"The Illness Lesson" is a haunting and timely novel that deftly combines the elements of a classical ghost story with a resonant scream of female outrage. Set in 1871 on the farm of Samuel Hood and his daughter, Caroline, the arrival of a mysterious flock of red birds coincides with Samuel's ambitious, albeit flawed, plan to start a school for young women.

The novel excels in its portrayal of the intellectual and societal constraints placed on women during the period. As the young students at Samuel’s school begin to exhibit alarming symptoms, the narrative delves into a chilling exploration of women's health and the skepticism with which it is treated. The author's vivid prose brings to life the desperation and frustration of Caroline and the students as they confront the dismissive and patronizing attitudes of the male-dominated society.

Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

This is a compelling gothic read which is well written.
There were some trigger warnings for abuse.
I wasn’t a huge fan of the characters in this book.

This was good. Well worth the hype around it. I'm sorry that I missed reading it as an ARC and had to get it later though.

There was much to enjoy here, but I found I couldn't connect with it. I'd read more from this author in the future though.

I had high hopes for this book but I just found it mostly bland and missing some magical ingredient to make it zing. The characters were all wishy washy and it would have benefited from more viewpoints than just Caroline's.

I really struggled with this book – From the description I expect to thoroughly enjoy it, but the reality was that I found it very difficult to get into and I struggled to complete it (which is very unusual for me)
I found the characters very difficult to engage with and the storyline didn’t quite hit the mark either.

Caroline Hood is a young woman living on a farm in Massachusetts in the 19th century with her father, Samuel. More progressive than the average 19th century gentleman, Samuel has encouraged Caroline’s learning and along with a friend, David, proposes to set up a boarding school for young women where they can stretch their intellect. Unfortunately, Samuel already has one failed similar venture under his belt and a certain amount of notoriety. When the school’s pupils start to arrive, a fateful choice of student by Caroline sets events in motion and the girls soon start succumbing to a shared hysteria. Caroline desperately tries to keep control but finds her voice growing smaller by the day.

The story may be set in the past but the issues, sadly remain the same. I don’t want to give away the plot, but the last third of the book has certain similarities and parallels with recent news events. Any authority Caroline has turns out to be an illusion in the face of the esteemed gentlemen of the world. There’s a lot happening in this book and the plot moves along at quite a pace. It’s part gothic, part historical fiction and is full of intrigue and mystery. The author has crafted a melting plot of a book and I found it thoroughly enjoyable. It’s a really interesting premise and I found it really well executed. A change of pace from the crime fiction I normally read but no less enjoyable. Recommend.

I received a ARC from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for a fair review.

This novel didn't quite live up to its promise for me.

I wanted the characters to sing more than they did. While understandable for the times, Caroline was a frustrated and frustrating character to follow.

I would read more of Clare Beams work but unfortunately I didn't love this one. The cover design is stunning.

Wow it hadn't read anything like this for a long time. Very original, and very thought-provoking. The author's voice is a much-appreciated one. Loved it.

Philosopher Samuel has already suffered much, the failure of a commune project and the death of his wife plus a fiction written by his brother that casts him in a bad light. When a strange flock of red birds arrives on his property Samuel decides it is time for something new and he sets up a school designed to educate young ladies to think. In the 1870s in New England this is thought of as very progressive and even his daughter Caroline is cynical. As the students begin to fall ill with strange symptoms an old physician friend is brought in but his treatment method shocks Caroline to the core.
This is a very thought-provoking book which is shocking yet very quietly written. The back-story of the failure of the commune is hinted at darkly and the details that inspired the novel about Samuel's marriage are also shrouded yet they provide a sense of history repeating itself as the tragedy unfolds. I found this story sucked me in and the birds act as an extended metaphor throughout with their unusual behaviour, magpie tendencies and 'nesting'. This is a powerful story about women and the control of their own lives.

I was beyond excited for this book – on paper this sounds like my type of book to the extreme. Its central conceit is a fabulist metaphor, it focusses women and their bodies, and the writing is lyrical enough without being flowery. I think this would have worked a lot better for me had it been a short story. As it was, I did not find it weird enough or realistic enough for me to work. I found the characters indistinct and never got a proper impression of the place – something that would have helped ground me in the world Beams builds here. I am (maybe unfairly) blaming this book for my reading slump because I have been reading it for two months, feeling too guilty to pick up another litfic kind of book and dreading having to pick it back up – so yesterday I decided to just not keep doing that. This is not a bad book and I might have actually rated it 3 stars had I kept with it, but it is very much not the book for me. I struggle with historical fiction and really wish this had been weirder.

In the 1990s there were a series of bizarre cases involving strip search phone call scams in rural areas of the US. A man claiming to be a police officer called many restaurants and grocery stores accusing female employees of theft and demanded that the manager strip search these young women. This happened in over 70 venues and, surprisingly, many of the managers carried out these invasive, humiliating searches only to later discover they were a hoax. An example from this case was dramatised in the 2012 film 'Compliance' whose story would have felt far fetched if it hadn't been based on a number of real documented cases. Institutional power can lead many ordinary people to commit outrageous acts of physical and sexual violence simply because a figure of perceived authority orders them to. I was reminded of this while reading Clare Beams' excellent debut novel “The Illness Lesson” because even though it's set in private girls' school in New England in the 1870s its themes are still very relevant today. It movingly and artfully describes how hierarchical structures can normalise such abuse, especially when men are in a position of power and have control over young women.

The novel focuses on Caroline, the only daughter of an influential intellectual named Samuel who starts a progressive school for girls. Many years prior Samuel had been one of the founders of a failed commune and he seeks to partly redeem himself with this new venture. Caroline joins in his plan as a teacher alongside another ambitious young intellectual David Moore, one of Samuel's devotees. They create a makeshift schoolhouse in the barn of the former commune and attract several adolescent girls to join as their first students. In this isolated situation the girls develop strange hysterical ailments after Eliza, the most charismatic girl among the group falls ill. As the teachers desperately seek a solution to prevent their school from failing, things quickly unravel and drastic steps are taken.

There's an engaging tension and poignant conflict to Caroline's character as she's had quite an isolated life being raised by her father after her mother died during Caroline's girlhood. She's Samuel's daughter but also a kind of protege and his minder. While she is devoted to him, she also feels unruly passions stirring within her and a desire for life outside of the intensely circumscribed boundaries of this intellectual household. She feels “They had trapped her in their plans, these men.” This claustrophobia and suppressed desire is expressed with beautiful imagery in the form of strange vibrant red birds which take up residence in their area. These birds are simultaneously alluring and intimidating as they drift through the backdrop of the story, stealing from the girls for their nests and swarming in the distance. It's such an evocative metaphor for all the conflicting inner desires that both Caroline and the girls are experiencing.

In the mid-1800s there were a number of communal experiments associated with the Transcendental movement. Most of these communities soon collapsed as high-minded thinkers quickly found the reality of agricultural living too challenging. Novels such as Hawthorne's “The Blithedale Romance” and Louisa May Alcott's “Transcendental Wild Oats” satirise these failed communes. Clare Beams also creates a novel within her novel called The Darkening Glass written by Miles Pearson, a former member and dissident of Samuel's commune. Pearson is deceased but his presence is felt throughout the story as Eliza is his daughter and each chapter of “The Illness Lesson” begins with epigraphs taken from his fictional novel. The Darkening Glass is also set on the school grounds where the commune used to be so this location is haunted both by this failed community and Pearson's fictional depiction of it. It's clever how Beams creates this layered sense of history in this location which adds tremendously to the atmosphere of the story.

There’s something classically dramatic and engaging about this novel and the situation it portrays. It’s a bit like Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible’ and a bit like Alcott’s “Little Women”, but has a strong feminist perspective about the way women and girls are often categorized and controlled in society. Yet it also has its own striking poetic quality which subtly describes these young women’s ambiguous feelings and how each navigates development in her own unique way. The story is also filled with a lot of tension between the girls, Caroline and David’s wife Sophia who all wrestle with their own jealousies and struggle for dominance amongst the group. This makes it a riveting tale as well as a shocking one when the ideals of this progressive school entirely collapse. Because all the action of the novel is contained in one location reading it felt a bit like watching a play. At times it seemed to me like the author was controlling the situation too tightly to keep the story at Caroline and Samuel’s country house and therefore bring the story to a crisis point. But this is a minor quibble within a book that’s so intelligent and forceful in the larger statements it makes. I greatly admire the power and passion of this novel.

This debut novel’s synopsis grabbed me from the start, with its promise of 19th Century gothic contrasted with ‘a modern scream of female outrage’. There is a lot about illness, medicine and it’s treatment of women that still provokes rage in me, so I had something to connect with from the start. I wasn’t disappointed by Beam’s novel and feel the need to buy a beautiful hardback copy for my collection, as this is a book I’ll want to read again.

Living in New England, Caroline Hood is a woman in between. Thanks to her education she seems overqualified for marriage and won’t fit into the very specific roles women are allowed in Victorian society. As such she is isolated from her peers and can’t relate to their experiences. With some concerns, given her own place in society, she starts a school for young women with her father, Samuel. Soon after, an unusual flock of red birds descends on the town. Caroline finds them unsettling, but the townsfolk largely continue as normal. Then the students start to display strange symptoms, headaches, rashes and sleep walking. Caroline wants to consult the girl’s parents but her father instead sends for a well known physician whose treatments seem horrific. The men continue to diagnose and dictate the girls experience, and Caroline tries to find a way to save her pupils just as her own body starts to fail her.

I have recently been researching gender bias in healthcare where patients have chronic pain and the results are startling for the end of the 20th Century. There are still the stereotypes of stoic men and sensitive women, and when both genders arrived at A and E with exactly the same pain symptoms men were treated far more seriously, were more likely to be investigated and referred on. The idea of the ‘hysteric’ is alive and well in the NHS, especially where the invisible disabilities like M.E and Fibromyalgia are concerned. So for me, the treatment of the young women in this novel is part of a long prejudice that we haven’t fully left behind, but has thankfully become more humane in terms of treatment. The psychological damage wrought by 19th Century treatments for hysteria is horrifying and difficult to recover from. The fact that others stood by and did nothing is a horrible betrayal, especially where they are supposed to love and care for the patient. This book is an important portrayal of the historical tendency of men to proscribe and contain women’s identities.

There are parts of the book that are emotionally unsettling and difficult to read, but important to understand. I was determined to know whether the girls and Caroline in particular, had the strength to defy the oppression they were under. I was also interested in the contradictory aims of providing progressive education to these girls, only to oppress them in a different way. However, because I enjoyed it and devoured it so quickly there were aspects of the ending I need to go back and fully understand. This was an intelligent, beautifully written novel that addresses important issues about women, the aims of education, and the role of illness in society.

Thank you to NetGalley for my copy of the novel in exchange for an honest review.

This is a heavy book that demands your full attention. I've been completely absorbed in it all day. I feel like I've been left with a literary bruise to nurse. Loved the writing style. Chillingly eerie.

My thanks to Random House U.K. Transworld Publishers for an eARC via NetGalley of ‘The Illness Lesson’ by Clare Beams in exchange for an honest review.

In 1871 Massachusetts, Samuel Hood and his daughter, Caroline, are surprised when a flock of mysterious red birds descend on their farm, Birch Hill. These unusual birds had been named the Trilling Hearts by Caroline’s late mother some twenty-five years previously when they first appeared. Samuel, whose fame as a philosopher is waning, takes their return as a sign that the time is ripe for his new venture.

He decides to open a school for young women and guide their intellectual development as he had his daughter’s. Caroline has misgivings but Samuel is determined to bring forward his revolutionary agenda. They open with only eight students. One of these is Eliza, the daughter of Samuel’s former colleague, Miles Pearson, who had been part of Samuel’s earlier social experiment at Birch Hill.

Miles had abandoned the project and written ‘The Darkening Glass’, a titillating tale of the supernatural, that had become very famous. Its villain is a thinly disguised Samuel and its romanticised heroine was widely believed to be based on Caroline’s mother. It is the only book forbidden in the Hood household and Samuel refuses to discuss it. Each chapter of ‘The Illness Lesson’ opens with a quote from ‘The Darkening Glass’.

Soon after the school opens the students begin to manifest bizarre symptoms. The first student to fall ill is Eliza and the others soon follow. Caroline is concerned that the others are following Eliza’s lead given her dominant personality.

As the girls’ symptoms worsen, Samuel turns to Hawkins, another of the former Birch Hill men and a physician in Boston. Caroline must confront these men who assume, despite their progressive ideas, that the voices of the women are unreliable.

This was definitely an unsettling read in places yet I felt that it was appropriate given the plot and historical context. Clare Beams had clearly done her research into the treatment of ‘hysteria’ during this period and in her Acknowledgements provides a few source texts on this subject and on girl schools.

She credits Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Transcendental Wild Oats’ as sowing the seeds for the creation of the Birch Hill community and I am now curious to seek it out.

I found Caroline’s journey a compelling one. The fictional birds were quite fascinating and seemed almost otherworldly. This is a novel that I would welcome rereading given its multiple layers, rich symbolism and exquisite prose.

Despite a couple of professional reviewers mentioning this as a ghost story, I didn’t really feel that this description applied. Ghosts or ‘celestial guests’ and the supernatural are discussed intellectually in the context of Miles Pearson’s novel inflaming the girls’ imaginations. This is different than the farm being haunted.

Overall, a powerful novel that I highly recommend.

Clare Beams’ debut novel, The Illness Lesson, is set in Massachusetts in 1871 and is narrated in the third person by Caroline, an unmarried woman in her late twenties who still lives with her father, Samuel, and feels stifled by the narrowness of her life; as she reflects when lying in bed ‘where she lay in the same darkness that had covered her at twenty-four, eighteen, twelve, eight, the walls and ceiling of her room like a box that fit her’. Caroline’s world promises to change when Samuel starts a progressive school for young ladies in their home, aiming to teach them such masculine subjects as Greek and philosophy, and recruiting Caroline to teach English literature. However, the presence of the girls, coupled with the strange behaviour of the trilling hearts, the imaginary species of bird that haunt the school’s environs, starts to stir up old secrets from the past and new tensions in the present.

The Illness Lesson’s blurb foregrounds the group of students, but this is really Caroline’s story, and she’s a convincing narrator, acutely aware of the loneliness of her position as intellectual companion to her father, and unsure whether it is fair to educate girls in a world that does not give them the opportunity to exercise their talents. Beams is a skilful writer, and the quiet prose is consistently vivid and impressive. The problem for me was that the story the novel focuses on is so familiar. There have been lots of post-Victorian fictions about female hysteria and its abusive treatments, and I didn’t think that this one brought anything very new, even though it is elevated by Beams’ careful telling. 3.5 stars.

This isn‘t my usual genre but I enjoyed it anyway. (not amazing, but good! 😁)

In 1871 Caroline‘s father decides to open a school for girls. There‘s clearly some hidden history and, when the girls arrive, so does a mysterious flock of red birds and soon the girls display signs of hysteria.

I very nearly bailed at the beginning, as the novel started with too many 'unknowns' for me - I'm not keen on narratives that look back with hints as to what has happened in the past. This also felt like it had an element of magical realism in it, which isn't my thing. However I persevered and came to enjoy the book, particularly once the girls arrived.

It did get a bit weird at times, particularly when the doctor was carrying out his treatments, which I found a little distasteful.

The book is a little reminiscent of ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock‘.

Really enjoyed this book. It was very well written, interesting story and very timely.
Characters were engaging and I was totally hooked.

Thanks a lot to NG and the publisher for this copy!

The Illness Lesson by Clare Beams seemed like my type of book. It was historical fiction at its base but also dealt with other issues. It looked at the sheltered life of women and how they had to conform to man’s whim, it looked at parental control, and it had a mystery element to it.

And it was a good story. I enjoyed it. It did take a while for me to get into the story but once I was in it I really enjoyed it but more for the feminist elements.

The Illness Lesson is a good read and for anyone who enjoys historical fiction.

The Illness Lesson by Clare Beams is available now.

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