan too as more of his character comes into focus.

Rhine is a beautiful narrator. We see a lot of uncommon metaphors that draw you deeper into her character as they ground you in the details of her world. Things are constantly getting caught–laughter in wind chimes, ghosts in hair–and it makes not only the voice of the author distinct, but Rhine’s world far busier and more treacherous than our own.

We get to revisit a lot of character’s we met in Wither, like Jenna, through memories that Rhine has. Rhine ends up spending a lot of time thinking about what’s going on at the mansion, especially because Vaughn always seems so close behind them. Rhine never removes her wedding ring, which grows to represent the emotional tether she feels to everyone still at the mansion. Cecily, the baby Bowen, Deirdre…and Linden. DeStefano ties Rhine to these character’s throughout the book, making it clear that even though she’s finally escaped the mansion she’s more tied to it than she thought.

Gabriel plays an important role as well, and their relationship evolves both romantically and platonically as they fight to survive. Gabriel was auctioned off at the age of nine and never left the mansion. It’s interesting to see this broken America the way Rhine does and the reaction Gabriel has to it, which is similar to the readers. He’s strong, but he’s perhaps not as strong as Rhine, who didn’t grow up as isolated as Gabriel did. He never had to worry about Gatherers, or riots, or sleeping in shifts while your sibling held the rifle. But he adapts and evolves and in the end he’s fighting for more than his life. He’s fighting for Rhine’s too.

I loved this book. In many way’s even more than I did Wither. It’s more grounded in the world, has considerably less description about the clothes the wives were wearing (understand when you’re on the run you don’t have much), but the plot moves a lot faster too. Or maybe it just seems that way because they’re on the move. Either way, this isn’t a sequel that slumps the way many others do. So get excited and remember there’s more to come in book three!

Notable Scene:

Madame takes my hands and pulls me to my feet. She cups my face in her papery hands and smiles. “Even lovelier in the daylight my Goldenrod.”

I’m not her Goldenrod. I’m not her anything. But she seems to have claimed me as one of her possessions, her antiques, her plastic gems.

I will Gabriel not to mutter my name again. I don’t want Madame to have it, rolling it off her tongue the way she fondled the flowers of my wedding band.

She pouts. “You do not want to wear the beautiful dress I laid out for you?” It hangs over her arm now like a deflated corpse, like the bloodless body of the girl who wore it last.

The Chemical Garden Trilogy:

1. Wither

2. Fever

FTC Advisory: Simon & Schuster provided me with a copy of Fever. No goody bags, sponsorships, “material connections,” or bribes were exchanged for my review. show less

Before the Fever Breaks

Trigger alerts for discussion of rape, violence, and drug use.

In a two-star review of Wither, one Amazon reader commented, “I really just couldn't stand Rhine at all. She kept saying she wanted to be free. But what point was there to being free. She was safe, and treated well, and it was terrible where she was.”

Freedom or comfort – this is the choice facing Rhine Ellery at the end of Wither. Within the walls of Vaughn’s estate, Rhine will never want for creature comforts; she has more food than she can eat, the latest in technological toys, and a “husband” and sister wives who love her. Somewhere (far, so far!) outside of the gates are her twin brother, Rowan; the Manhattan home they shared with their show more parents, now five years dead; and, perhaps most importantly, choice: the freedom to choose her own path in life, no matter how hard or short it might be.

If you know exactly how and when you’ll die, which would you choose?

* Warning: minor spoilers ahead! *

Naturally – for The Chemical Garden would be a one-book trilogy otherwise – our hero chooses freedom. Fever picks up where Wither leaves off, with Rhine and Gabriel’s escape from Vaughn’s mansion. The pair wash up in South Carolina, where they’re almost instantaneously kidnapped again: this time by Madame Soleski, an eccentric first generation brothel owner. Built on site of a 21st century carnival, Madame’s “carnival of amour” is an especially absurd version of the scarlet districts Rhine so carefully avoided in Manhattan, complete with a working Ferris wheel and giant striped circus tents. Here, Rhine and Gabriel are drugged with aphrodisiacs and painkillers and forced to perform intimacy for paying customers. Dubbed “Goldenrod” by Madame – who names all her girls after colors – Rhine is deemed “too valuable” to be prostituted outright.

After a thwarted attempt to sell Rhine to a Gatherer – a favored john at the carnival – Vaughn shows up to retrieve his fugitive daughter-in-law. With a little help from Lilac, a kind-hearted prostitute-slash-sex slave (it’s never really clear whether she’s with the Madame voluntarily, although every one of the sex workers arguably operates on varying degrees of non-consent, ranging from outright enslavement to drug-fueled dependency and simple lack of choices) and Jared, a security guard, Rhine and Gabriel manage to climb the electrified fence (always fences, holding the human cattle in) and escape to freedom once again. With Lilac’s young, malformed (“malfie”) daughter Maddie in tow, they make their way to New York in search of Rowan. Instead they find the charred ashes of Rhine’s old home.

A name and address written in crayon in one of Maddie’s ancient books leads them to Grace’s Orphanage – and to Claire and Silas. Here Rhine and Gabriel find refuge, albeit briefly; just as Rhine begins her search for Rowan anew, she’s struck down by what appears to be the virus – three years early, a fate similarly suffered by her sister wife Jenna. Even 1,000+ miles up the coastline, Vaughn still has his hooks in her – literally. When he first purchased Rhine, Jenna, and Cicely, and unbeknownst to them, he implanted his newest human property with trackers, so that he’d always know where they were. This is how he tracks her to New York – and her declining health, along with a not-so-subtle threat against her new family, is how Vaughn coerces Rhine into returning to the mansion.

Fast-paced and full of suspense, I found Fever to be every bit as readable as Wither – though I do admit a slight preference for the latter. Gabriel’s character is never fully developed, and his relationship with Rhine remains murky. While I could understand the two choosing to run away together – clinging together in the stormy sea of their oppression, much like Offred and Nick in The Handmaid's Tale – the relationship never really advances in Fever. On the plus side, Fever introduced three characters of color: Claire, Lilac, and Maddie – Maddie, who calls to mind Fray’s Loo and will alternately steal and break your heart.

Some reviewers have complained that Fever is more of a “filler” book than anything else; the story ends more or less in the same place it began. “More or less” being the key phrase.

While it’s true that, for all her travels, Rhine doesn’t get far, by Fever’s (near) end she winds up in a much worse place than the wives’ floor: Vaughn’s basement of horrors. Here, she and fellow captives Deidre and Lydia (former “domestics” – child slaves – whose services were no longer required when Rhine escaped and Rose died, respectively) endure inhumane, involuntary experiments, the least of which include testing new drugs with hallucinogenic side effects. They’re sedated, restrained – and artificially inseminated (read: medically raped). Deidre, if you remember from Withered, is all of ten years old. Lydia, also quite young, miscarries several pregnancies before dying – bleeding out on a cold metal table.

Whatever she thought Vaughn capable of, Rhine discovers that the truth is a million times worse.

Fever also gives us a glimpse of the outside world. Through Madame’s “carnival” (too charming a name for a rape factory, I think), we see what other fate awaits the girls snatched up by Gatherers – the life Rhine might have been thrust into under other circumstances. The young women who arrive at Madame’s doorstep travel a number of paths: they’re orphans, Gathered girls, addicts, young women with nowhere else to go. Madame gets or keeps them drugged and sells their shelled bodies to whoever can pay up. Different girls fetch different sums: young and pretty, the Reds are Madame’s favorites; the Blues, with their “murky” and missing teeth, are less expensive; and those girls who lay dying of the virus are sold at a discount. Even in death’s shadow, they are not granted a reprieve. Madame provides illicit birth control for her “best” girls; the babies born to the others become Madame’s property, child laborers and, later if they are girls, sex workers.

While reading Wither, I wondered more than once why any next generation teens would choose to bear children that they’d have little hope of knowing – children who would most certainly grow up to be orphans themselves. In Fever, we learn that President Guiltree outlawed all forms of birth control. A member of the pro-science faction who himself has nine wives, the president wants to keep the birth rate up so that scientists like Vaughn have plenty of warm bodies on which to experiment. While he’s eager to spend a small fortune rebuilding bombed out research labs, no money is allocated toward practical health care: the next generation is a lost cause. It’s also rumored that he actively supports the Gatherers. In any case, there is no justice system to speak of – kidnapping, owning, and vivisecting other humans no longer appear to be criminal activities. The title of president, of course, is now one that’s inherited rather than bestowed upon a democratically elected leader by the people.

Wherever slavery exists, none of us are free. Rhine’s story illustrates how, in such a world, any one of us could be snatched up and tethered to another. Whether your captor is seemingly kind and compassionate, like the naïve Linden – or cruel to the point of monstrosity, like Vaughn and Madame – you remain a piece of property, an object to be bought and sold. A gilded cage still has bars.

http://www.easyvegan.info/2013/04/03/fever-by-lauren-destefano/ show less

It is two o’clock in the morning and I can’t go to sleep yet because I NEED TO TALK ABOUT THIS BOOK.



WHY do you do this with the cliffhangers, DeStefano?!



At least you gave Rhine one small bright spot in her life there at the end, considering all we’ve seen of her is terrible circumstances and less than desirable choices. But still! That’s where you’re going to end the book?



When we last saw Rhine, she had escaped the mansion and creepy, sinister father-in-law Vaughn with attendant Gabriel for company. You’d think maybe Rhine would catch some sort of a break and that something good would come out of this rediscovered “freedom.” But, as is the trend, she doesn’t catch any breaks and her life gets about a billion times show more worse.



Let’s talk about Gabriel. When she’s sick and practically dying, Gabriel’s there to try to take care of her. At other times in the book he was there to protect her and be there for her in her moments of weakness. But I’m still not convinced on these two together. And I understand that he was angry because his relatively untroubled life is in shambles now that he’s left the only life he knew after Rhine talked up the outside world and it didn’t deliver (in the least). I just don’t feel like they have a real love connection.



They’re ASTOUNDING friends! But more than that? I don’t see it.



You know how I said the last book was chilling and creepy? Multiply that by about 80 and you get the intensity and disturbing genius that is this installment. I could feel Rhine’s depression and despondency. I could feel her fear and panic at the thought of Vaughn and his experiments. My heart racing, breathing haggard.



FEELS.



There was more heartbreak and lost hope and terror and creepily unsettling aspects to this story than I know what to do with. There was little emphasis on romantic relationships, yet I was still held in a vise grip and inundated with feels. This is one series I am at a complete loss as to what I think is going to happen, because everything surpasses any conclusions I attempt to draw.


RATING: 4.5 show less

Wow... I enjoyed this book exceptionally more than the first one in the series. It was all I could do not to press my nose to the pages to try to get through the story faster, the suspense was just that awesome!! I was constantly questioning wtf was going on, where is this character, why did they do this, what choice will they make, WHY IS RHINE SO SICK?!... the ending was awesome. NEXT PLEASE. :D

Fever jumped right in from where Wither left off with Rhine Ellery and Gabriel fleeing from Linden Ashby's house. Their journey to Manhattan is immediately stalled when they stumble upon a carnival themed scarlet district. Rhine and Gabriel are forced to perform as lovebirds in order to be kept alive. With some unexpected help, Rhine and Gabriel escape with a young malformed girl, Maddie. Together, the three of them continue to head toward Manhattan. Things don't get much easier on their journey, with little food, money, and resources for trading. It doesn't help that while being held captive at Madame's, Gabriel has gotten addicted to a drug called Angel's blood. Since it was only for a short period, Gabriel is able to beat the show more addiction, but not without a painful withdrawal period.

Rhine, Gabriel, and Maddie manage to make it to Manhattan. Once there, Rhine leads them to her childhood home and finds it partially burned and destroyed. Her brother is nowhere to be found and appears to believe Rhine is dead. With no other options, they search out the house listed under Maddie's one possession - a book her mother gave her. The address turns out to be Maddie's grandmother's house/orphanage. The three of them move in and begin helping out with chores in exchange for a place to sleep. While there, Rhine begins to get sick and show symptoms of the virus that kills all the youth prematurely.

I did enjoy the fast pace of this book. Things happened quickly and flowed nicely. The downside of the fast pace is that sometimes it was a little too convenient. They managed to get to Manhattan incredibly quickly for two young kids and an infant with little resources and knowledge of the road they were traveling. I don't want to give any spoilers, but the ending of the book was incredibly convenient.

The new characters were interesting, but you didn't get a real chance to develop any relationships with them. For example, Maddie was a very interesting character, but you no one could get her to say a single word. Also, she broke her arm before they ran away from Madame's and her injuries seemed to take a backseat once things with Rhine picked up. I would have liked to see more relationships to form between Rhine and the characters currently in her life. She had a lot of development with her family and sister-wives, but not so much after that.

Overall, I give this book a 3.5 out of 5. It was a fast read with an interesting storyline. It could improve by allowing more character development and making more realistic obstacles form. I would also appreciate to hear more of the science behind the virus taking all these lives. I find it unrealistic that Rhine is a daughter of two scientists who worked on finding an antidote and she doesn't know much about the virus. show less