However, before a decision can be reached, Mattie's mother falls seriously ill. Many people have different opinions on the best way to control the epidemic, and within Mattie's family, there are debates about whether she should be sent to the country for her own safety. Amidst the intense summer heat, residents of Philadelphia begin to sicken and die from a strange disease that is eventually identified as yellow fever. Mattie Cook is a 14-year-old girl who lives with her mother and grandfather and helps them to run a thriving coffeehouse business. With Nell and Eliza's nephews under their wings, the two women scramble for food, tend the sick and await the frost that will end the epidemic.The novel begins in August 1793, in the city of Philadelphia. With the epidemic still in full force, Mattie is reunited with Eliza, who's nursing disease victims with the Free African Society. Mattie, all alone now, searching for food and her mother, finds and takes up an orphaned child, Nell. Mattie and her grandfather hole up in the deserted coffeehouse, where they are assaulted by robbers. Mattie falls sick, but recovers under the enlightened care of a French physician, and she and her grandfather return to Philadelphia, only to find Lucille missing. Lucille orders Mattie and her grandfather away from Philadelphia and the epidemic. Mattie witnesses her mother's radical purgings and bloodlettings, practices advocated by Dr. One sweltering August day, Lucille contracts yellow fever, and Mattie's world caves in. Nearby, Mattie's beau works as a painter's apprentice for Charles Willson Peale. Their hired cook is Eliza, a young widow, a free black and Mattie's best friend. Mattie, tenacious and tenderhearted, assists her widowed mother, Lucille, in running a coffeehouse, where Mattie's grandfather, who served in George Washington's army, presides as chief raconteur. Pitching the reader into this setting, Anderson tethers her story to the plight of her 14-year-old narrator, Matilda Cook. (One-tenth of the city's population was killed in three months by the mosquito-borne disease.) Laurie Halse Anderson's staccato title refers to the ruthless 1793 yellow fever epidemic that decimated Philadelphia, then the capital of the United States and the nation's largest city.
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