Fever 1793
By: Laurie Halse Anderson / Narrated By: Bailey Carr
Length: 6 hrs and 12 mins
Quick! Answer this: What teenager wants to listen to stuff about a yellow fever epidemic in 1793?!?
Answered that question yet? One wonders how Laurie Halse Anderson will make Fever 1793 feel real and relevant to Teens. Forget about adults who like dabbling in good fiction for teens and young adults.
Seriously. While she does bring the fear and hardship of the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793, her characters aren’t so well-developed that I’d think teenagers would be fully engaged in the audiobook. Mattie starts out as a whiny, labor-dodging young girl, almost a woman. Bailey Carr narrates it so well that Mattie’s every whine, every snivel is brought boldly to life. MOST unlikable!
And she doesn’t change much throughout the book. Even when things are dire, she’s determined but pretty much feckless. She refuses to go this where and that, but rather clings to others who will do for her what she fairly can’t do for herself. I simply lost patience with her several times during the book.
And things wrap up in a neat little package, all tied up with a bow. Mattie and her mother and grandfather and friend/servant/free-woman run a coffeehouse which is vandalized and wiped out by desperate people and thieves during the height of the epidemic, but for some reason, they’re able to get it up and running with no problem, able to run it with few staff, become so successful it’s laughable (oh, I’m sorry—that’s kinda a spoiler; my sincerest apologies!).
Add to that Carr’s all-in narration. If somebody yells, she yells (and people exclaim A LOT in Fever 1793!); if somebody begs, the woman is practically down on her knees in the recording booth, wailing her heart and lungs out. It’s absolutely impossible to listen to this audiobook when you’d like to be unnoticeable. I listen overnight, and boy—with Mattie’s feathery soft voice being almost inaudible, followed by shrieking and wailing—I was rushing like crazy to adjust the volume in attempts to hear, to silence. Plus, she makes Mattie sound like a really, really young girl. I didn’t buy the steely determination at the end.
I’ve listened to Speak by the same author, thinking this would be another great book. But Speak was immediate and modern. Fever 1793 is based in an entirely different era and, while she obviously did some heavy-duty research, it doesn’t strike me as true to its era. It has some old-fashioned language, but mostly, it just sounds like a modern girl who tosses off an olden word every now and then but, is quite modern.
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