Fever

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.

Reviewed at http://www.mandikayereads.com/archives/985

When I reviewed Wither, I struggled to give it a rating. There was no such struggle this time around. It's not often that a second book is better than the first, but this is one occasion where it absolutely is. It didn't read like a middle book to me. The writing is amazing and the visual imagery had me believing I was actually breathing ash in the air right alongside them.

This was a painful book to read. At every turn something went wrong for Rhine and Gabriel. It caused a physical ache in my chest just hoping that something good would happen (you'll have to read the book to find out if it did).

This one is definitely much darker than the first, but I think it needs to be. Things show more always get worse before they get better - and I do have hope that things in this world will get better by the end of the series. It's been alluded to several times, but I can't imagine going through all of this - becoming so emotionally invested - for naught. And honestly, despite the dark and cruel nature of the story, it was always laced with hope. That's what kept me going through the book and what has me dying to read the next installment.

Hope. Sometimes that's all that keeps you going. show less

Fever picks up right where Wither left off. Just as she did with the opening chapter of the first book, Ms. DeStefano begins with a bang. Even though Rhine and Gabriel have escaped the mansion, it doesn’t mean they are safe. Their journey north toward Manhattan is a rocky one, and they’ll be lucky to make it there alive.

What I love most about these books is that the author uses fluid, gorgeous prose to tell a very horrifying and ugly story. I mean who would have thought that reading about young girls (dying young girls no less), captured by a demented old woman and forced into sexual slavery in a circus setting could be so beautifully ugly?

I especially liked seeing Rhine questioning her decision to escape the mansion. In the first show more book she wanted to be anywhere but where she was, and now, once she’s gone, the horrors that she stumbles upon outside the mansion gates make her life there seem like heaven. In the first book we saw a strong and determined Rhine, willing to do anything to get back to her brother. In this book, Rhine is still determined, but her decision to leave weighs heavily on her, as does her mortality. Was the escape worth it? Will she ever find her brother? Did she make a mistake when she left?

These are all questions that hang heavily around Rhine’s neck, and she carries them with her throughout the book. Any fan of Wither should definitely check this one out, and if you haven’t read the first book, I do recommend it. This is an interesting and different type of dystopian series that crawls under your skin and holds tight. show less

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 . . .

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

Despite the cliffhanger ending of the last novel, it took me a little while to get into this sequel. However, about mid-way through, the action really picked up and I sped my way to the end. Rhine's adventures (and misadventures) after escaping the mansion only to attempt to make her way back to a life and a brother that might not be waiting for her are often heartbreaking, as is much of the dystopian future she inhabits. A good read and I'm ready for the conclusion to this series (I really want to know if they find a cure to the virus) as soon as I can get my hands on it!