Fever by Lauren DeStefano

Fever by Lauren DeStefano
Release Date – February 21, 2012
Publisher Website – Simon and Schuster
Publisher Social Media - Twitter
Pages - pages
My Rating- 8.5/10
**Obtained from swapping with another bloggers**

********************Spoilers for Wither************************

Here is the Goodreads synopsis

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.

Wither ended with Rhine and Gabriel escaping the mansion and setting off to Manhattan to find her brother. Fever picks up when they’ve come ashore and we quickly learn it’s not going to be an easy or peril free journey for them.

In many ways Fever scared me more than Wither. The world outside the mansion is just as (if not more so) dangerous than the one Rhine left behind. There are some pretty horrible fates that can await young women in Rhine’s position and we get a taste of what happens to those who don’t become brides. It’s easy to imagine a world like this and that is where Lauren manages to capture your attention. It also brings to mind one of the main plot points of the second novel - Rhine coming to terms with leaving the mansion and if it was the right choice. She spends a lot of time thinking about Cecily, Linden and the comforts of the mansion. There are cases where it almost seems like Rhine has been freed from one prison just to be locked into another one.

I liked Rhine in this novel. She didn’t just sit back and let things happen. She fights and is very focused. Sadly, she spends much of the novel in situations that are really beyond her control.

Vaughn is horrible.He is such a chilling bad guy. Mostly because he is driven by something we can all understand. He wants to find a cure. His means of doing it are awful, but it is something everyone wants. Also, just when you think the chills and creep factor could not get higher Rhine has something done to her eyes that will give me nightmares.

Fever ends with Rhine once again on the edge and trapped in a precarious situation. She’s dropped an explosion on someone and we are going to have to wait for book three to see the fallout.

Lauren’s dark, scary, and all to realistic world combined with a wonderful writing style has me anxiously awaiting the next instalment in the series.