Thursday, August 23, 2012

Fever by Lauren DeStefano [REVIEW]

Fever
(The Chemical Garden #2)
by Lauren DeStefano
 Summary from Goodreads:

"Rhine and Gabriel have escaped the mansion, but danger is never far behind.

Running away brings Rhine and Gabriel right into a trap, in the form of a twisted carnival whose ringmistress keeps watch over a menagerie of girls. Just as Rhine uncovers what plans await her, her fortune turns again. With Gabriel at her side, Rhine travels through an environment as grim as the one she left a year ago - surroundings that mirror her own feelings of fear and hopelessness.

The two are determined to get to Manhattan, to relative safety with Rhine’s twin brother, Rowan. But the road there is long and perilous - and in a world where young women only live to age twenty and young men die at twenty-five, time is precious. Worse still, they can’t seem to elude Rhine’s father-in-law, Vaughn, who is determined to bring Rhine back to the mansion...by any means necessary.

In the sequel to Lauren DeStefano’s harrowing Wither, Rhine must decide if freedom is worth the price - now that she has more to lose than ever.
"

Rating:

Note: If you haven’t read Wither I suggest you take a pass on reading this. For those who haven’t read Fever, be warned, review contains spoilers.

Fever picks up exactly where Wither left off. Rhine and Gabriel have escaped the mansion and are just having their taste of freedom. But their freedom is short-lived; they stumble into a world way worse than being locked up in a mansion. They end up in a carnival, witnessing an environment of drugs and prostitution. Fortunately, Rhine is not sold to pleasure men; rather she and Gabriel are set in a cage to put on a “show”. Believe me I don’t know what they were doing exactly... lots of kissing, I’ll give you that but I don’t know how far that went.

Anyway, for the amount of time they stayed there, Rhine’s main agenda [of finding Rowan] got a little off track. Can’t say I blame them since they’re hands are relatively full with what is already going on. But ever determined Rhine doesn’t lose hope in finding her brother, and so when the chance came for her and Gabriel to finally escape, they quickly find their way to Manhattan. But things are not as Rhine has left off before being abducted and married...

Fever has picked up quite a pace compared to Wither (not that I can complain about Wither, since being in a mansion the whole time, I don’t think it’ll be very eventful to begin with). It also did take on an even deeper note of the story. With Wither, I only (even though it’s not a small matter) witnessed the kidnapping of women to sell as wives to a polygamous marriage, the disease that only leaves a lifespan of twenty (for young women) and twenty-five (for young men), and the danger of meeting a man who would do anything to save his son’s life from such tragedy. Now with Fever, I see a very cruel world where there’s prostitution in a much terrifying state, the drugs (which is always a dangerous and scary issue), hardly any people left you can trust, death and a lot more.

Rhine’s character didn’t take on any further development, other than the disease that starting to kick into her system. What most surprised me was Gabriel’s character. I felt as guilty as Rhine for taking this boy out to the world and having him experience so much awful encounters. I’m glad that he at least got to pull himself together. And yet, it seems he could never be the same again after all that. I got more interested that I get to meet new characters in this book such as Silas and Maggie. I’m eager to get to know them even more (probably in the next book). Of course, we are not short on our old characters: there is Vaughn (making his presence well known), Cecily, (who’s seemingly caring and yet still has that tinge of jealousy towards Rhine), and Linden (a lot has yet to be told about this man).

I can say that Fever has definitely taken this trilogy up a notch. It’s far more interesting and more eventful than the first book. A lot has happened here although it seems a lot has yet to happen still. This book ends with another more motivating subject that would occur in Sever, and I’m keen on finding out how this trilogy would end.