Publisher's Weekly Review
Beams's daring debut novel (after the story collection We Show What We Have Learned) imagines a school for teenage girls in the mid-19th century Massachusetts countryside. Here, at a failed commune, sensitive Caroline lives with her idealistic, ambitious father, Samuel, and his admirer David, for whom 20-something Caroline harbors secret feelings. When Samuel starts a school dedicated to the intellectual awakening of its eight young women students, things quickly go astray. Following the lead of Eliza, the daughter of a rival of Samuel, the girls begin to exhibit a variety of physical ailments--headaches, skin irritations, and sleepwalking--as does, to her own horror, Caroline, a teacher at the school. When an unscrupulous doctor is brought in to test an experimental treatment on the girls, Caroline must decide whether to stay loyal to her father or question his authority. Though there is a fantastical thread about a flock of mysterious, aggressive, blood-red birds that doesn't fit well with the otherwise plausible plot, Beams excels in her depiction of Caroline, an intriguingly complex character, and in her depiction of the school, which allows the reader a clear view of changing gender roles in the period, with parallels to today's sexual abuse scandals. This powerful and resonant feminist story will move readers. (Feb.) Correction: An earlier version of this review misspelled the author's first name.
Kirkus Review
A progressive all-girls school in 1870s Massachusetts is thrown into chaos when its residents begin to experience inexplicable maladies.Caroline Hood is the daughter of one of the most prominent thinkers in New England. Her father, Samuel, is a widowed essayist best known for a failed social experimenta sort of utopian villagehe attempted when Caroline was a child. This failure was lightly fictionalized in one of the period's most popular novels, The Darkening Glass. So when Samuel gets the idea to found a rigorous school to teach girls about their "deepest selves" on the site of the failed community, Caroline, now in her late 20s, is apprehensive. This apprehension deepens when one of their pupils, Eliza, turns out to be the daughter of the man who wrote The Darkening Glass. Eliza's presence is even more disruptive than Caroline and Samuel feared: Though an intelligent and mature student, Eliza seems more interested in prying into the secrets of the Hoods' past than in her studies. When Eliza suddenly begins manifesting strange physical ailmentsseizurelike fits, mysterious markings, hysteriathe other girls soon come down with them, too. Caroline assumes some kind of manipulation; that is, until they start happening to her. When her father calls upon a physician, a family friend who seems to share Samuel's forward thinking, to treat the girls, the world that Caroline and her father tried to build is in danger, once again, of crashing down. 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Beams' luminous debut is set in post-Civil War Massachusetts, where the scion of a failed intellectual collective sets out to open a school for girls. At first, Caroline Hood is thrilled when her father, Samuel, and his disciple, David, decide they want to offer young women a classical education just like the young men receive. Caroline will teach literature, which will also allow her more time with the alluring David. But Caroline complicates things when she invites Eliza, the daughter of Samuel's former acolyte, who wrote a sensational novel believed to be inspired by Caroline's dead mother, to attend the school. And then Caroline makes a shocking discovery about David. Once the girls show up, Caroline tries to focus on teaching them, but she's vexed by the sway Eliza has over her classmates and troubled by her own feelings for David. And then the girls start to fall victim to a mysterious series of ailments, causing Samuel to call upon a doctor Caroline distrusts. 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.--Kristine Huntley Copyright 2019 Booklist
Library Journal Review
DEBUT In 1871, scholar/philosopher Samuel Hood lives in Ashwell, MA, on a farm that was previously the site of a utopian community experiment. That experiment has long since failed, and Hood's new plan is to educate young women to be equals to their male counterparts. Hood and adult daughter Caroline, a devotee of his philosophy, will head up the faculty. The students arrive, including one connected to the farm's previous function. But a secret lies waiting to be revealed, and the students soon begin to show signs of illness. One has a strange rash. Another has a verbal tic. A third has "fits." Hood calls on a psychiatric physician he knows to treat the girls for what seems to be group hysteria. The psychiatrist's sinister treatment, amounting to sexual abuse, is condoned by the men at the farm despite their misgivings and Caroline's outright protests. VERDICT 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. Readers of general fiction will enjoy. [See Prepub Alert, 8/5/19.]--Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Libs., Providence
