It was a little creepy reading a book about an infectious disease during Covid, but it was interesting. Lots of retail, but not overly detailed.
I like the little side stories about the minor characters. Nice satisfying ending, too.

I was intrigued by the title and primary subject of the book, a disease killing young children in Brazil and the researcher trying to determine the source of the disease. In a manner like real life, there seemed to be several different potential side stories but none of these got enough pages to be really satisfying. The writing is good, but I would have liked this book to go into more depth about almost all the topics – or maybe to have narrowed down to a couple of real focal points. ( )

The book Fever had the interesting premise of a budding female Bacteriologist in search of a cure for a disease causing the deaths of young children in Brazil. The main plot was mixed in with Sid's own personal relationships as well as the relationships in her lab, and with the people she was trying to help.
The author had difficulty arranging these disparate elements into a smooth flowing story. The transitions were often awkward although the story as a whole was appealing. ( )

I received an ARC in exchange for an unbiased review.

The title of this book is really not accurate. "Fever" implies that the book is mainly about a virulent disease and a scientist's effort to investigate and determine the cause of the disease. I expected the book to be focused on the investigation and really delve into the mystery of the disease -- a la Richard Preston's non-fiction thriller "The Hot Zone." In actuality, the disease plays only a disappointingly small part in this book. In fact, I could not figure out what genre this book wanted to be. The title "Fever" implied mystery thriller, but the book vacillated more between romance and chick lit, with a little scientific stuff thrown in, and it really wasn't even much of a scientific mystery because it was solved disappointingly fast.

Even though my ARC did not designate it as an uncorrected proof, I felt that that is what it was. Although there were no typos or grammatical errors, there were a number of instances where it could have used some better editing. There were many jarring scenery shifts that were confusing: For example, it is afternoon, then suddenly the next paragraph talks about nighttime, and the paragraph after that says, "When her alarm went off at 6:30 a.m..." Why bother even including one paragraph about nighttime if it is not going to add any value, and the next paragraph jumps to morning with no warning? Sudden scene shifts like this, at a minimum, need to be separated by a bit of white space to separate book sections, so that the reader is aware that there is a break in the scenery and time flow, and then it makes more sense. Many times as I was reading, I kept saying to myself, "What the hell was the point of that entire scene?" There was just lots of stuff that didn't contribute to moving the plot forward or toward character development, and it could have all been cut out.

Also, descriptions of people and dialogue seem almost juvenile at times and don't flow with the story. Basically, the overall writing was just not very good.

I was feeling generous in giving this book 3 stars because the parts that dealt with the protagonist's struggles as a career-focused woman in a scientific/medical field were genuine. This book should have been about her -- Dr. Sidonie Royal -- as more of a character study, with some medical mysteries thrown in to keep things interesting. Instead, the book felt aimless, not knowing what kind of book it wanted to be. To the reader, that is just extremely frustrating. ( )

Granted that this was an ARC for the Early Reviews giveaway...the premise is interesting but the telling of it is jumpy. Scenes appear to start and end out of nowhere and very loosely follow a time line. One subplot with Sid and her boyfriend Paul was not necessary-Paul did not need to be a part of this novel at all. No real ending about the research that Sid was doing in order to find out what caused a strange illness among children in Brazil. Even though this story took place when AIDS was first being talked about in the news....it didn't really need to be a part of this story-there really was no connection to the main story or any of the characters.