When Mattie’s mother becomes ill, she sends Mattie and her grandfather to the countryside, where she thinks they will be safer. As more and more people die, though, he realizes that this is like no other fever he’s ever seen. The grandfather has seen many fever outbreaks in his long life, and this seems no worse than any other. At first many people, including Mattie’s grandfather, are skeptical about the fever. Soon the fever spreads throughout the city. One day Polly is perfectly healthy, and the next day she’s dead. The fever hits Philadelphia in the summer of 1793, and one of the first victims is the family’s maid, Polly, who had been Mattie’s childhood friend. Instead, she has a crush on Nathaniel, a painter’s apprentice.

Mattie has dreams of going to Paris, expanding the coffee shop, and opening a store that sells the latest French fashions, but she has no desire to marry the rich man’s son. In an early scene, we find out that she wants to marry Mattie off to the son of a wealthy family. It is suggested that her mother came from a higher social class and has aspirations for Mattie. Mattie’s father, a carpenter, had died in a fall from a ladder when Mattie was four years old. She is actually closer to Eliza than to her own mother, who is always scolding her for not doing her chores. Eliza, a freed slave, is the family’s cook and seems like a second mother to Mattie.

The protagonist is fourteen-year-old Matilda (“Mattie”) Cook, who lives in the apartment above her family’s coffee shop with her hard-working mother and her grandfather, a Revolutionary War veteran. It was published in 2000, but, of course, it seems very timely today. Fever 1793 is an award-winning young adult novel by Laurie Halse Anderson about the yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793.

Fever 1793 by laurie halse anderson