Mary Mallon immigrates to New York City from Ireland when she is just fifteen years old. Keane does a wonderful job of providing a first-person account of the situation complete with vivid detail that is as engrossing as it is informative. The book also offers an interesting perspective that might be challenging for modern-day readers to understand, but at the time, very little was known about how contagious diseases were transmitted from one person to the next. The novel is told from the perspective of Mary, giving the reader an intimate view into the life of a new immigrant in America and the difficulties that plagued young women at the time. Published in 2013, Fever by Mary Beth Keane tells the story of the woman known as “Typhoid Mary,” the first person in America to be identified as a healthy carrier of typhoid fever.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |