The New York Times Book Review - Siobhan Jones
Think City Upon a Hill ideals and The Scarlet Letter-style misogyny and you'll have a pretty good idea of this sly debut novel, which scarily hints that, since the 19th century, perhaps not a whole lot has changed…Best of all is Beams's tone: ironic and arch when relaying the spirited optimism of Samuel's precious experiments, urgent and sinister when depicting their nightmarish outcomes. Astoundingly original, this impressive debut belongs on the shelf with your Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler collections.
Publishers Weekly
12/02/2019
Beams’s daring debut novel (after the story collection We Show What We Have Learned) imagines a school for teenage girls in the mid-19th century Massachusetts countryside. Here, at a failed commune, sensitive Caroline lives with her idealistic, ambitious father, Samuel, and his admirer David, for whom 20-something Caroline harbors secret feelings. When Samuel starts a school dedicated to the intellectual awakening of its eight young women students, things quickly go astray. Following the lead of Eliza, the daughter of a rival of Samuel, the girls begin to exhibit a variety of physical ailments—headaches, skin irritations, and sleepwalking—as does, to her own horror, Caroline, a teacher at the school. When an unscrupulous doctor is brought in to test an experimental treatment on the girls, Caroline must decide whether to stay loyal to her father or question his authority. Though there is a fantastical thread about a flock of mysterious, aggressive, blood-red birds that doesn’t fit well with the otherwise plausible plot, Beams excels in her depiction of Caroline, an intriguingly complex character, and in her depiction of the school, which allows the reader a clear view of changing gender roles in the period, with parallels to today’s sexual abuse scandals. This powerful and resonant feminist story will move readers. (Feb.) Correction: An earlier version of this review misspelled the author's first name.
From the Publisher
LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE • A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE
“Brilliant, suspenseful. . . . A masterpiece.” —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of City of Girls
"Astoundingly original.” —The New York Times Book Review
“This is Alcott meets Shirley Jackson, with a splash of Margaret Atwood. . . . Unusual and transporting.” —Washington Post
“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
“Part horror, part case study and . . . part feminist polemic. . . . [The novel’s antagonist] is a true and timeless 21st century villain.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Both savagely acute in its portrayal of misogyny and tenderly hopeful in its trajectory.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“[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
“Expertly blends 19th-century and modern diction. . . . Steering [her] protagonist toward liberation, [Beams] seem to suggest that an honest reckoning with misogyny might produce not only solidarity, but also change.” —The Atlantic
“Frightening, suspenseful, and timely, The Illness Lesson explores the crushing weight of oppression and the indefatigable power of female defiance.” —Esquire
“A haunting psychological thriller about society’s preoccupation with controlling women’s minds and bodies. . . . [An] arresting, beautifully written debut novel.” —Newsday
“An astonishing book. . . . Beams shows a kind of mastery in yoking the natural to the surreal and linking grief and fear to rage.” —New York Journal of Books
“Provocative. . . . A scathing indictment of early toxic masculinity, a measured diatribe against male-dominated medical and educational institution.” —The Washington Independent Review of Books
“Clare Beams’ writing is a revelation. . . . A fascinating mix of genres (the school story, body horror, paean to feminist anger), [The Illness Lesson] manages to achieve all the things that the best historical fiction should.” —Irish Independent
“Beams takes risk after risk in this, her first novel, and they all seem to pay off. Her ventriloquizing of the late 19th century, her delicate-as-lace sentences, and the friction between the unsettling thinking of the period and its 21st century resonances make for an electrifying read.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Luminous. . . . This suspenseful and vividly evocative tale expertly explores women's oppression as well as their sexuality through the eyes of a heroine who is sometimes maddening, at othertimes sympathetic, and always wholly compelling and beautifully rendered." —Booklist (starred review)
“Daring. . . . [A] powerful and resonant feminist story.” —Publishers Weekly
Library Journal
12/01/2019
DEBUT In 1871, scholar/philosopher Samuel Hood lives in Ashwell, MA, on a farm that was previously the site of a utopian community experiment. That experiment has long since failed, and Hood's new plan is to educate young women to be equals to their male counterparts. Hood and adult daughter Caroline, a devotee of his philosophy, will head up the faculty. The students arrive, including one connected to the farm's previous function. But a secret lies waiting to be revealed, and the students soon begin to show signs of illness. One has a strange rash. Another has a verbal tic. A third has "fits." Hood calls on a psychiatric physician he knows to treat the girls for what seems to be group hysteria. The psychiatrist's sinister treatment, amounting to sexual abuse, is condoned by the men at the farm despite their misgivings and Caroline's outright protests. VERDICT Bard Prize winner Beams (We Show What We Have Learned) successfully shapes the characters who tell the story, capturing the mores of the times and delving deeply into the psychological aspects of the situation. The underlying secret creates a tension that is resolved only in the final pages. Readers of general fiction will enjoy. [See Prepub Alert, 8/5/19.]—Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2019-10-14
A progressive all-girls school in 1870s Massachusetts is thrown into chaos when its residents begin to experience inexplicable maladies.
Caroline Hood is the daughter of one of the most prominent thinkers in New England. Her father, Samuel, is a widowed essayist best known for a failed social experiment—a sort of utopian village—he attempted when Caroline was a child. This failure was lightly fictionalized in one of the period's most popular novels, The Darkening Glass. So when Samuel gets the idea to found a rigorous school to teach girls about their "deepest selves" on the site of the failed community, Caroline, now in her late 20s, is apprehensive. This apprehension deepens when one of their pupils, Eliza, turns out to be the daughter of the man who wrote The Darkening Glass. Eliza's presence is even more disruptive than Caroline and Samuel feared: Though an intelligent and mature student, Eliza seems more interested in prying into the secrets of the Hoods' past than in her studies. When Eliza suddenly begins manifesting strange physical ailments—seizurelike fits, mysterious markings, hysteria—the other girls soon come down with them, too. Caroline assumes some kind of manipulation; that is, until they start happening to her. When her father calls upon a physician, a family friend who seems to share Samuel's forward thinking, to treat the girls, the world that Caroline and her father tried to build is in danger, once again, of crashing down. Beams (We Show What We Have Learned, 2016) takes risk after risk in this, her first novel, and they all seem to pay off. Her ventriloquizing of the late 19th century, her delicate-as-lace sentences, and the friction between the unsettling thinking of the period and its 21st century resonances make for an electrifying read.
A satisfyingly strange novel from the one-of-a-kind Beams.
