Jane Doe

Ms. Stender

Eng. 9 6th hour

30 January 2018

January Book Report: Historical Fiction

  1. Anderson, Laurie Halse. Fever1793. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Print.
  2. Setting: The story takes place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania during the summer of 1793. In 1793, Philadelphia, PA was the largest city in the established colonies. Located on the Delaware River made it an ideal spot for accessibility and trade.The action covers the summer and into the fall when the first frost hits. The historical significance of the story is that Fever 1793 is based on the actual yellow fever epidemic that hit Philadelphia and wiped out some five thousand people. Life in this period was very different from today because of the lack of technology and especially the lack of medicine and medical knowledge. This story could take place during another time or even our time because plagues and epidemics have happened throughout history.
  3. Protagonist:The main character is one of the people affected by the fever, a young 14 year oldgirl named Mattie (Matilda) Cook. Mattie’s mother and grandfather own a coffeehouse in Philadelphia and that is where Mattie spends most of her days.Mattie is an obedient hard working and resilient girl. She runs errands at market and dislikes fancy dress up tea parties. The historical event affects the character’s life by splitting up her family and causing economic and emotional grief. The time period after the Revolutionary War was otherwise pleasant enough except for the epidemic.
  4. Antagonists: The main antagonist is the disease of yellow fever. It is carried by mosquitoes and affects everyone in the area. The community blames the disease on immigrants who came to the area in ships, but it was actually the mosquitoes. The robbers who come and rob her coffee shop are also antagonists. The yellow fever is accurate historically, and there certainly would have been robbers, but those characters are fictional in this story.
  5. Main Conflict:One day, Polly, their servant girl does not show up for work. Stricken sick with a fever that people first called the “grippe.” In the next few days things change very quickly for this family and other Philadelphia residents as they begin to die.The epidemic creates the main conflict. Mattie’s mother falls ill with yellow fever and Mattie and her grandfather flee the city to take refuge in the country.As they never make it to their destination, uncontrollable hardships fall on Mattie and her grandfather. When Mattie finally returns to the city she finds it deserted and the coffeehouse ransacked.Mattie tries to find the courage to manage her life and the coffeehouse after the yellow fever has taken everything away.
  6. Minor Conflicts or Crises:Supply and demand of needed items drove prices sky high. The people that remained suffered in their homes, hallucinating and starving.Mattie Cook is initially unhappy with her mom, but learns to love her when she might lose her.Mattie is very interested in a boy named Nathanial and is very nervous and giddy around him. She learns to love her very old war hero grandfather. He teaches her a lot as the two of them are alone just fighting to survive the epidemic.Another crisis happens when her grandfather is killed.
  7. Plot:Matilda Cook is a teenage girl living above a coffeehouse in Philadelphia in 1793.The major conflict at this stage is between Matilda and her mother – the age-old struggle between parent and child for authority and identity.Everyone is getting sick: the serving girl Polly dies and Matilda's mother comes down with yellow fever.Matilda is being confronted for this first time with illness, and what's more, with death. She is also being forced away from her mother and the city she loves – into the country.Matilda and Grandfather flee to the country and are abandoned by the family they set out with. Matilda is stricken with yellow fever.Matilda and Grandfather get a taste of the cruelty of others when the farmer and his family leave them for dead (more or less) in the countryside. Things keep getting worse when Matilda herself becomes ill and blacks out.After returning to the city, the coffeehouse is burglarized. She watches her grandfather get in a fight with a thief looting their home, and then she witnesses her grandfather's death. Though she's there to give him comfort as he dies, the event brings her deep pain and anger.Matilda and Eliza nurse the sick children (Nell and the twins) in the bottom floor of the coffeehouse.This section of the novel sees a turning point for Matilda. She is no longer a victim of the fever, rather she's the one giving help to others. She takes responsibility for the orphan Nell and starts working with Eliza at the Free African Society. The suspense builds, however, when Nell and Eliza's nephews becomes sick. Eliza and Matilda must nurse the children back to health. The frost finally comes and the children's fever breaks, and the children survive! The fever epidemic is over and life returns to the city. The marketplace is filled once again with food and the people who fled to the country return to the Philadelphia. The coffeehouse is set to reopen.Matilda becomes partners in the coffeehouse with Eliza and Nathaniel Benson. She is reunited with her mother.As the novel ends, the family is re-formed: Matilda asks Eliza to be her business partner, Nell stays on at the coffeehouse with Matilda, Nathaniel shows up, and Mother returns at last. Though things have changed, everyone is back together. Matilda is a survivor and is stronger than ever, running the coffeehouse. Her journey into adulthood is complete.The parts of the story that are fiction are the characters and what happened to them, although similar things most likely did happen to real people at the time. The parts of the novel that are non-fiction are the parts about what it was like to get yellow fever, how the doctors treated it, what living in Philadelphia in 1793 was like, and the basic way that life was lived back then.
  8. Mood/Tone:The beginning of the novel is quitehumorousand light, but soon enough both tone and mood change. The predominant mood of the book is tense, sorrowful, and depressive. The prominent tone of the book is intimate and lively. Matilda is likeable, relatable, and very human. As we read, we may come to feel like one of her very good friends – a relationship between novel and reader that makes witnessing her pain all the more intense.
  9. Themes: The book covers many themes including mortality (death is a part of everyone’s life), suffering (the loss of loved ones causes suffering and grief), family (a person is born in to one family and then you create family), dreams, hopes, and plans (despite hardships in life, hope lives on), foreignness (sometimes a particular group of outsiders is blamed for the problems that occur), coming of age (Mattie grows up through the experiences), and science (the development of science and medicine was slow and frustrating). The message the book is trying to get across is that no matter how horrible a situation is, it is possible to survive and continue on in life. Examples from the book that give the reader a better understanding of a time in history than a history book is the haunting toll of the church bells, the mass graves and the desperation of the people, our people, which was heart-wrenching to read. Other examples from the book that give the reader a better understanding of a time in history than a history bookare about the Free African Society, or famous people touched by the fever, and the battle of the doctors in this time period.
  10. Personal reactions/evaluations: The story would have been very different if it were told through an adult perspective. Adults would have different concerns than a teenager. Adults have a more realistic view of death because they have experienced more of it than someone young has. If it was told by someone today, they would know how to get medical help to stop the epidemic. Since the story is set in 1793, the dialect of the characters has a bit of England’s style of English is its sentence structure and dialect. Also, the characters speak differently depending on their level of education and economic status. The effect the dialects have is that the reader can tell what level of society a character is from. I would not have liked to trade places with the main character because this epidemic was heartbreaking and the life back then was extremely difficult. My favorite part was when she was describing the hot air balloons, which I had not realized even existed back then! She said, “A few blocks south lay the Walnut Street Prison, where Blanchard had flown that remarkable balloon. From the prison's courtyard it rose, a yellow silk bubble escaping the earth. I vowed to do that one day, slip free of the ropes that held me.”