praise for The Illness Lesson
“Astoundingly original, this impressive debut belongs on the shelf with your Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler collections.” —New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice)
“Unusual and transporting…This is Alcott meets Shirley Jackson, with a splash of Margaret Atwood.”
—Washington Post
“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.”
—Kirkus (starred review)
“Stylistically, the two novels are near opposites. Thomas sets Oligarchy in contemporary England and writes in snappy prose, while Beams locates The Illness Lesson in 1800s Massachusetts and expertly blends 19th-century and modern diction. But both are set at all-girls boarding schools, which prove fertile settings for exploring patriarchal authority…Beams and Thomas also vary the unvarying: Steering their protagonists toward liberation, they seem to suggest that an honest reckoning with misogyny might produce not only solidarity, but also change.”
—The Atlantic
“Beams’s first novel is a meticulously crafted suspense tale seething with feminist fury.”
—O, the Oprah Magazine
“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 other times sympathetic, and always wholly compelling and beautifully rendered.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“The Illness Lesson’ is a broodingly good feminist horror story…Beams is a gifted writer of “slipstream,” or that thin ice in a good story where audience expectation gives way to well-imagined plausibility…The horror of this book was understanding with a shudder that the Samuels, the Davids and the Hawkinses of this world are practicing medicine, swiping right and running Congress. Oh, for the love of Louisa May, what are we to do?”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“[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
“In this thrilling work of historical fiction, adolescent girls at a school in 1870s New England are subjected to an outrageous medical treatment at the hands of paternalistic doctors. Frightening, suspenseful, and timely, The Illness Lesson explores the crushing weight of oppression and the indefatigable power of female defiance.”
—Esquire
“Masterfully considered…Clare Beams’ cool, cutting prose hypnotically evokes the oppression of female bodies and minds.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“After a strange flock of birds flies into town in Beams’ debut novel, the students at an all-girls school in 19th- century Massachusetts begin to develop headaches, rashes and odd sleepwalking habits. As they grow sicker, a doctor with a questionable track record is invited to campus, his presence underlining a timely conversation about who claims control of women’s bodies.”
—Time Magazine
“Daring…[a] powerful and resonant feminist story.”
—Publishers Weekly
“The tide of feminine anger that flows through Clare Beams’ arresting, beautifully written debut novel The Illness Lesson is as fierce and unexpected as the strange, blood-red birds…Beams pits masculine arrogance against feminine rebellion in artful ways, illustrating how easily good intentions can be wielded as a tool for oppression. She invests us deeply in Caroline’s warring loyalties—to her father, to the students, to herself. Even more impressive is her skill at making her persuasive social commentary secondary to her unnerving ability to tell a good story.”
—Newsday
“Clare Beams' writing is a revelation...The Illness Lesson is a strange novel, although its strangeness is a crucial part of its appeal. A fascinating mix of genres (the school story, body horror, paean to feminist anger), it manages to achieve all the things that the best historical fiction should.”
—Irish Independent
“[T]his haunting novel blends historical fiction with
a timely comment on women’s bodies and minds, and those
who think they can control them.”
—Stylist Magazine
“A bit Little Women, a bit The Fever, Beams’s first novel is an unsettling parable of women’s pain.”
—Electric Literature (Favorite Novels of 2020)
“Beams’s highly readable but unsettling debut novel has a 19th-century elegance and Gothic tone attuned perfectly to its themes of shadows from the past, omens, men’s control over women’s bodies and the hint of a malign force just beyond our ken.”
—The Herald Scotland
“The Illness Lesson combines the feminine camaraderie found in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women with the simmering anger of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s proto-feminist short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and the result is both savagely acute in its portrayal of misogyny and tenderly hopeful in its trajectory.”
—Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“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.”
—Library Journal
“Haunting… Beams has proved adept at conjuring a macabre, slightly off-kilter world.”
—Columbia Magazine
“…an astonishing book…This fictive evocation of ‘a world that does not exist’ is a luminous addition to ‘the world in which we live.’”
—New York Journal of Books
“Quietly brutal, at times hallucinatory, and laced with emotional trap doors and secret passages, The Illness Lesson vibrates with a slow burning fury…Clare Beams is not the first contemporary writer to hand a gothic story back to the women at its center—Margaret Atwood, Jean Rhys, Angela Carter, and Shirley Jackson (just to name a few) have been at this for some time—but you don’t need to be one of the first to be one of the best. Beautifully written, carefully plotted, and utterly devastating, The Illness Lesson will gnaw on your heart long after you’ve put it down.”
—Fiction Writers Review
“The Illness Lesson evokes the atmosphere of a dark fairy tale with transcendentalist values…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.”
—WBUR
“…a scathing indictment of early toxic masculinity, a measured diatribe against male-dominated medical and educational institutions… a blistering condemnation of a patriarchal society which would deter the empowerment of independent female thinking.”
—Washington Independent Review of Books
“Beautiful and unsettling, The Illness Lesson is a stunning parable of female oppression. Because of the author’s wonderful ability to evoke the atmosphere of Victorian Massachusetts, the story reads like a modern gothic nail-biter of a novel, in the vein of Alias Grace and Melmoth the Wanderer. Caroline’s inner life is intimately depicted, enabling the reader to understand what it must have meant to be a woman in an era when ‘females’ were not to allowed to know their own minds, souls, or bodies. Highly, highly recommended.”
—Historical Novels Review, Editors’ Choice
“The book has the feel of a sleek modern novel in the costume dress of an earlier time, which gives it an allegorical atmosphere…This reckoning leads the reader to understand this novel’s power as a realist fable and a historical novel about the horrors of today.”
—The Common
“The Illness Lesson is a brilliant, suspenseful, beautifully executed psychological thriller. With power, subtlety, and keen intelligence, Clare Beams has somehow crafted a tale that feels like both classical ghost story and like a modern (and very timely) scream of female outrage. I stayed up all night to finish reading it, and I can still feel its impact thrumming through my mind and body. A masterpiece.”
—Elizabeth Gilbert, author of City of Girls
“Stunningly good—a brainy page-turner that’s gorgeous and frightening in equal measure. The Illness Lesson dazzled me.”
—Leni Zumas, author of Red Clocks
“I read The Illness Lesson over the course of two feverish days, as if one of the afflicted girls at Trilling Heart School, possessed and enthralled by the sly beauty of the prose and by Clare Beams’s riveting insights on women’s bodies and power. A beautiful, timely novel by a writer with a once-in-a-lifetime imagination—I’m a Clare Beams fan for the long haul, and this knockout will win her legions more.”
—Julie Buntin, author of Marlena
“The bravery of Beams is contagious in this beautifully written and radically profound book. The Illness Lesson glows with guts, questioning where nature and knowledge, control and disease meet in young women. Beams’s astonishing accomplishment radiates terror, joy and wonder as this narrative, deeply grounded in the female body, takes flight.”
—Samantha Hunt, author of The Dark Dark
“The Illness Lesson truly shook me. In prose so sharp it cuts through the decades and arrives at the present day, Clare Beams takes a shocking moment out of true history, and brings it to life. You want to know how horrifying things happened while decent people looked on and did nothing? Read this novel. I believed every nuance of these characters’ thoughts, the conflicts waging war inside their own minds, their devastation, and their courage. I was immensely moved by this story, and the people who populate its pages.”
—Mary Beth Keane, author of Ask Again, Yes
“Narrated from a painfully intimate perspective, The Illness Lesson explores the consequences of an outrageous medical treatment inflicted upon adolescent girls in 1870’s New England to cure “hysteria.” In Clare Beams’s luminous and suspenseful prose, the unspeakable is spoken, falteringly at first, then with triumphant strength. Its timeliness will be evident to readers for whom the suppression of female sexuality/ identity is an ongoing and urgent issue.”
—Joyce Carol Oates, author of Pursuit
“Clare Beams has a compellingly edgy sense of just how quietly ubiquitous both the surreal and the oppressive can be in our lives. The Illness Lesson features a memorably appealing young protagonist who, even given her time and place, persists in questioning why powerful and mostly well-meaning men who otherwise see with such clarity can remain so blind to so much.”
—Jim Shepard, author of The World to Come
“After Clare Beams' short story collection, We Show What We Have Learned, I'd follow her anywhere. The Illness Lesson proves that Beams can work just as much creepy magic in the length of a novel as she can in a shorter format. This book gave me chills.”
—Mary Laura Philpott, bookseller at Parnassus Books, Nashville, TN
“Clare Beams’ debut novel plays an eerie, off-balance minor chord progression, descending a newly-formed all-girls school into madness (from the male doctor's perspective) or into frustration (from the female schoolteachers and childrens' perspective). Both my heart and my tear ducts were full reading about something so personal and dear that I could never articulate as eloquently as Beams does in this book.”
—Olivia Zisman, bookseller at BookPeople, Austin, TX
“The Illness Lesson is a finely crafted tale of gothic feminism. Not since duMaurier’s Rebecca has dread been so perfectly paced. A flock of nearly extinct red birds descends upon a bold social experiment in 1871: an intellectually rigorous boarding school. For girls. The small staff includes Caroline Hood and her father, an aging philosopher determined to redeem his reputation. But when the students begin to exhibit strange rashes and fits, the doctor is called. Modern women will recognize the humiliations that follow. If The Handmaid’s Tale imagines the future, The Illness Lesson reveals its sinister roots. Don’t miss this one.”
—Ann Woodbeck, bookseller at Excelsior Bay Books, Excelsior, MN
“Imagine if Little Women or Jane Eyre were written by Shirley Jackson. This might be one of the most feminist books I've ever read. The fact that it is set in the late 19th Century and full of delicious, historical details makes it subversive, as well. I loved Beams' book of short stories, so I thought I was ready for this novel. I was not. It's original, deeply disturbing, beautiful, and absolutely horrifying. Her descriptions of Hawkins made me want a shower. ALONE.”
—Angela Schroeder, booksller at Sunrise Books, High Point, NC
“Clare Beams’ luminous handling of women’s hysteria in 1871 Massachusetts segues into an impressive lesson about decision making in general. Who or what is selecting our intentions: educators, spiritualists, professionals, parents, scientists, gut instincts, and does gender matter? How many bits of each of us are ensnared within the nest of the social role? What happens when we fly away? Thank you Clare Beams for giving us the courage to consider!”
—Kayleen Rohrer, bookseller at Ink Link, East Troy, WI