Review: Fever (The Chemical Garden #2) by Lauren DeStefano
Title: Fever (The Chemical Garden #2)
Hardcover, 368 pages
Author: Lauren DeStefano
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Children’s
Publication Date: February 21, 2012
Source: Publisher
Buy: Amazon
Add to: Goodreads
SPOILERS FOR WITHER FOUND BELOW
Book Summary from Goodreads.com:
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.
Review:
Wither is actually one of the dystopians where I remembered most of what happened without having to go back through and skim or read a bunch of reviews. YAY! So I started Fever with a good attitude, knowing what was going on, etc.
The first part of Fever put me off a bit – the carnival of girls was a little much for me to read. It wasn’t as compelling to me as the Wither setting, and it was also a bit creepy. Once Rhine and Gabriel get past that to continue on to Manhattan, it was very hard to stop reading.
When I finished this book and stopped to reflect on what happened, I kind of went bug eyed. Fever is a normal sized YA book but SO much happened (written beautifully, nonetheless) that I can barely believe it was only one book. I’m still kind of in shock about that bit.
I found Fever to be quite a bit more complicated than Wither, and also more disturbing overall. I’d label this one better suited for YA readers with a little more mature taste, as Rhine and Gabriel go through quite a bit and not much of it is very pretty.
This was a great follow-up to a book that I really enjoyed. I think that most fans of Wither will really enjoy Fever, and it will definitely hook most anyone into reading further books in the series.
I loved Wither and can’t wait to read Fever.After reading your review I am now even more desperate LOL.
Twitter: BookwormAsheley
I waited to read Wither for some weird reason, so when I had the chance to read Fever – I read Wither and Fever back to back. So I feel like I got this amazing, beautiful yet horrifying, bigger-than-life Chemical Garden experience. I gobbled those books up and then it took me weeks before I could form cohesive enough thoughts so I could write my reviews, which aren’t scheduled until February. And I’m still tweaking them because my thoughts are still garbled. I’m not sure why I’m so affected by them. Maybe because I know that if I were Rhine, I’d be dead by now. Or maybe because I have daughters and the thoughts of those dudes dressed in gray are so scary. At any rate, I loved Wither but I LOVED Fever and I can’t even articulate accurately how much so.
Asheley (@BookwormAsheley) recently posted..My Thoughts On: The Selection by Kiera Cass
Twitter: BookwormAsheley
…I definitely think reading them back-to-back made the experience better for me. :)
I’m glad someone else had some trouble articulating! When I finished Fever I was just like WHAT JUST HAPPENED. I loved Wither but Fever seemed even more epic to me.