The Illness Lesson by Clare Beam takes place in an experimental all-girls school in Massachusetts in the 1870s. The protagonist, Caroline, is the daughter of Joseph, the headmaster and an esteemed progressive thinker whose previous experiment, a utopian society, failed. One of the participants in that experiment wrote a novel about it that includes scandalous allegations about Joseph and his now-deceased wife that may be fiction or fact and his daughter is one of the students. An illness strikes the girls (and Caroline) and seems somehow connected to the appearance of a strange species of red bird named “trilling hearts” (which also is the name of the school). The excellent prose partly replicates language of the times, but with observations sometimes modern and always precise. The manner in which the “illness” is treated is a twist that invites socio-political questions about patriarchy and women’s sexuality. The story has elements of surrealism, horror, and romance. Here’s what Kirkus Reviews says:
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/clare-beams/the-illness-lesson/
