Fever, 1793 Analysis

At last, the culprit: it's those darn blood-sucking bugs that keep spreading the yellow fever. They're tiny and pesky and no one seems to know just how dangerous they actually are. In fact, everyon...

Cook CoffeehouseThe Cook family's coffeehouse is located in the city of Philadelphia, and is a site where people discuss news, politics, current events, and titillating gossip. (And here we were th...

Fever, 1793 is narrated in the first person by Matilda Cook, our plucky young heroine. The effect is that we are privy to all of Matilda's hopes, fears, dreams, plans; as well as her fear, anger, s...

Historical FictionFever, 1793 is a work of historical fiction, which means that it makes use of time and place in the distant past to unfold the plot, as well as to dramatize its basic themes and c...

Our narrator, Matilda Cook, is quite the young firecracker. How do we know? Well, because we can hear all of the private thoughts running through her head – whether her mother is getting on her n...

Matilda's narrative (her story) may be firmly planted in the late eighteenth century, but her prose, along with much of the novel's dialogue is of the twenty-first century. While you might find an...

The title of Laurie Halse Anderson's novel is punchy, pithy, and plenty helpful. The words "Fever, 1793" tell us what we're going to be seeing, when it'll be happening, and even give us some bigger...

Laurie Halse Anderson more than did her share of homework for Fever, 1793; she spent a good deal of time reading source material and conducting research in the archives of the Historical Society of...

Life and death, joy and sorrow, endings and beginnings: Fever, 1793 is a novel about all of the connections, contrasts, and seeming opposites that make up the great circle of life. The ending of th...

The historical context might seem a bit daunting, but Fever, 1793 is actually a pretty quick read. Laurie Halse Anderson does her best to modernize the dialogue, with only the occasional eighteenth...

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 chil...

Laurie Halse Anderson compared her research for Fever, 1793 to "digging at an archaeological site." Thanks to the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, she even read the diaries and correspondence...