Review: Deadly

DEADLY
Julie Chibbaro
Historical Young Adult
304 pages
Atheneum Books for Young Readers
Available Now
Received through Teen Book Scene for review

THE STORY (from Goodreads)
A mysterious outbreak of typhoid fever is sweeping New York.

Could the city’s future rest with its most unlikely scientist?

If Prudence Galewski is ever going to get out of Mrs. Browning’s esteemed School for Girls, she must demonstrate her refinement and charm by securing a job appropriate for a young lady. But Prudence isn’t like the other girls. She is fascinated by how the human body works and why it fails.

With a stroke of luck, she lands a position in a laboratory, where she is swept into an investigation of the fever bound to change medical history. Prudence quickly learns that an inquiry of this proportion is not confined to the lab. From ritzy mansions to shady bars and rundown tenements, she explores every potential cause of the disease. But there’s no answer in sight—until the volatile Mary Mallon emerges. Dubbed “Typhoid Mary” by the press, Mary is an Irish immigrant who has worked as a cook in every home the fever has ravaged. Strangely, though, she hasn’t been sick a day in her life. Is the accusation against her an act of discrimination? Or is she the first clue in a new scientific discovery?

Prudence is determined to find out. In a time when science is for men, she’ll have to prove to the city, and to herself, that she can help solve one of the greatest medical mysteries of the twentieth century.

MY THOUGHTS
Written in journal entry format, Deadly details the profound discovery that a healthy individual can be a carrier of contagious disease, combining the art of storytelling with factual evidence and scientific process to give us an intriguing, albeit brief, look into medical understanding in the early nineteen hundreds. The beginning chapters are a bit tedious as we follow Prudence in her attempt to find a job that will challenge her mind beyond gender-standard secretarial work, her journal entries fraught with details that seem to have no bearing on the overall plot arc other than to give us additional insight into the mind of our protagonist. Once her job with the Department of Health and Sanitation begins however, the story picks up and Prudence’s proclivity for questioning anything and everything around her seems to infect us through osmosis as we hold the pages, and we flip through the often very short chapters in search of answers to satisfy both Prudence and ourselves.

Prudence is a young woman easy to admire, her desire to find a job she feels will have an impact on society and her conviction to see that job through in the pursuit of a career typically frowned upon for women traits we fully support. While we may initially think the journal entry format will bring us closer to Prudence given we’re privy to her innermost thoughts as she documents them, rather the opposite seems to be true. Reading her journal keeps us at a bit of a distance, the physical paper pages of the book we’re reading combining with the fictional pages of Prudence’s personal records to form two separate barriers between us and the young woman we want to know. We have her thoughts, but her feelings and actions are often given to us in past tense–relayed to us after events have already taken place–and we’re denied the ability to experience them in real time with her to help us forge a connection based on shared moments of emotional or physical intensity.

While our relationship with Prudence may not be as deep or piercing as we might like, the story itself is inherently fascinating, and once we get to the actual pursuit of Mary Mallon we don’t want to set the book aside until we learn what becomes of her. Unfortunately, the story concludes with a rather open ending, our need for details about the outcome of Mary’s predicament and the results of her extensive testing only satisfied in the author’s note rather than in the story itself. Additionally, we have an idea of what Prudence’s future holds in store for her, knowing her dedication to science and learning will lead her into a medical field, however we can’t help but feel by the time we close the back cover that we spent nearly 300 pages with a stranger, seeing events through her eyes without ever truly being invited into her heart. Despite those flaws, the story is well written and will certainly entertain many a reader, those of us who crave a thriving connection with characters may just wish for a bit more from Prudence.

Rating: 3.5/5