The Illness Lesson

A Novel

By: Clare Beams

Narrated by: Ann Marie Lee

A New York Times Editors’ Choice

Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

“Astoundingly original.” (The New York Times Book Review)

From the author of the award-winning debut story collection We Show What We Have Learned, a vivid work of historical fiction with shocking and eerie connections to our own time.

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 own body 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.

©2020 Clare Beams (P)2020 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"[This] gripping novel meditates on how an all-male establishment can denying women’s pain, and how the consequences can shape a society." (Vanity Fair)

"Beams’ first novel is a meticulously crafted suspense tale seething with feminist fury." (O: The Oprah Magazine)

"Masterfully considered...Clare Beams’ cool, cutting prose hypnotically evokes the oppression of female bodies and minds." (Entertainment Weekly)

Circling the drain

DNF. Tried and tried, but this story never picked up in intensity and by 2/3 in I felt no understanding of, connection to, like or dislike of any of the characters or even the setting. It had potential, certainly, but I felt like the story was just kind of spinning it’s wheels and circling the drain. Going nowhere fast, but not fast enough for me to waste valuable reading time on it.
No knocks on the performance, other than the fact that by this point in the audiobook I still had to keep looking up whether it was taking place in England or the US. The accent was somewhere in the middle.