If you’re looking for a great poolside or beach read for what’s left of summer, The Fever would be a very satisfying choice. It’s a mystery involving teenage lust, parental lust, environmental toxins, and anti-vaxxers.
The action focuses on the Nash family. Dad is a high school chemistry teacher, Eli is a dreamy senior and hockey star, Deenie is 16 and dealing with the academic and social pressures that go along with that, and mom is gone, having cheated on dad and moved away years ago. One cold spring day, Deenie’s BFF Lise, whom she’s known since they were toddlers, has a seizure and convulsions in class. She winds up hospitalized. Shortly thereafter, Gabby, who happens to be Deenie’s other good friend, suffers a seizure during a school orchestra performance, and then friend Kim does likewise. Soon, girls throughout the school are on edge and suffering a variety of symptoms. Hysteria is unleashed in the small town of Dryden. Is it the HPV vaccine that’s causing it? Is it the horribly polluted lake in the middle of town, which is slimy, green and iridescent? Why do only girls suffer and why only some of them?
Abbott does a wonderful job of building up the fear amongst the students and parents. The PTA meeting at which environmental activists and anti-vaxxers confront the school administration and health department officials is especially well done. It’s at this meeting that one parent, a pediatrician, suggests that it’s a psychological problem more than anything — a mass hysteria among these young women. The PTA meeting shows the growing hysteria among parents, too, and how it can sweep people away.
The cavernous space seemed to explode with diffuse panic: hollers, howls, countless arms raised above heads, fingers pointing like lightening bolts….
More and more, Tom sensed that if he stayed a moment longer, he would start to feel it, too. Feel this sense that nothing could protect his daughter from anything because everything was out to doom her. To annihilate her.
For anyone familiar with autism, the level of fear and the intensity that parents demonstrate regarding vaccines and environmental pollution will be very familiar. In general terms though, this scene and the novel as a whole show the fear parents have for their kids as they are growing up, the doubts about their own decisions. Tom thinks that “…parenting amounted to a series of questionable decisions….” Gabby’s mother tells him, “… even if it isn’t any of these things, it could be. Because all we do from the minute they’re born is put them at risk.”
Abbott also gets into the teen psyche pretty convincingly as well — the desire to fit in, the jealousy among friends, curiosity about sex…. Gabby is a queen bee, the type of girl all the other girls emulate. Lise is a swan newly shed of her ugly duckling status. Eli is a very popular guy who isn’t as much of a cad as some of his buddies, but not completely innocent either. He muses, “Growing up felt like a series of bewildering afters.” Deenie experiences this same feeling as well. She is deeply loyal to her friends, but not immune to poor and selfish decision-making that surprises herself.
Abbott’s resolution to the mystery of these girls falling ill is believable, satisfying, and truly taken from today’s headlines. I’ll be putting Abbott’s other novels on my “to read” list.
Great review. I’m going to have to add this to my to-read list. I’ve been waiting to see how authors will handle the whole “to vaccinate or not to vaccinate” issue that seems to have become more vocal as of late.