Fever
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4.4 • 9 Ratings
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
SOON TO BE A MAJOR BBC AMERICA SERIES, STARRING ELISABETH MOSS
Typhoid Mary: a selfish monster, or a hounded innocent?
They called her Typhoid Mary. They believed she was sick, that she was passing typhoid fever from her hands to the food that she served. They said she should have known.
But Mary wasn't sick. She hadn't done anything wrong.
She wasn't arrested right away. There were warnings. Requests. And when she was finally taken, she did not go quietly. Branded a murderer and condemned by press and public alike, Mary continued to fight for her freedom, no matter the cost...
Fever casts a brilliant light over the life of a figure once described as 'the most dangerous woman in America', and Mary Beth Keane's fictional account is as fiercely compelling as Typhoid Mary herself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Keane (The Walking People) rescues Typhoid Mary from her "cautionary tale" status by telling her true story. Apprehended by the New York Department of Health in 1907, following the deaths of the family for whom she cooks, Mary Mallon is turned into a guinea pig on an East River island with little to comfort her aside from rare letters from her lover Alfred. Slowly she builds a case to win her freedom and returns to a changed New York of Chinese laundries, tenement fires, and Alfred, now-destitute. Dogged by her reputation as a tainted woman, Mary defies the virus she carries by doing what she does best, even as her nemesis the "medical sleuth" Dr. Soper (the novel's most engaging figure) hounds her from kitchen to kitchen. There's a tremendous amount of retrospection and research circling the myth, but Keane, by staying so close to Mary, occasionally loses sight of what might have been a more lucrative subject: the birth of the health scare. Typhoid is frequently treated as though it's little more than a metaphor for difference or estrangement, and we don't entirely understand why Mary never seems to grasp the consequences of her actions. Still, as historical fiction, Fever seldom disappoints in capturing the squalid new world where love exists in a battlefield both biological and epochal.
