fever 1793 by laurie halse anderson summary

She wants to turn the Cook Coffeehouse into the finest business in Philadelphia, the capital of the new United States.īut the waterfront is abuzz with reports of disease. Fourteen-year-old Mattie Cook is ambitious, adventurous, and sick to death of listening to her mother. She instead flings the dead creature out the back window overlooking the garden so that Silas can find his morning breakfast.August 1793.

Matilda stops herself from throwing the mouse corpse out the front window.

She sometimes sees him down at the docks where he sketches the ships or the sea birds.

Matilda mentions Nathaniel Benson, a boy who has heard her talk about Blanchard's hot air balloon.

(For more, see: 'Symbols, Imagery, Allegory: Blanchard's Hot Air Balloon.')

She again imagines floating free like Pierre Blanchard's hot air balloon.

Matilda tells us that her favorite place in the city is the waterfront, with the docks and the ship masts and such.

Matilda assumes Polly must be visiting her beau, Matthew, who is the blacksmith's son.

The sound of the blacksmith's anvil reminds her of Polly, the serving girl who's running late.

Leaning out the window, Matilda surveys Philadelphia, her city: 'Below the window, High Street teemed with horsemen, carriages and carts' (1.25).

She then takes the dead mouse carcass and considers throwing it out the front window.

Matilda gets dressed and realizes that she's starting to outgrow her clothes.

Matilda watches her cat Silas pounce on a mouse and nearly drop his breakfast onto her mother's best quilt.

(A nocturnal growth spurt?) She decides to forgo washing up.

Eventually, Matilda gets out of bed and hits her head on the ceiling.

('For more on Blanchard, see: Symbols, Imagery, Allegory: Blanchard's Hot Air Balloon.')

Matilda snuggles back down into her bed and imagines herself floating away like the famous Pierre Blanchard's hot air balloon.

Matilda's thoughts on this? 'How utterly unlike me' (1.7). She was a hard worker who stitched quilts and spun wool all before breakfast. Her mother was a perfect child who grew up during the American Revolutionary War. Matilda has apparently heard this one before.Matilda's mother again urges her to get out of bed with the classic line: 'When I was a girl, we were up before the sun…' (1.6).Matilda, we learn, lives in a not very large room above a coffeehouse in Philadelphia.

Someone named Polly, the mother tells us, is running late. The narrator's mother is demanding that she, a young girl named Matilda, get out of bed.

A mosquito is buzzing in one of her ears and someone is screeching in the other. Our narrator awakes on a hot and sweaty morning in August 1793.

Fever 1793 by laurie halse anderson summary