Reviews with content warning for Racial slurs - The Fervor

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The Fervor by Alma Katsu

25 reviews

kaiyakaiyo's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional informative mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

This book made me sad and angry and disheartened, but I’m glad to have read it. “Farewell to Manzanar” is extent of my school-sponsored education on Japanese internment, so getting another (clearly altered for fiction) view into things definitely gave me a starting point for googling. I think it teases some supernatural elements but ultimately this is a book about internment, white supremacy, and the fact that the minority-eating machine that is American society makes no exceptions.

Complicit white people by the thousands watched as their neighbors were dragged to internment camps. America set up the idea of the model citizen— do this, worship that, wear this, buy this— then pulled that rug out from under certain people’s feet as soon as jobs and resources were scarce. No matter how hard anyone at Minidoka tried to be model citizens, to not “resist”, etc. they were treated as sub-human by their guards, the scientists, and the rest of America. They felt they had to make themselves smaller to earn their rights back, to no avail, and it’s maddeningly sad. I doubt the term existed back then but it’s respectability politics hard at work, making POC turn the hate inflicted on them towards themselves instead of striking back at the actual source (white people).

The most galling & unfortunately accurate thing about this story is that

in the end Meiko is still looked at as the solution to what is clearly the American Governments giant fuck up.

POC, especially women, are often burdened with the responsibility to lead their own liberation and everyone else’s. White men, white women, and even POC men often wait for these women to take a stand before they find the courage to do so; an incredibly frustrating & nearly inevitable phenomena, then and now.

Meiko & her daughter deserve $10 million cash and to be left the fuck alone.

Pacing was a tad slow but picked up in the middle, and I liked the narrative style. THATS how you do an alternating timeline (im looking at you, Rin Chupeco)

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tigger89's review against another edition

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dark mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

The execution of this book just didn't do it for me. The true meaning behind the fervor infection was clever, but instead of dropping the bomb and moving on with the story, the author lingered on the point, repeating it over and over again. Maybe this was meant to be artistic, but the vibe I came away with was that she didn't trust the reader to get it. That said, I did feel like, at the core, the message behind the plot was not only timely, but actually pretty solid. Each character stood in for a different population, presenting their perspective and demonstrating the good(and harm) possible. I just wish it had been conducted with a lighter touch and less repetition, you know?

I also felt like, while the yokai and jorogumo demon were teased in the description, they weren't the ultimate focus. This was disappointing to me, because I'd been drawn to the book specifically to explore the folklore in a horror setting. Instead, I was bait-and-switched with a completely different sort of horror. It almost seemed like the characters of Meiko and (especially) Aiko were wasted, given their vast potential in the other book that this one was pretending to be, before the white characters came in and made it all about their own feelings. While poignant, somehow I doubt that was the artistic statement the author was going for.

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amandalorianxo's review against another edition

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dark mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

I immensely enjoyed the different side of WW 2 we rarely often get in fictional books around this time period. I’m speaking about the Japanese experience of being in internment campus during the early 1940’s post Pearl Harbor. This novel combines realism with Japanese mythology and some horror elements infused with some real experiences of xenophobia and even the fear of an epidemic. If you haven’t gotten the chance to pick up this April ‘22 release, I highly recommend checking this out for a diverse outlook on what WW 2 was like for those who called America home in spite of the rest of the world viewing them from a different lens.

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magellen's review against another edition

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challenging dark informative mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Timely and well tied to our present, The Fervor echoes our current denialist attitude about illness, othering, and white nationalists in america. Katsu turns a historical mirror on us and demands we look, be uncomfortable in our complicity and our ignorance, and do better.

<spoilers>the supernatural elements drop off sharply towards the end in a way that's somewhat disappointing, but ties in to the fact that while the illness is exacerbating rage, the real monster is intolerance and racism and white fragility. On one hand it's sort of mask off the fear to it's real source, on the other damn dude I wanted a spider demon.</spoilers>

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goatsrsexy's review against another edition

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dark fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

This was a really gripping historical fiction with supernatural horror mixed in a way that felt very natural. More than anything it was a story about how terrifying hatred becomes

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