The Fever: A Novel

"If there were a category for books to make a plane ride fly by, this would surely be a front-runner. The Fever is the third in what I think of as author Megan Abbott’s trilogy (my word, not hers) taking readers inside the mind of that most exotic and confounding creature — the teenage girl. This is not, however, a young adult novel (not that there’s anything wrong with that); this is literary fiction with young adults as the subject. The Fever loosely takes its jumping-off point from real life: the mysterious illness that struck girls in Le Roy, N.Y., causing them to twitch and spasm uncontrollably. Combining vaccination anxieties, teenage jealousies and an overall sense of something really bad happening, this is the kind of book you can start on takeoff and not put down until you absolutely have to."