Review of Fever by Lauren DeStefano


Series: The Chemical Garden #2
Genres: Dystopia, Romance 
Pages: 341
Publisher: Simon Schuster
Release Date: 21/02/2012
Find The Author: Website / Twitter
Find The Book: Book Depository / Amazon UK/US

Running away brings Rhine and Gabriel right into a trap, in the form of a twisted carnival whose ring mistress 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.


Warning: there will be spoilers for Wither, the previous book in this series.

Over-hype is a truly terrible thing, we see it all the time, there's always the most popular book out and everyone is raving and you pick it up expecting Great Things, only to be bitterly disappointed. I think I had an idea in my head when I started reading Fever, of where I wanted it to go and I was definitely disappointed when I didn't get the story that I was hoping for.

We left Wither on a true high note, Rhine and Gabriel had escaped the shackles of her husband's mansion and she planned to find her brother. What I was expecting was for the story to turn post-apocalyptic, with the whole walking from destroyed town to destroyed town thing. What we got was... I'm not really sure. Compared the gorgeous writing and pacing of the first book this was undeniably a mess.

We start of where Rhine and Gabriel are captured by a Carnival which is actually a brothel featuring some sort of French woman who's batsh-... completely batty and Rhine keeps her virginity very much in tact due to a combination of voodoo magic and sheer bloody determination from the author I guess. The rest of the story is trippy mess as Rhine slowly descends into a Fever that doesn't break.

Speaking of the carnival scenes, I really felt that this was added at different point than the rest of the book, possibly later. The whole thing is written quite rushed and choppy, completely different to writing style in the rest of the book which made the whole thing more confusing.

Old characters are reintroduced but don't have quite the same impact as Wither. Gabriel becomes somewhat cardboard unfortunately, as I loved him in the first book. Rhine can't seem to make up her mind what she wants and the discovery of what happened to one of Rhine's friends was a bit too much even for me.


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