Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Not good at all.


Oh, wait. No one likes it when I leave a single sentence review. Breathless fangirls and guys are even now lurking in the darkness of the internet, waiting to leap out with their all caps denunciations: HOW CAN U SAY THAT WITH NO REASON U JUST DONT GET IT ITS TO DEEP FOR YOU. I'm sorry. I'm sure some of them can spell. I'm a little bitter from my last bad Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ experience, with other fan fave 'Name of the Wind'. But there's no need to be rude, and I'm sorry for casting aspersions upon DeStefano's fan base.

I guess there's something that reminds me of 'Name' about this book. The same overwrought faux Victorian prose, loaded with improbably purple dialogue and shoddy character descriptions. Here's something that has bugged me for 100 pages: the main character at one point claims to 'mutter something unintelligibly' to herself. Can you do that? I mean, even if you mutter very softly and don't enunciate, I'm pretty sure you still know what you're saying. With all of the other problems with the book, I am not sure why that one stuck in my teeth, but there you go.

If you, like me, love books about bleak pitiless futures and strange diseases, just give this book a miss, no matter how alluring it may seem. You could have just stopped at my first sentence. Fever is really not good. DeStefano has captured the tone of a melodramatic teenager who mistakenly believes she's Very Deep, but since the entire book sounds the same, I'm not sure it's a stylistic choice as much as it's simply crappy prose. She very nicely thanks her editor for helping her with her "erratic" writing, but clearly more help was needed.

I'd feel worse about panning this but I'm sick of YA books with a rape and/or victim fetish. And though as a feminist I should say that's what I'm MOST sick of, I'm even more sick of wading through heavily promoted, big budget, poorly written books.


Now, you kids get off my lawn!

The end.