Video Book Review: Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin

Watch this review of Fever Dream and other bookish videos on my Read Remark booktube/YouTube channel here.

One-sentence summary of Fever Dream:

As a mom lays dying, she talks through her recollections of the events that brought her there with a boy who is not her son.

Fever Dream is disorienting.

This book is not false advertising – it really does read like a fever dream, where nothing quite makes sense, events are jumbled and nonlinear, and characters are difficult to understand.

It begins with an infirmed woman, guided through a series of events by a mysterious person at her bedside. The person at her bedside is a child. The child is not hers.

It gets increasingly twisted from there. We find that the woman’s friend has a child (presumably the same child now at her bedside…or not) who drank of tainted water. Something goes funky and the kid is profoundly changed.

Fever Dream is evocative of other stories that practically scream “Beware the children!!” Children of the Corn? Check. Hostel? Check. Invasion of the Body Snatchers? You bet.

It’s deeply engrossing. The woman’s story becomes more and more frantic until every word is like breath, and the next one can’t come fast enough.