Fiery Fever

Fever by Lauren DeStefano

4 gnomes and a gnome hat out of 5 gnomes

This series is a tad bit addictive because if you're anything like me you'll be dying to know what happens next to Rhine and well if there's a chance that she'll actually survive.

The world of this book will really grow on you as you try to figure what the heck is going on.  It's still not exactly a happy world because the new generation only lives to the age of twenty if female and twenty-five if male.  This means that all the first generation born before this mysterious disease have had to sit back and watch their children die.  This means if you thought generational barriers were bad before they're nothing compared to what these characters go through.  This leaves two generations with not a lot to live for and really breaks down how their society works.

After the end of the last book Rhine and Gabriel are on the run but things aren't as rosy as she remembers and it looks like her plan to find her brother might be over before it really begins.  Rhine is very adept at getting into bad situations and catching the attention of psychos.  Madame is just about as scary a villain as Vaughn is because she's so unpredictable.  

Vaughn is one evil guy.  He is the epitome of a mad scientist and does not seem to have a conscience.  I believe that the only person he even comes close to caring about is his son, Linden.  It's shown even more in this book just how far he'll go to find a cure and that ethics aren't something that he thinks about.

Gabriel is an interesting love interest but I'm not sure that I foresee him and Rhine staying together.  Rhine does at one point compare him to a goldfish so I'm guessing that what they're feeling might not be exactly long term.  Weird as the situation is, I think she and Linden might make a better couple overall.

Everything starts to feel like a fever dream at certain points because a lot of characters are either sick or drugged.  Rhine also comes to realize that she's romanticized a lot of her life that happened before she was gathered.  Take her brother for example I don't know about you but I thought he sounded like a real, to put it nicely, a jerk.  She doesn't seem to see much worth in herself as compared to her brother and that kind of bothered me.

With this ending it shows how close Rhine is getting to what she's looking for.  I really hope that this story ends happily but I have a feeling that it might not.  There's just so much happening that I hope the last book can answer all the questions that these two books have provided.