Fever
Lauren DeStefano
Series: Chemical Garden, #2
Release date: February 21st, 2012
by Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing
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Rhine and Gabriel have escaped the mansion, but danger is never far behind.
Running away brings Rhine and Gabriel right into a trap, in the form
of a twisted carnival whose ringmistress keeps watch over a menagerie
of girls. Just as Rhine uncovers what plans await her, her fortune turns
again. With Gabriel at her side, Rhine travels through an environment
as grim as the one she left a year ago - surroundings that mirror her
own feelings of fear and hopelessness.
The two are determined to get to Manhattan, to relative safety with
Rhine’s twin brother, Rowan. But the road there is long and perilous -
and in a world where young women only live to age twenty and young men
die at twenty-five, time is precious. Worse still, they can’t seem to
elude Rhine’s father-in-law, Vaughn, who is determined to bring Rhine
back to the mansion...by any means necessary.
In the sequel to Lauren DeStefano’s harrowing Wither, Rhine must decide if freedom is worth the price - now that she has more to lose than ever.
An
improvement over Wither - Fever starts exactly where we left off in the
midst of the excitement from having escaped. The issue I had with Wither lacking energy,
where I had a feeling of restlessness being with those girls in their
big mansion unmoving, is not the case anymore. In Fever, we're out in
the real world. Things are moving fast and the anxiety is heightened. As
a lover of fast paced dystopians, I found myself much preferring this
second installment.
We're following Rhine and Gabriel on the run. Rhine is trying to
find her brother, while Gabriel is seeing the outside of the Mansion for
the first time in a decade. As in Wither, I didn't feel a lot of
chemistry between these two. They are clearly good for each other; always there
to help one another, but there's no rooted passion between them.
Fortunately, the plot doesn't center around the romance as much as their
escape and, eventually, what's happening to Rhine. She's started getting
sick with the same symptoms as the virus. No one knows why, or how to fix it.
Although it's still not at the scale I was hoping, we do learn more
about the outside world in Fever. Rhine and Gabriel travel enough to give us glimpses
of society's living situations. We also hear the president give an interesting
speech of future plans. Furthermore, we get some good plot development as well as a
lot of mystery throughout the novel. The twists we encounter definitely came to
impress me. They are very well thought out from the beginning, put
together in a way that makes them hard to predict. I, for one, had no
idea what was happening and was caught smiling by the cleverness of it
all by the end.
I noticed an improvement in the writing from Wither. It's more vibrant, and the
story flows really well with an easy to read, but
sophisticated prose. It's beautiful in a sense. There is also a sequence where
Rhine is drugged, going in and out of consciousness, that I thought was
brilliantly done. I felt as confused as Rhine was. Trying to figure out
what was happening along with her. You get the sense of unease like in a dream where you
know you must escape, but you're trapped, controlled. It's
suspenseful and frightening.
A much more fast paced, captivating dystopian than the first in its
series- Fever continues Rhine's story while her years dwindle by. With
only 3 of them left, Rhine has a lot of life left to live in a very
short time. I'm looking forward to finding out how she spends these in
the final book of the series!
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| 4 Hot Espressos |
The Chemical Garden series:
Want to know what I thought of Wither?
