Title: Fever
Author: Lauren DeStefano
Series: The Chemical Garden, #2
Genres: Dystopian, Young Adult
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Date Published: February 21st, 2012
Edition: Hardcover
Rating:
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.
My Review:
Now that the shock factor of Wither has worn off, Fever had a lot to live up to. Don’t get me wrong, I like Wither. I gave it four stars. But the majority of the interest it draws is due to the shocking and disturbing plot of young girls being married off into polygamous marriages. So now that we’ve kind of “seen that, read it”, Fever had to stand on it’s own.
I think it did a good job in all the places where Wither lacked. It has a lot more action and running around, which for some reason I’m really drawn to in books. I think because it allows you to see the world within the book from other perspectives instead of having tunnel vision where we only see what’s going on in one part of the world. So that was definitely a plus and something I was hoping for from this book.
But what the book didn’t give me is…more! I want a war or something to happen in this world. It needs to happen. Despite the conspicuous, and strangely specific, ages that these people die at, they should not be treated like they are. I was hoping for more of a revolution going down in Fever, and we definitely didn’t get that. We did get sparks, but nothing full out. Rhine is fighting for her own life, but I want a bigger picture here.
Overall, the book is good, but not great. It’ll keep you turning the page, and we get some interesting developments regarding Vaughn’s crack-pot scientific theories, but other than that I was a little disappointed. We also hardly got any Rhine/Gabriel time and that’s another thing I wanted.
I still like the series and I’m still intrigued by the world DeStefano has created, but I’m hoping that with the last book in the trilogy some big revolutionary stuff happens. Because if everyone ends up where they started off when the series began, then what’s the point of telling a story about it?
Read more reviews & Buy it up! 
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