“Fatal Fever” by Gail Jarrow packs in a good punch of information about a life threatening disease  including an intriguing story to keep you on your toes. In this book we learn about the deadly fever Typhoid, as well as a woman who was unknowingly spreading the disease around causing death after death. This story gives off a very dystopian time period, because at the time there was no solid vaccination for the illness causing it to feel like the world was crashing down. Mary Mallon plays a very important role in this book because she was the woman who tested a-symptomatic for typhoid and she refused to be tested without force which ending up causing herself more trouble in the future.

The goal I had in mind for my notes was to jot down a quick summary for each chapter and then look for some of the biggest central ideas.

The first page of notes a took was my summary of chapters one through five, this is when they were introducing some of the protagonists that come in later in the story such as-George Soper. This page of notes also shares the confusion people were having not knowing where typhoid was coming from nor did they not how to stop it.

The second page of my notes is my summary from chapters six through nine. These chapters were going more into depth about Mary Mallon and how she refused to comply with the authorities when asked to. After using force to get her into the hospital she caved in and her blood tests came back positive. Because Mary Mallon was being extremely difficult and disobeying officials orders they had to keep her in the hospital because they believed that if they trusted her to be safe by herself she would change her identity and run away. This note page helped show that Mary was very stubborn.

My third page of notes was where me and my bookclub members jotted down any central ideas that came to mind. You can see how they progress over time as we were reading. Our first central idea is the higher class people believed they had power over the lower class and could treat them worse. This idea came to mind when first reading about the officials forcing into testing without her consent only because she was a chef with didn’t compare to police officers at the time. Our other central idea is typhoid fever spreads rapidly and kills many. When was came up with this idea we were reading the part of the book where the narrator was telling the stories of some of the people lives which were brutally taken. A theme we came up with for this book is Comply to authorities when you and others health is at stake. We thought of this idea for our theme because of Mary Mallon, she had been spreading typhoid unknowingly for over ten years and when asked to stay away from people so she doesn’t continue to end the lives of innocent families she reacted terribly. She only did what was best for herself and didn’t consider other people. The last part of this page of notes is when we were finding a descriptive passage in our book and connecting it to our central idea. We chose page 56 which was describing how Mary Mallon looked before she was taken in by the officers, she looked perfectly healthy but had deadly cells inside her body.

The last page of notes I decided to include in this blog is my summative assessment discussing my central idea and using evidence and connections from the book. I used the idea of typohid fever spread rapidly and kills many because I think that it is very straight to the point but still can be connected the the book very smoothly. I also did this idea for my central idea because in fatal fever it mention how deadly typhoid really is and how easily it can transfer from one person to another.

Thank you so much for reading until the end of my blog, I hope you enjoyed!