The Fever: A Novel

I might have had smoother skin and been much thinner, but I wouldn't go back to being a teenage girl and feeling all those feelings again for anything. It's such a confusing and heady place to be, and Megan Abbott's The Fever really digs into the murky territory that friendships at that age can turn into. Deenie Nash and Lise Daniels have been best friends since they were small, but things are starting to change. They've recently started hanging out with Gabby, who a parent would probably euphemistically describe as coming from "a troubled home". And Lise has grown from a cute little kid into a pretty teenager. This has not escaped notice by Deenie, or her older brother Eli (himself the subject of significant attention for his looks), or even her father Tom, a teacher at the high school. This is all putting strain on Deenie and Lise's friendship, and then one day during class, out of nowhere, Lise falls out of her chair and has a seizure.This alone is troubling, but then Gabby has a seizure too. One girl having a mysterious medical episode in a small town is cause for concern. Two is cause for alarm, especially as the doctors can provide no answers. Deenie thinks it might have been caused by a lake, rumored to be unclean, that all the girls spent time in together shortly before the episodes began. She worries that she might be next. Parents want to protect their daughters, start looking for a culprit. Hysteria starts to build as yet another girl is stricken, much of it focusing on the HPV vaccinations that the school mandated for the girls. The entire Nash family find themselves drawn further and further into the mystery and when it's finally unraveled, it's a doozy.I won't spoil anything, but the real villain of this book is teenage sexuality. Specifically, teenage girls having sex. That's what the real terror of the parents over the HPV vaccine is driven by, the idea that their daughters might be sexually active. But it's not just the parental fear. The book is steeped in sex in a very realistically teenage way: girls worrying about who's having it, who isn't, if the boy you like is sleeping with someone, if you think he might want to sleep with you, wanting to do it, not wanting to do it. For all I know, boys probably have the same kinds of thoughts, but having been a girl, I know that for all of the innocence that's attributed to female-shaped persons, they are often consumed with questions of sex. Like Deenie with Lise and Gabby, you measure yourself against your friends: who's the desirable one? Who's the innocent? Who's the slut?Thematically, this is a potent work. Abbott beautifully captures the atmosphere of small town paranoia and the thrill and terror of being what Britney Spears would call not a girl, not yet a woman. But reading this book had its frustrations as well: the tension ratcheted up too high, too soon, leaving it nowhere to really go once things got really dramatic. The plot felt slightly underbaked and the pacing was kind of stop and start. And I thought having the dad, Tom, as a main character didn't really work. I appreciated the inclusion of Eli, the perspective on teenage boys and sex made the book as a whole feel more balanced, but Tom didn't add much for me. All together, I think this was an interesting, well-written novel and I'd recommend it if teenage psychological thriller is a genre you enjoy!

This is another can't put it down book from Megan Abbott. She skillfully captures the adolescent drama, angst, and inner turmoil about being accepted, wondering if they're "normal", tragic unrequited love, and complicated relationships with parents. This book has a plot you can believe could happen tomorrow, or maybe has already started in your town - and that's scary. Abbott drew from an actual case in New York, where the hysteria insured there will always be doubts about what really happened. Her book is fiction, but very well written - an enjoyable read and a subject matter that keeps you pondering (and worrying) long after.

Before reading 'The Fever', I wasn't sure it was going to be for me. Set in high school with a teen-aged girl as a protagonist, I was thinking I might not be able to relate. I'm a man, and I'm not over the hill, but I can see the peak.Glad I was wrong.The Fever takes place from the perspective of Deenie Nash, a girl coping with the transitions of high school, her older brother, local hockey star Eli, and her father Tom, a science teacher at Dryden High.When Lise Daniels, a member of Deenie's inner circle of friends, begins to contort and convulse in high school, sending her to the hospital in a coma, it sets off a chain reaction in the other girls in the school. From rapid blinking and paralysis to hallucinations, the school, and the town, are driven into a frenzy to discover the cause.You can't appreciate the insanity of a story unless you can find yourself firmly inside of it, and here is where Megan Abbott shines. Her sculpting of the Nash family; the tenacity that Deenie shows as she tries to hold onto her two best friends - Lise and Gabby Bishop. The aloofness that even a popular guy like Eli Nash feels, subtly expressed and in conjunction with the aloofness his and Deenie's father Tom faces as he tries to find the new boundaries he must manage with their becoming adults. And overall, the rush, by the town, to assign blame for what is happening n the absence of real answers.Abbott does an exemplary job of introducing larger issues - vaccinations, fracking, pollution - into the narrative without the narrative voice taking a spotlight to those things. She lets the characters do that.If the point of a great novel is to throw the reader out of their comfort zone, challenge them, and have them glad they pulled through at the end, then The Fever is a great novel.So I would ask myself if this appeals more a young adult crowd or a general crowd. After reading it, I have to say both. And I recommend it.

Take The Crucible and remove all manner of excellent writing. Replace with repeated clauses and many commas. Repeat the word "face" as often as possible and make several references to hues of purple to pretend there is any imaginary or figurative devices being used in this novel. Use hackneyed tropes about young girls' sexual awakenings. Use the most obvious loss of innocence device. Yes, you guessed it. The bad person is compared to a serpent and the garden is lost, or more precisely, the bushes are razed at the high school. Then tie it with a bow.

The Fever is a really well written and a very good point of view on behavior of teenagers, especially girls and all that comes into play in their social life. But the plot is shallow and nothing really happens at the end. I enjoyed reading because of the curiosity to perceive what is important to the characters depending on their age and gender.

A tense plot with brilliant, very realistic characterisation and a rich insight into the social mores of a small American community however there's something about the badly polluted lake at the heart of the story which doesn't ring true. Why was it so polluted? I'm half way through yet there's no clear explanation. Why is there an algal bloom in the lake in the middle of winter? Why doesn't the community push for it to be cleaned up? These questions detract from the story's overall strength.

This is doubtless a very enjoyable book, with a tense and compelling mystery central to its plot, although the denouement, although entirely unexpected, is rather anti-climactic. I would say that the style and characters can feel very similar across Abbott's work (I have only read 'The Fever', 'Dare Me', and 'The End of Everything' so can only speak for similarities across these three works. The style of writing and narrative voice across them is almost identical and there are often huge similarities between characters. I wouldn't say this detracted from my enjoyment of the book, however, which was well-paced and suspenseful.(Of the three books I have mentioned above, 'The Fever', 'Dare Me', and 'The End of Everything', the best by a long way is 'Dare Me', which I would highly recommend)

At first I wasn't too impressed: I love Megan Abbot but I had the feeling that this book was not as powerful as the others (I am referring to The end of everything, Dare me, Bury Me deep, The Queenpin). I was wrong: the story literally "grows" inside you and you cant' stop reading it after the first 50 pages. The end is quite striking and you may wanna read it again under a new perspective.

Megan Abbotts THE FEVER ist in der amerikanischen Kleinstadt Dryden angesiedelt, in der auf den zweiten Blick fast alles seltsam ist, was seltsam sein kann. Sonderbar ist das Wetter, in dem die Bewohner ihre Farbe verlieren, und sonderbar der See, der grün fluoresziert, eklig riecht und für den die Stadtverwaltung ein permanentes Badeverbot erlassen hat. Auffällig auch die hohe Zahl an Alleinerziehenden.Dass die amerikanische Kleinstadt-Idylle täuscht wie schon in TWIN PEAKS, wird spätestens deutlich, als die Freundin der 16-jährigen Deenie Nash, Lise Daniels, mit unerklärlichen Krampfanfällen ins Krankenhaus eingeliefert wird; und bald ist Lise nicht die einzige, die diese Symptome zeigt. Angst und Panik verbreiten sich unter Schülern, Eltern und Lehrern, Gerüchte verschleiern Tatsachen und bald befindet sich die Dryden Highschool im Ausnahmezustand.Dabei bedarf es eigentlich gar keiner Epidemie, um die Mädchen zu verunsichern. Wie Megan Abbott das Hintergrundrauschen für den Roman gestaltet, ein Geflecht aus teen-angst, bullying, Freundschaften, Entfremdung und den sozialen Netzwerken, das ist das Faszinierendste an diesem auch sonst spannenden Roman. Nach ersten sexuellen Erfahrungen und dem vermeintlichen Ausbruch der Epidemie ist Deenie ihr eigener Körper bald so fremd wie die Welt der Erwachsenen. Ihre Freundinnen zeigen eine nach der anderen die Krankheitssymptome, und Deenie fragt sich, ob sie als „typhoid Mary“ die Verantwortung trägt. Oder liegt die Ursache in den umstrittenen HPV-Impfungen gegen Gebärmutterhalskrebs? Haben die Mädchen verbotswidrig im See gebadet? Fast meint man auch Horror-Elemente zu erkennen; etwas scheint in den Mädchen zu stecken, von innen nach ihren Kehlen zu greifen; sie zeigen Besessenheitsmerkmal wie Regan im EXORCIST.Besorgnis schlägt bald in Panik um, die Hilflosigkeit der Schule, das Anrücken von Gesundheitsamt und Polizei, das alles beschreibt Abbott so detailliert, dass man sich – wie die ebenfalls angereisten Pressevertreter – als direkter Zuschauer eines realen Geschehens fühlt, zu dessen Verständnis immer wieder wichtige Informationen fehlen.Was mich an THE FEVER vor allem beeindruckt hat ist, dass der Roman vor Spannung vibriert wie die frühen Aufnahmen von Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. Viele Elemente setzt Megan Abbott als Katalysatoren ein, aber schlussendlich wird es genau dieses Vibrieren des Textes sein, das ich in Erinnerung behalten werde.Und wie schön doch die Schulzeit war und mithin auch die Jugend – so ganz unvoreingenommen wird man diese Behauptung nach der Lektüre von THE FEVER wohl nicht in den Raum stellen mögen und eher an Jeffrey Beaumonts Feststellung aus BLUE VELVET denken:„It's a strange world“