Thanks to Double Day Books, Clare Beams, and NetGalley for a chance to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

This book was listed under historical fiction, though I'm not sure I quite agree with the selected genre. It is set in a different period, indeed, but how much it deals with historical events I'm not sure, aside from the archaic medical treatment. Unfortunately, the issue of misogyny isn't behind us, so in some way the story is even contemporary. But this doesn't matter as far as my review goes.

I am writing this review months after I finished reading this book, so some of the details of character names and alike are gone. My review is still relevant, however, because even after all this time I think about this story. It had a lot of promise in the weirdness of the story, it tries to bring light to issues women have been facing for millennia, but all with a feeling of shallowness. That said, I finished it quickly and enjoyed reading it. The symbolism of the birds, the symptoms of the hysteria, and how these tied into the message were done very well. We're just missing...something...to really make us connect with the characters and to bring some kind of insight to light besides just echoing what all women already know.

This book was such an interesting blend of literary fiction, magical realism, and mystery. The prose was absolutely gorgeous and I love that it's set in a school -- it created the perfect environment for this dark and gritty story!

What an odd book. It's got a dreamy, otherworldly quality. It never quite becomes a full-on nightmare, but it hovers on the edge, menacing the reader and the characters equally. Set in a transcendentalist school clearly inspired by the efforts of Bronson Alcott and his colleagues, the main character and her father attempt to teach a group of teenage girls much the way boys are taught. Magnetic personalities and teenage fascination with a gothic novel ostensibly inspired by their headmaster soon combine in what first appears to be psychosomatic group hysteria of some kind, though controversial "treatment" turns it into something much more sinister.

Find this review and others like it at https://aravenclawlibraryx.wordpress.com

tw: child abuse, parental death, epilepsy, disordered eating, sexual assault (multiple times), cheating

I requested this book because it reminded me of the Water Cure with the cover and the synopsis. Upon reading this book, I discovered it was written in a similar way too. It was very prosey and descriptive. But that kind of hindered me from truly understanding what was going on for the first 100 pages or so. Once I got used to the writing, I was able to enjoy the book more.

But I am a bit disappointed. I expected something different. I mean, I kind of got what I wanted but I wanted more of it. It didn’t go far enough with the creep and sinister factor. I wanted more fits from the girls. I wanted confusion and despair of what was happening to the girls. I wanted this to go a lot further than what it did.

I did enjoy having Caroline as a narrator. She was so unreliable and I liked it. I never knew what to believe and that upped the creep factor by a lot. I truly couldn’t trust her at all. I never knew whether she had the girls’ best interest in her heart or if she had something more sinister up her sleeve. She made it hard to sympathize with her but I still rooted for her. While Caroline wasn’t my most favorite MC, I enjoyed her nonetheless.

I have to mention one part that truly disturbed me and will probably disturb a lot of others. So take caution while reading this particular part. It goes on for several pages. In the 1800’s, the “cure” for hysteria was bringing females to orgasm. Doctors did this by hand. I don’t think I need to go into any more detail. So there's a part where underage girls were subjected to this treatment multiple times.

Overall, this was a good book even though it had some flaws. Like I mentioned above, I wish it had gone more sinister. I would have easily rated this 4 (four) stars had the author just upped the creep factor. Besides that little issue, I did enjoy this book and am read more by this author.

I was intrigued by the overview and the theme of mass hysteria and was curious about the symbolism of the blood red bird flocks which appear throughout the story. The sexual abuse spoiled it for me and couldn't finish the rest after that.

Caroline lives with her father, Samuel, a writer and educator whose career and reputation have been sullied by a younger man that Samuel mentored many years ago. But Samuel is determined to revive his career by starting a school for girls. Girls can think. Girls can learn. They needn’t be limited to the traditional lessons that make young ladies into gracious hostesses. They can rise in this world, as long as he is there to guide them.

I read this book free and early thanks to Doubleday and Net Galley. It’s for sale now.

As the story opens, just a few ladies are signed up for the boarding school that will be run by Samuel and Caroline from their home. A former protegee, David, comes to join them also, and will teach the sciences. Running errands in town, however, Caroline and David run into Eliza, the daughter of the man that ruined Samuel’s career. Her father is now deceased; Eliza wants to attend the school. In a moment of mischievous rebellion that she will come to regret, Caroline accepts her.

At the outset, The Illness Lesson seems to be feminist fiction, and as school begins and I see Samuel mansplaining to his female charges about the things that women can and cannot do, should learn to do, should want to do, I lean in, ready for a rapier-sharp tale in which—I hope—the father and teacher that believes himself to be an educational gift to womankind will learn a powerful lesson.

Alas, not so much.

Before the halfway mark is reached, the story has wandered in various directions and has lost its cohesion and focus. I check my notes and change the genre for it over and over again; feminist fiction becomes historical fiction becomes romance becomes magical realism becomes horror and what the heck is this author trying to achieve? If the plan is to keep the reader guessing, I can honestly say that I am genuinely surprised (in the second half) by what Caroline finds in the woods. However, I am not a fan of surprise elements that fragment the plot. It almost feels as if it was written by a half dozen writers drunkenly passing a story around late at night. “Okay, now YOU write a chapter! Surprise me.”

I might not have been so disappointed if I hadn’t expected such great things. The premise is a wonderful one. Beams could have done so much with it, and I can’t figure out why she didn’t.

Perhaps if you read it, you’ll come away with a more charitable viewpoint. My advice, however, is to get it free or cheap, or else give it a miss entirely.

I am obsessed with this book, and Beams is an amazingly adept storyteller! The atmosphere of the school in 1800s Massachusetts is so consuming, but at the same time the themes explored here are so resonant today.

Claire Beams debut novel The Illness Lesson depicts a cohort of late 19th century young woman educated at an experimental Transcendentalist-based girls’ school where plans go awry when they all succumb to the “female illness” hysteria. This one drew me in immediately with questions pivoting on appropriate education, and by extension role, for nineteenth century women. Beams sets the historical novel in the late 19th century during the second, lesser-known wave of Transcendentalism at the end of the 19th century; however, the question of women’s education was at the forefront as this period witnessed the first flux of women attending colleges and universities. While some of the allusions in the book seem unresolved, the strength of the book is its probing of 19th century feminism and women’s illnesses.

Samuel Hood, is a Transcendentalist who starts a girls’ school at his Massachusetts farm house in the 1870s. His school will defy the normal expectations for the era, as instead of focusing on “womanly” subjects of needlepoint and music, his school aims to educate them no different than boys in such subjects as natural history, philosophy, and literature. Also helping educate the teenagers are David Moore, an acolyte from Hood’s earlier educational experimental school Birch Hills and his daughter Caroline, who herself has been educated in all the same subjects by her philosopher father. The school is named Trilling Hearts, after a newfound breed of reddish-hued birds that dot the landscape on the Hoods’ rural property. The school opens swimmingly with a core of earnest students. That is until the arrival of one in student in particular.

Eliza Pearson, daughter of a novelist Miles Pearson who wrote a scandalous book The Darkening Glass based on Caroline’s own deceased mother and her very much alive father, joins the first ranks of students. Miles also worked briefly at Samuel’s first educational endeavor Birch Hills School. Thus, Samuel does not take kindly to the arrival of Miles’s daughter to his school. After several months at the school, mysterious behavior is manifest in Eliza. Initially, she has frequent fainting spells, and later, odd flurries of rashes covering her body, and fits of uncontrollable bodily contortions better known as hysteria. The other seven pupils at Trilling Hearts later begin to show similar manifestations. To address these bizarre symptoms Samuel beckons his friend Hawkins, a physician and former Birch Hills teacher to diagnosis and treat the girls. Yet, Hawkins doesn’t have the best of intentions with treatment. The book has the semblance of a Gothic period novel as Beams does a top-notch job maintaining the language of the book. There are questions raised about the nature of women’s education and illness, both are the strengths of the story.

Women’s education was beginning to take an uptick at the end of the 19th century. This is the generation of the “New Woman,” so called because of her aspirational leaps to receive a college education and become employed. Celebrated feminist writer of the era Charlotte Perkins Gilman, author of The Yellow-Wall Paper and Herland, and Progressive reformer, Jane Addams, reflect the cohort of New Women receiving early college educations. And, so it is that Beams creates the fictional Trilling Hearts School to reflect some of the changes in women’s education of the era. It is a fascinating development as women of this time even if educated formally lacked outlets of employment besides writing and volunteering. To be certain this is the context for white middle class and upper middle class women of the period.

It is the question of women’s illnesses during the 19th century that kept me rapt as I have been a fan of a woman who typified this era for years—Alice James. Unlike her famous older brothers, well-known existential philosopher William James and equally successful novelist, Henry James, Alice James succumbed to much of the characteristics exhibited by Beams’ Trilling Hearts students. Alice James known mainly for her private diaries had extraordinary talent but societal expectations for women dashed her hopes for a career. Jean Strouse’s Alice James is a timeless, exacting, and award-winning biography of the younger James. What then of the illnesses fictionalized in The Illness Lesson?

The understanding and treatment of 19th century women’s illnesses were generally said to be rooted in their physical differences from men. Put simply, educated women were said to have these rash of illnesses because they possessed a womb. Laughable by today’s standards and entirely debunked by the 20th century, at the time, as in The Illness Lesson, all sorts of treatments attempted to tamp down womanly sicknesses. Historian Cynthia Russett in her masterful work, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood maps out the terrain of sex differences to reach the conclusion that “The great division of labor was here brought to bear: men produced and women reproduced.” (Russett, p. 12). Curiously, why did upper and middle class white women seem likely to suffer from inexplicable illnesses?

The best book I’ve read on the history of women’s illnesses and medicalized treatment of such illnesses is the masterful For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women by feminist scholars Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English. This book covers everything from understanding of colonial midwives and those accused of being witches to excellent chapters on the “the sexual politics of sickness.” All of which, of course link illnesses to the ovaries. While women such as James and Gilman were prescribed the famous rest cure which the latter poignantly fictionalized in The Yellow Wall-Paper, in Beams’ work girls are offered a more “hands on” treatment with sinister repercussions.

In the end, the Trilling Hearts School dissolves but Beams clearly shows the chains of patriarchy in the decisions made by Samuel, David, and Hawkins. Caroline, too, leaves behind the authority of her father in the book’s final chapters but how I wished she sought out a college education or turned her private writings into a book for public consumption. Minor details like using the parlance of gender difference instead of the 19th century language of sex differences appear in Beams’ book. And, the symbolism of the trilling heart birds seems to lose their meaning, or perhaps seemed less clear to me, in the later chapters of the book. Still, The Illness Lesson is an engaging read, especially for those interested in good historical fiction. The questions it raises about women’s education, illnesses, and treatment put this squarely in the camp of contemporary feminist literature.

Beam’s novel is an authentic voice of what the Transcendentalist movement. Were the ideals of progressive feminism just before their time or were they, as this novel seems to point to, the idea that women should be allowed to have a voice up to a certain point. Women were looked at as having an intellect but still their highest goal was to be married and have children. Other than Jo March in Little Women, I’ve never heard a voice as strong as the story told from Catherine’s point of view. An excellent book to read, particularly if you, like me, have questioned the idealism of the male Transcendentalists as they failed to let go of male power.

A century and a half after the publication of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women,” a new book by Clare Beams echoes a familiar tale of a reformer and his well-educated daughter.

Samuel Hood and Caroline Hood (inspired by Amos Bronson Alcott and Louisa May Alcott) create a school to educate girls. Once classes are underway, a mysterious hysteria sweeps over their students, and the “cure” is more sinister than their symptoms. “The Illness Lesson” evokes the atmosphere of a dark fairy tale with transcendentalist values.

Samuel is an essayist who is trying to revive his reputation after his Birch Hill farm commune failed. The school he opens, Trilling Heart School, will provide young women the same education Caroline received as a child, which Samuel says, “will be a pursuit of the divine in the human. We’ll teach thinking, not sewing or physical graces, not shallow parlor-trick erudition.” Caroline is excited to teach alongside her father. As an unmarried woman in her mid-20s, she has no other paths for her life to take.

Beams’ prose really sings as it sets the scene of idyllic Concord stand-in, Ashwell, Massachusetts. Her depiction of Birch Hill mirrors Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands, a short-lived agricultural community in central Massachusetts where residents adopted a vegan diet and performed labor without farm animals. Alcott’s Temple School, though not an all-girls school like Trilling Heart, was similarly founded with an emphasis on students speaking freely, but was ultimately disbanded due to controversy over the radical content of its teachings.

The equal partnership Caroline envisions between herself and her father never comes to pass. Beams writes, “Though Caroline was meant to be a walking embodiment of the school’s aims, that didn’t mean her feminine fingers belonged in its meatier pies." Caroline is limited to teaching literature while Samuel and one of his few remaining acolytes teach history, math, classical languages, and moral philosophy. Samuel’s dismissal of Caroline’s mastery of these subjects is one of many actions that contradict his alleged feminist principles. Caroline’s confidence in her father erodes until his ultimate betrayal at the climax of the novel.

Caroline isn’t the only female character living in her father’s shadow. Trilling Heart pupil Eliza is the daughter of one of the Birch Hill men, Miles Pearson, who villainized Samuel in a fictionalized account of Birch Hill's failures. The students start trusting in Pearson’s deceptive depiction of Samuel rather than the teacher himself.

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Beams' book shifts from historic fiction to gothic horror using the imagery of the bright red trilling heart birds. Every appearance of the birds inspires physical dread within Caroline for reasons she can’t explain. And with the escalation of Eliza’s charm over the other girls, the birds are found plucking and hoarding the girls’ possessions. After Eliza leads the girls into the woods and encourages them to self-harm, (which Caroline prevents by spooking them from afar), it’s not long before the titular illness claims its first victim—Eliza.

The symptoms of this illness range from physical to mental. Eliza has a bright red spot in her eye, but her fainting spells are most concerning. The other students are quick to feel faint as well. Some have rashes, other have mysterious bruises. They’re all disoriented. All three teachers can’t help but wonder, is this a psychosomatic illness spread due to Eliza’s charisma? Samuel is afraid to send them home to receive medical care in fear of the public blaming their schooling on their poor constitutions.

While the cause of the illness is a compelling mystery, the primary theme of “The Illness Lesson” is the limitations of 19th century feminism. Education that allows girls to learn the same subjects as boys would merely serve as a tool to humor future husbands. (Or so Samuel and his fellow Birch Hill men point out.) Even Caroline imagines the women on her father’s commune were merely wives of men who ascribed to the beliefs in Samuel’s essays, rather than transcendentalists themselves. For all Samuel claims to want the world to realize “the soul does not have a gender,” he undermines Caroline every time she tries to assert herself. Beams evokes the loneliness of an independent woman who grew up alongside some of society’s great thinkers, yet is never encouraged to be a great thinker herself.

This novel was beautifully written and atmospheric. The storyline was complicated however and I do not feel that I fully grasped the author’s meaning. There were many elements but the y did not come together for me.
Many thanks to Doubleday Books and to NetGalley for providing me with a galley in exchange for my honest opinion.

The thing about The Illness Lesson is that it isn’t enough of anything. It isn’t historical enough, it isn’t weird enough, it isn’t feminist enough. The premise – girls at a boarding school who fall prey to a mysterious illness – sounds like it’s going to make for a positively entrancing book, but I could not have been more bored while reading this. It never felt grounded enough in its setting to really provide much commentary about the time period (which historical fiction is wont to do) – not to mention that about a quarter of the way through the book I had to ask a friend who was also reading it if it was set in the U.S. or the U.K.

There’s a recurring motif of red birds throughout the novel – strange red birds have flocked to the school for reasons no one knows. This was an intriguing thread that proved to be, like everything else in this book, utterly inconsequential; it’s empty symbolism shoehorned in in order to imbue this book with some kind of meaning that wasn’t actually there.

As for the girls falling ill: this plot point is relegated to the latter half of the book (what happens before that, I don’t think I could tell you), and I was frustrated and a little sick at the way their invasive treatment was narratively handled. This book does contain an element of rape, which is never given the depth or breadth it deserves; instead it seems like it’s there for shock value in the eleventh hour, not offering near enough insight to justify its inclusion.

On the whole, I found this book incredibly anemic and unsatisfying. I finished this a few weeks ago and I think, at the time, there was a reason I opted for 2 stars instead of 1, but I may need to downgrade my rating because I cannot think of a single thing I liked about this.

Thank you to Netgalley and Doubleday for the advanced copy provided in exchange for an honest review.

Terrific book. Absolutely loved it. Compelling characters and story line. Kept me interested the entire time.

From Goodreads review: 2.5 stars. Unfortunately. I will say it was a relief for me to hit that "I'm Finished" button here on Goodreads. Such a different and unfortunate feeling from me about this book from what I've seen on Twitter (mainly raving love for it). Here on Goodreads, the ratings do run a touch low - it has a 3.62 rating, so it's not great, but it's not that bad either.

I don't know if I can articulately explain why this wasn't the most engrossing read for me ....the bits with the birds in the book - were they meant to be unsettling and creepy? Because that really wasn't coming through for me. The part where the one student starts to fall into fits? I saw that as only manipulation on her part and her popularity with the other girls had them following along (mob mentality). The attempt to link behaviours to a book that was forbidden in Caroline's home, but was written by Eliza's father (the girl starting to exhibit troubling fits and fainting spells, etc.) fell quite short for me too.

I think I'm rambling up there - but if I was to get a sense of creepiness, or to feel unsettled over this experiment of an all-girls school that went wrong - I only ever felt a "meh" feeling towards it overall and was quite anxious for it to end. :-(

The Illness Lesson offers timely discussions of culpability, willful blindness, and toxic cultures and the impact all of that can have in the lives and bodies of women and girls. This is a tough but beautiful read, leavened only slightly by the ultimate agency and survival of its main character. The imagery of the invasive species of birds offers a fluid motif that gives the story weight and nuance, and demonstrates a serious engagement with the many ways of grappling with the build up to and aftermath of victimization. Recommended for fans of Megan Abbott.

What a thought provoking and unique read full of symbolism and beautiful prose that I enjoyed reading about. The setting of this book is in Ashwell Massachusetts in the year 1871. Samuel Hood starts a school for young women that he envisioned to be revolutionary in nature that teaches mathematics, literature and teaching these young women just as boys school have been taught at the time.
As a strange event with a flock of birds descends the town, the young ladies suddenly manifests these symptoms of fainting, rashes, headaches and wandering. A physician has been called and diagnosed the young girls with hysteria. The treatment administered for these young women is very disturbing.
All in all, I felt that this book was an important read though the subject matter may be uncomfortable. There are a lot of symbolisms in this writing that I enjoyed a lot. Overall, I was very glad to experience reading Claire Beams very talented writing.

In a small town in 19th century Massachusetts, a mysterious flock of red birds descends. At the same time, Samuel Hood, a prominent intellectual, has started a school for girls along with his daughter Caroline, and a follower named David. Samuel seeks to educate girls the same way boys have been educated- teaching them English literature, mathematics, classical languages, and to think critically, in a time where girls schools traditionally focused on needlepoint, music, how to become wives and mothers. Samuel believes he can change the world.

Then one of the students comes down with a mysterious illness and one by one, all the other girls do too. Rashes, fainting, headaches, night wanderings. Soon Caroline develops symptoms as well but tries to keep them hidden. That is, until a doctor is summoned and quickly determines it hysteria. Caroline is the only one who can speak up for the girls, but to do so would require questioning everything she’s ever been taught. Is she strong enough to confront the all-male, all-knowing authorities & protect the girls within her care? And what of those red birds & their strange behavior?

Claire Beams is a talented writer. She can turn phrases so beautifully. The idea of this novel was also fantastic. Unfortunately, I found this book to have some serious issues in structure and characterization (or at points, lack thereof). I really struggled to get into for a long time. For quite awhile I felt like I was missing pertinent information. There is so much talk of Samuel Hood, of Birch Hill, some kind of failed experiment. Birch Hill is absolutely essential to the novel and yet we literally don’t get the story of what happened with it until halfway through the book. There is also much talk of Samuel’s ideology and the essays he writes and his following, yet I never did feel like that ideology was particularly well developed or explained.

The girls were also rather indistinguishable, more a singular character than eight individuals but it occured to me first that the men loom so large in this book. Then I realized, the author, though female and writing ostensibly from a feminist bend, is somehow much better at writing men than women. There’s many ways Caroline, the only female who is really given much detail, doesn’t seem much different from the men, seems almost genderless or masculine, or maybe I just didn’t connect to her character. I certainly couldn’t relate to her well. There’s a sort of emotional detachment in Caroline even though the book is told from her point of view, even though the depth and quality of female emotions is an integral part of this book, as much as their brains, skill, and general ability to be intellectually as good or better than men. So I found parts of this book to hit like a punch in the gut but how much more powerful could it have been if we, as women readers in particular, could more easily relate to her.

Caroline was so focused on her a body in ways that, as someone who’s experienced a lot of sickness myself, I found really odd. I’ve found, and I suspect many would agree with me, that there is nothing quite like illness, especially if it’s the kind of illness others doubt or don’t understand, to pull one deep inside their head, to make one really question their life and aims, and illness forces one to live a great deal more internally as the external type is so difficult. I found it strange that even as Caroline grew and changed, she was overly focused on her body. Perhaps this was due to her father’s obsession with souls or perhaps- and much to the detriment of the greater story- it was something the author felt necessary to drive home her point. If so, it sure was heavy-handed. There’s a moral kind of lesson here and things you feel eventually while reading it, but a general lack of emotion in the pages. I think this was the books greatest flaw for me, personally.

All of this said, however, I genuinely do feel this is worth the read if the topic interests you. I had a very visceral reaction at the books climax, when we meet Dr. Hawkins. There’s far too much that simply hasn’t changed in the way women and girls are treated. That section vividly and painfully brought to mind my own traumas and while we no longer have doctors forcing orgasms on so-called “hysterical” women, have we really changed much? We force internal ultrasounds in some states on women who elect to have abortions. Pelvic and rectal exams are regularly forced on scared women and children in ERs. While one has a right to refuse or at least demand a female practitioner, I’ve been in situations myself where so much like in this book I was coerced and spoken to very demeaningly and manipulatively, told I must not really want to get better, or told I’m not really sick at all. In some ways I would hesitate to recommend this one to others who bear the scars and trauma I do, but this book may be exactly the thing for some of them. It is strange though, how a book I struggled to connect to and that seemed to generally be lacking in emotion could, at least in that part, make me feel so much. I was enraged, and I only wish the women and girls in this book had been allowed any anger at all.

Many mixed feelings, yet some beautiful writing that I spent a lot of time highlighting. I think this one would make for some interesting discussions and I do hope others are able to gain something from it. I would absolutely read other work by Claire Beams. This one just missed the mark for me.

Try, try and try again - we continue to try and describe female hysteria in a way that will make sense and it never quite hits the mark. The symbolism in this book is rather heavy handed but language and lovely prose made this a quick read.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book.

I am not quite sure how this title first caught my attention, but I really enjoyed it! Beams is quite a talented writer! There's a lot crammed into this relatively short novel (under 300 pages). It's tightly written, fascinating and has quite the mounting sense of dread as the novel progresses. Set in 1871 in Ashwell, Massachusetts, the book feels authentically researched and though the girls' school, The Trilling Heart School, is progressive, it still seems to accurately reflect the era.

Caroline, a sheltered book smart 29 year old, has grown up in the shadow of her mother's death and her father's failures - both in his personal and professional life. Caroline really makes for a fascinating narrator and Beams has her identifying with their 15-year-old students in a way that manages to feel so authentic. It is really set up well! The author really does a wonderful job building a foundation for this story that creates this shared sense of tense suspense of what is yet to come.

The adult characters, more than the children, are fully developed and Beams makes their weaknesses apparent. This really rounds them all out and adds yet another layer to make this feel so genuine. Hawkins' rose is particularly well set-up from the beginning - and while this book ends up being much darker than I expected, I really enjoyed it. The plot takes some surprising (and horrifying) turns and the ending is satisfying enough. I think that this would make an excellent choice for book clubs, because there is a lot to unpack and discuss here! I really couldn't set this down!

"A searing novel which probes the world's approach to women's bodies and women's minds, and the time-honored tradition of doubting both.

At their newly founded school, Samuel Hood and his daughter Caroline promise a groundbreaking education for young women. But Caroline has grave misgivings. After all, her own unconventional education has left her unmarriageable and isolated, unsuited to the narrow roles afforded women in 19th century New England.

When a mysterious flock of red birds descends on the town, Caroline alone seems to find them unsettling. But it's not long before the assembled students begin to manifest bizarre symptoms: Rashes, seizures, headaches, verbal tics, night wanderings. One by one, they sicken. Fearing ruin for the school, Samuel overrules Caroline's pleas to inform the girls' parents and turns instead to a noted physician, a man whose sinister ministrations - based on a shocking historic treatment - horrify Caroline. As the men around her continue to dictate, disastrously, all terms of the girls' experience, Caroline's body too begins to betray her. To save herself and her young charges, she will have to defy every rule that has governed her life, her mind, her body, and her world.

Clare Beams's extraordinary debut story collection We Show What We Have Learned earned comparisons to Shirley Jackson, Karen Russell and Aimee Bender, and established Beams as a writer who "creates magical-realist pieces that often calculate the high cost of being a woman" (The Rumpus). Precisely observed, hauntingly atmospheric, as fiercely defiant as it is triumphant, The Illness Lesson is a spellbinding piece of storytelling."

Anyone garnering comparisons to Shirley Jackson is a must read in my book.