Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Illness Lesson

The Illness Lesson

Beams, Clare

Paperback

General FictionHistorical FictionLiterary Fiction

ISBN10: 0525565477
ISBN13: 9780525565475
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: Mar 9 2021
Pages: 288
Weight: 0.65
Height: 1.00 Width: 5.20 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
A NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE - FINALIST FOR THE 2023 JOYCE CAROL OATES PRIZE - From the author of the award-winning debut story collection We Show What We Have Learned, an atoundingly original (The New York Times Book Review) 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 nineteenth-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.

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