A review by hsrudolph
Fever by Mary Beth Keane

3.0

Fictional retelling of the story of Mary Mallon, a feisty, determined Irish immigrant in NYC at the turn of the century (1900), who works her way up from laundress to cook and whose life is turned upside down when a medical investigator traces various typhoid outbreaks to her cooking. Typhoid Mary, as she comes to be known, is an asymptomatic carrier of the desease and unknowingly spread it through her cooking. She is hunted and captured, hospitalized and tested and studied. She ultimately spends most of her life in a small cabin on North Brother island in the East River. The book humanizes Mary, explores various themes about women’s rights, human rights, medical studies and more. Keane brings old New York to life - the sounds, the smells, the struggles, the hardship of life. The story moved slowly but was very rich.