The Fever by Megan Abbott

Published by Little, Brown and Company on June 17, 2014

Deenie Nash is in high school, as is her brother Eli, a handsome hockey player who is a bit of a rogue. Their father, Tom, is a teacher at the school. Their mother lives elsewhere. The Fever's drama starts when Deenie's best friend, Lise, is stricken not with a fever, but with seizures. Lise is hospitalized and in a coma when Deenie's newest friend, Gabby, has something that appears to be a seizure while performing in a recital. Other symptoms begin to afflict Deenie's other friends, leading high school girls to text all sorts of inane theories to each other involving rabid bats and a polluted lake. As more girls develop symptoms, CNN turns up to report the growing hysteria.

Hysteria is the novel's driving theme. The Fever touches on the controversy surrounding the practice of giving HPV vaccinations to girls before they become sexually active, which proves to be one of the more popular explanations for the phenomenon that afflicts the girls. Other hysterical parents are convinced that a sexually transmitted disease is responsible for the illnesses despite the absence of any evidence to support that theory. The moral of The Fever is that rational thought is preferable to knee-jerk reactions. But are those parental reactions plausible? In a town populated by exceptionally ignorant people, perhaps, but that isn't how this town is portrayed. I wasn't convinced.

Hysteria might have been a better title for the novel than The Fever, which has almost nothing to do with fever. The novel is largely about teenage girls and their endless capacity for drama (not to mention their addiction to texting). The teenage characters are more interesting than the novel's few adults, all of whom spend their time fretting. They are concerned about all the risks to which their children are exposed -- radon, PCBs, lead, mercury, STDs, crime -- without giving much thought to the fact that they all survived those same risks and more.

The Fever sometimes has the atmosphere of a horror novel, other times a thriller, but it runs out of gas before it finds an identity. After a strong build-up, the resolution of the spreading symptoms is less than compelling. I liked the character development well enough to give the novel a guarded recommendation, but the central idea that drives the plot isn't developed nearly as well as the characters. That left me with a sense of disappointment when the novel ended.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS