She's a very smart, independent young lady, but one who's perhaps a tad lazy as the story opens. The story is told from the viewpoint of Mattie, a fourteen year old girl who helps her widowed mother run a coffee house, something that was all the rage at the time (and apparently still is :-)).
It was a rather bleak chapter in our history as a nation but one that I found very interesting.
Those who stayed behind were obviously hit the hardest, and there were many people who IMHO were heroes for doctoring and nursing the sick, some of them coming down with the disease and dying themselves. Many of the patriots and founding fathers, including President Washington, left the city for safer areas. It was made all the more interesting, because the United States was just coming off the Revolutionary War at the time and was still a fledgling country, whose capitol was then Philadelphia. I've heard of a number of epidemics throughout history, but I'm not sure that I'd ever read anything about this specific one. I love historical fiction, and this one gives a fictional account of the yellow fever epidemic that hit Philadelphia in late 1793, killing over five thousand people. Laurie Halse Anderson is an authors who's been on my radar for some time, so I decided to start my journey through her books with Fever 1793. Occasionally I enjoy reading books that are aimed more toward kids, because they can be just as good as adult books.
Eventually young Mattie must learn how to survive in a city that seems to have gone mad, and gradually she finds the strength and determination within herself to make her own way in the world. But soon they learn that the disease is everywhere and they can't outrun it. When her mother makes a fevered plea for Mattie to leave the city, she heads for a nearby town with her grandfather. People she's known all her life are falling ill and dying, and then her own mother takes ill, too. But in the summer of 1793, an epidemic of yellow fever breaks out, leaving the city reeling and turning Mattie's world upside down. She dislikes doing chores and has grand dreams to someday turn the shop into something far more than what it currently is. Evernight Teen Summer Kick-off Blog Hopįourteen-year-old Mattie Cook lives with her widowed mother above the Philadelphia coffee shop they own and helps run the family business.Cosmo Red Hot Reads from Harlequin Launch.
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