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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