Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not affect my rating or review.
I am bummed. I really wanted to love this one. I have been told forever that I have to read Alma Katsu’s books. I will take another spin at another book by this author around Halloween time I think. The main reason why I gave this 3 stars is that the book felt too jumbled. I don’t think Katsu did a very good job of us following Meiko, Aiko, Fran, and Archie. I get that Katsu wanted to show this time in American history and throw some horror in it, but the horror felt like it was an after thought. It didn’t help that the ending just fell flat. I did love the afterword and Katsu explaining why they wrote this book (due to the rise of Anti-Asian rhetoric blooming all over the United States) and how they tied it into past sins that the United States has done when it comes to Asian Americans.
“The Fervor” follows Meiko Briggs and her daughter, Aiko. They are currently imprisoned in an internment camp in Idaho. Though Meiko is married to a white American who is currently flying planes against the Japanese, she is still seen as not American enough and a traitor in some ways to the fellow Japanese who are also imprisoned. Things go from bad to worse when people in the camp start to get sick and Meiko’s daughter warns that the demons only she can see are telling her that something bad is coming. When Meiko realizes that things are tying back to something from her childhood, the book then shifts to a man named Archie who knows Meiko’s husband, but who abandoned Meiko and Aiko to the camp. And then a journalist named Fran starts to investigate all of the goings on happening which seem to be part of a big government cover-up.
I wish the book had followed just Meiko and maybe Aiko.
Fran and her whole plotline could have been cut and nothing would have been lost. It feels like Katsu felt the same way since Fran is dumped towards the end and we get an info-dump about what happened to her.
When the book starts shifts back and forth between the four characters along with Meiko’s father’s journals I just didn’t know what was happening and or how to follow the many threads that the book dangles at you. Meiko felt very blank to me as a reader for most of the book. I got a better sense of Aiko and Archie which was a shame. Even Archie’s terrible wife felt more developed.
I wish the book had leaned on the supernatural/horror aspects more though. We hear about Jorōgumo and even get a small scene with the notorious demon, but it just felt like an after thought. The book really did show that the humans in the book were much worse.
The setting of the United States during the 1940s does not show a rose colored world. Why I am always surprised when people are like those were the days. Sure they were, for white Christian people. Not so much for a lot of other people.
The ending as I said fell flat. I just thought it needed something more or an epilogue that shows you where characters are after the end of the war.