I always love to think about book pairs as I am reading. This week I just had the chance to read Fever Season by Eric Zweig. Even before I started to read the book, I thought about how it would be a good book to match up with Laurie Halse Anderson's Fever 1793. While Zweig's book is set during the early 1900s, including the time frame of World War I and Halse Anderson's book is set a little over a hundred years earlier, both books have themes dealing with fevers effecting main characters' lives and changing their family dynamics. It would be interesting for students to examine similarities and differences.
Beyond that, there are also possibilities to link to semi-current events. Last year around the time my students read Fever 1793 as a book club book, there was a lot of hype about the swine flu, especially in Mexico. I was also thinking that reading these book while we studied the Bubonic Plague in Medieval Europe earlier this year would have been a perfect fit.
Illnesses and how they effect communities is a recurring theme throughout history, and I am glad that I will have both of these books in my classroom library for all of the exciting possibilities.
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