The Illness Lesson: A Novel

Written by:
Clare Beams
Narrated by:
Ann Marie Lee

Unabridged Audiobook

Ratings
Book
3
Narrator
2
Release Date
February 2020
Duration
10 hours 15 minutes
Summary
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.
Reviews
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Anonymous

It just wasn’t my cup of tea.

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Jennifer G.

The book was pretty good , but the narrator was WAY too dramatic, almost histrionic. It really distracted me because 1) it felt like a freshman drama class and 2) the dramatic emoting didn’t fit the character at all.

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