Deadly (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Deadly Elizabeth Bush Chibbaro, Julie. Deadly; illus. by Jean-Marc Superville Sovak. Atheneum, 2011. [304p.] ISBN 978-0-689-85738-6 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 6-9. Sixteen-year-old narrator Prudence Galewski is in need of work to supplement her missing father's small pension and her mother's intermittent pay. Typing skills land her a position with Mr. Soper of the recently established New York Department of Health and Sanitation, which is currently investigating an outbreak of typhoid fever. As Soper's assistant, Prudence revels in the intellectual challenges of her job, [End Page 229] which turns out to be more analytical than clerical; as they zero in on Mary Mallon, a cook who keeps turning up as an employee in infected households, she even begins to consider the possibility of furthering her education, perhaps in medicine. However, Prudence continually wrangles with the job's requirement of dispassion and her own crush on the boss and concerns for the rights of Mallon, who is held in indefinite quarantine. Chibbaro's fictional retelling of the saga of "Typhoid Mary," who famously infected dozens of New Yorkers in the early twentieth century, keeps a steady focus on the social implications of science running ahead of public policy ("Our attorneys are discussing the legal rights of the department, and which law is stronger—a person's right to freedom, or the public's right to a healthy, protected community"). The author wisely compresses the timeline of the investigation, as patient, lengthy departmental plodding makes for better science than novels. Subplots involving Prudence's missing father and her fading friendship with a close chum who moved away add little to the far more engrossing threads of the epidemic and the doomed romance, but there's plenty of medical detectivating and moral questions to absorb readers. Chibbaro's endnotes sort out the factual and fictional characters, and middle-schoolers drawn to the grim fascination of populations in peril will certainly catch the fever. Copyright © 2011 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois