Review by New York Times Review
LE ROY, N.Y., a former factory town between Rochester and Buffalo, became famous three years ago when 14 girls and one boy were afflicted with undiagnosed verbal and physical tics. Cheerleaders writhing and snarling on the "Today" show: It's not hard to understand why Megan Abbott, a reliable producer of noir page turners, based her seventh novel, "The Fever," on the Le Roy outbreak. In real life, the underpinnings of the teenagers' outbursts turned out to be psychological. But in "The Fever," Abbott attributes the epidemic to a curious brand of black magic. Lise Daniels, the first girl at Dryden High to have a seizure, is a formerly chubby child who has grown into a skinny, large-breasted teenager - a "transformation" Abbott terms a "kind of witchcraft." And just before the tics begin to debilitate one Dryden High girl after another, a devoted father worries he will lose his daughter, Deenie, to the same mysterious force that caused his wife to have an affair and abandon him: "Demons had come in the dark, come with the famous Dryden fog that rolled through the town, and taken possession of his lovely, smart, kindhearted wife. And next they'd come for his daughter too." Indeed, the day before Lise - Deenie's best friend - has a seizure and falls into a coma, Deenie loses her virginity to the guy Lise is hooking up with. Guilty, Deenie recalls one of her parents' fights, just before her mother moved out: "Her dad's voice high and strange through the walls. Couldn't keep your legs together couldn't stop yourself look what you've done look what happened." And when Deenie visits Lise in the hospital, she believes she can see the rage in Lise's unfocused eyes, blaming Deenie for her coma: "You had to have him too. And now look what happened. What you've done." Now look what happened: "The Fever" revolves around terrible consequences of female desire. Soon before the second girl starts twitching, she texts a photo of herself in underwear to a boy she likes. After girls lose their virginity, they say things like: "I should never have done it. And now it's gone." And Deenie has a revelation that the cause of the seizures has to be a "thing you didn't know you were waiting for. Like something inside opening, and then opening something else." This is, as it happens, the exact sentence Lise uses to describe the first time she receives oral sex. Although the causation remains murky, female sexual awakening is clearly at the heart of Abbott's reimagining of the Le Roy epidemic. The concerns in Abbott's work are sensationalist rather than moral. Still, this book's punitive view of female sexuality is worth noting for its kinship with nonfiction writers like Caitlin Flanagan, Wendy Shalit and Laura Sessions Stepp, who argue that young women should protect themselves from the complications of sex by treating their sexuality as merely a minor component of monogamy. Flanagan also wrote about the rash of tics in Le Roy, using it as confirmation of her theory that adolescent girls are fragile homemakerwannabes. In her view, the Le Roy girls were having Tourette's-like symptoms because they were overwrought by their "increased physical vulnerability" and "their new potential for childbearing." Like Flanagan, Abbott was apparently uninterested in the stark economic decline that has plagued Le Roy since the 1980s. After much fruitless speculation into the cause of the girls' tics (Erin Brockovich suspected environmental causes; the antivaccine movement suspected the HPV vaccine), doctors concluded that Le Roy had undergone an episode of mass hysteria, in which a close group of people unconsciously express emotional stress through physical symptoms. This stress stemmed from much deeper roots than growing breasts and first periods: poverty, abusive and absentee fathers, mothers in chronic pain, teenage parenthood. This is not to say that adolescent hormones don't cause their fair share of suffering and confusion. However exploitative its setting, "The Fever" makes the worthwhile attempt to grapple with a widespread truth about today's sexually permissive culture: Girls often find it difficult. But perhaps the difficulty many young women have in navigating their sexual choices stems in part from the pervasive depiction of lustful girls as hysterical and self-destructive, and lustful boys as simply normal; the assumption that sexual responsibility is solely up to women; and the confusing portrayals of vulnerability in girls as both dangerous ("a havoc upon his sweet daughter's small, graceful little body") and sexy ("She kept laughing and covering her face," a boy recalls of the beautiful Lise. "She was so... young"), while vulnerability in boys is rarely acknowledged at all. THE MAIN MALE characters in "The Fever" are Deenie's father, Tom, and her brother, Eli, who are portrayed as stable and protective, unlike her adulterous, deadbeat mother and the desperate sluts who text Eli sexually explicit messages. After a school assembly, Tom accosts the detectives who have been interviewing students, begging them for information. "Do you have a daughter? Did either of you ever have a daughter?" he asks. "Did you ever look out in that dark... world out there and think, How do I let my daughter out into that? And how do I stop her?" Like the antivaccine cohort and environmental activists who used the mass hysteria in Le Roy as confirmation of their worst fears, Abbott portrays the objects of parental anxiety as real dangers, all peculiarly threatening to girls. She is a skilled storyteller, and "The Fever" is a gripping and unsettling novel. But since neither the narrator nor the characters are smarter than their panic, "The Fever" is not so much a book about fear as it is deeply fearful. And fear loves nothing so much as punishment. HANNAH TENNANT-MOORE'S criticism has appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Republic and n+1.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 22, 2014]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Following her brilliant, cheerleading-as-blood-sport Dare Me (2012), Abbott returns to high school for another disturbing drama. In an isolated northeastern town known for its miserable weather, Deenie and her best friends, Lise and Gabby, find themselves at the center of a mysterious epidemic that causes girls to do what, exactly? The symptoms are puzzling. Lise seizes in class, and Gabby collapses onstage during an orchestra recital, leaving Deenie to wonder if she's next. Or is she a carrier? The affliction affects only girls, leaving Deenie's caring science-teacher father and her hockey-player brother feeling worried but utterly helpless. Despite texts and videos sent from hospital beds, information seems as scarce as in the Dark Ages, and rumors and misinformation fly: Is the cause HPV vaccinations? Or the water of the town's dead lake? Is it a thought that lurks darkly in Deenie's mind her recent loss of virginity? Once again, Abbott makes an unforgettable inquiry into the emotional lives of young people, this time balanced with parents' own fears and failings. It's also a powerful portrait of community, with interesting echoes of The Crucible: it's the twenty-first century, and, in many ways, we're still frightened villagers, terrified of the unknown. Abbott may be on her way to becoming a major writer.--Graff, Keir Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Abbott's (Dare Me) thrilling seventh novel takes a peek into the strange, inscrutable minds of teenage girls. Deenie, Lise, and Gabby are the "Trio Grande," whispering together in the library and giggling late into the night during sleepovers. Their "teen-girl-ness" confounds Deenie's father, a teacher at their school, and her older brother, Eli, a popular hockey player. When Lise has an unexplained a seizure during class, the girls' triumvirate is thrown into disarray, and no one seems to have any answers. Everyone from doctors to school administrators are keeping quiet, sending a ripple of fear throughout the school. Almost immediately, other girls start getting sick and the suspicions and hysteria quickly rouse the small town into a fervor. Parents, teachers, and students alike speculate wildly, the rumored causes ranging from stress to mutant viruses, as Deenie tries to find out the truth. Abbott's adolescents are close to pitch-perfect with their sudden switches between childlike vulnerability and calculating maturity. What the narrative lacks in depth it makes up for in momentum and dark mystery. This is a gripping story fueled by the razor-sharp treachery, jealousy, hormones, and insecurities of teenage girls. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
It begins when Lise Daniels starts convulsing in math class. Her horrified classmates, including her friend Deenie Nash, watch as she crashes to the floor. That evening, Lise enters the hospital after another violent seizure. Soon more girls at the high school begin falling ill and the questions begin. Is this the result of the HPV vaccines all the schoolgirls received? The polluted lake water in which some of the victims took a forbidden dip? Or is it something more sinister-and why is it only happening to the girls? Tension mounts in the suburban community, and rumors spread like wildfire. Deenie searches for answers, beginning with a look at her closest friends and their evolving relationships, while her schoolteacher father and hockey-playing brother confront uncomfortable truths about themselves. Verdict Abbott's seventh novel (after Dare Me) may be her best so far. It has elements of David Lynch, Shirley Jackson, and the best of Stephen King but in a voice all her own. The sinuous, liquid prose is evocative and startling, and Abbott's ability to delve into teenagers' psyches is true and clear. For fans of the author and those who like Laura Lippman's stand-alones, dark YA, and suburban noir. [See Prepub Alert, 1/6/14; see also "Books for the Masses: Editors BEA Picks," LJ 7/14, p. 30.]-Liz French, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The lives of teenage girls are dangerous, beautiful things in Abbott's (Dare Me, 2012, etc.) stunning seventh novel.At Dryden High School, 16-year-old Deenie Nash and her best friends Lise Daniels and Gabby Bishop are an inseparable trio. The daughter of Tom, a popular teacher, and younger sister of hockey star Eli, Deenie radiates the typical teenage mixture of confidence and vulnerability. When Lise suffers an unexplained and violent seizure in the middle of class, no one is quite sure how to react. Until another girl and then another exhibit the same symptoms. The rumors seem to spread as fast as the mysterious affliction, which is blamed on everything from a rotten batch of vaccine to female hysteria. Abbott expertly withholds just enough information to slowly ratchet up the suspense until the reader is as breathless as Deenie at the arrival of each new text message or cryptic phone call and the school vibrates with half-formed theories and speculations. Finding herself becoming slowly more isolated with each incident, Deenie must not only sort through the infinitely complex social and emotional issues ignited by the eventsshe's also dealing with her first clumsy sexual experiencebut also the very real fear that something in the town is causing the fits, and it's only a matter of time before she's next. Nothing should be taken at face value in this jealousy- and hormone-soaked world except that Abbott is certainly our very best guide. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
