Review
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“[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’s 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
“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)
"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
“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
“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 Book of Aron
"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 ins 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 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
“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
"Narrated from a painfully perspective, The Illness
Lesson explores the consequences of an outrageous medical
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
“This haunting novel blends historical fiction with
a timely
comment on women’s bodies and minds, and those
who think they
can control them.”
—Stylist UK
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About the Author
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CLARE BEAMS is the author of the story collection We Show
What We Have Learned, which won the Bard Prize and was a Kirkus
Best Debut of 2016, as well as a finalist for the PEN/Robert W.
Bingham Prize, the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction
Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. With her husband and two
daughters, she lives in Pittsburgh, where she teaches creative
writing, most recently at Carnegie Mellon University and the
Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.
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