Deadly by Julie Chibbaro

Deadly by Julie Chibbaro

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Prudence lives in a cramped New York City tenement with her mother.  She attends Miss Browning’s School for Girls—and hates it.  Instead of paying attention to lectures on how to properly

run a household, Prudence finds herself daydreaming about people and what makes them healthy or sick, especially since her brother died from injuries from a cart horse and her father is still missing in action from the Spanish-American War.



When she has the chance to work as a secretary for an engineer at the Department of Health and Sanitation, she’s thrilled—and this means that she’ll have to stop attending the School for Girls! 

Because she shows such an interest in the diseases she reads about as she types up her boss’s notes, he changes her job to also include accompanying him on trips to examine disease cases.  When one case turns up a healthy cook who inexplicably makes people sick with the typhoid through her cooking, Prudence faces some of the toughest challenges of her life when her department wants to quarantine this lady—who comes to be known as Typhoid Mary.



I enjoyed this book very much and read it fast!  It’s written in a journal format, which gives the story an added dose of realism to this scary subject.  Those who enjoyed Fever, 1793 (Anderson) might want to give this book a try.





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