I think this was a good novel, and frustratingly close to a great novel. I loved the premise, and the voice of the main character, Caroline, was strong and sympathetic. The author cleverly allowed the reader to experience along with her characters the ways in which even "progressive" men ultimately silence the women in their lives. I think there just needed to be more...something to really bring the novel to it's full potential. Perhaps the secondary characters needed more life. Perhaps the imagery of the birds needed to be expanded and ultimately resolved. This was an interesting read, but not entirely satisfying. I would, however, read more by this author. ( )

Beautifully written and suspenseful. ( )

This novel is just too garbled for me. I literally could not follow the plot. ( )

Caroline Hood has lived with her father Samuel at Birch Hill ever since her mother's death (from an epileptic fit - Caroline thinks). Samuel Hood is getting ready to launch a new school for girls, named after the birds Caroline's mother named, Trilling Hearts. Samuel believes that girls can learn everything boys can, and Caroline agrees - she has learned it, after all - but she is less concerned about the girls' capabilities than about what girls educated like boys will do out in the world of 1871 New England. She herself has little hope for the traditional path of marriage and motherhood, though she harbors hopes that one of her father's acolytes, David, who has come to live with them and teach at the school, has feelings for her.

Seven girls are to attend Trilling Heart, but at the last minute, an eighth convinces Caroline to admit her: Eliza, the daughter of a man who wrote a novel about a thinly fictionalized version of the Hood couple, and his love for Caroline's mother.

Eliza is the first student to show signs of a curious affliction, but soon it spreads to every girl, though each has different symptoms: fainting, a rash, a verbal tic, etc. A former Birch Hill man, a doctor Samuel knows, comes to study and care for the group - but Caroline has never trusted him. Her instincts are correct, but unfortunately, she does not act on them.

The men in this story are confident of their place in the world - on top of the hierarchy - and sure of themselves and their ideas, to a fault. Caroline is both bystander and victim, knowing better but unable to trust herself enough to force a stop to Hawkins' "treatment" of the girls' malady. Ultimately, she is able to leave Birch Hill after the Trilling Heart school experiment crumbles, leaving her father for the first time in her life, but what happened there weighs on her conscience.

See also: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, The Fever by Megan Abbott, The Swallows by Lisa Lutz, The Secret History by Donna Tartt, The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

Quotes

[Hawkins was] the sort of man who never considered himself an amateur at anything. They all were. (3)

...that sense that a gift was being given, and the moment for its use was passing, had passed. (17)

Had he ever considered her life, really? (35)

"I think we'd all be wise to remember that it isn't as easy to achieve a thing as to dream it up." (Caroline to David, 36)

"Is it the same journey if different people are on it?" (Samuel, re: Pilgrim's Progress, 63)

"I would argue that it is always right to think." (Samuel to Thoreson, 65)

It might be the only line that mattered in life: between those who thought about things and those who did them. (90)

Every night her woods had been changing into a different country while she'd slept. (101)

Marriage mystified Caroline in its attending certainties about the actions and intentions of someone else. (135)

"You think they'll contain their own cures, somehow." (David, 161)

"...the view we take of our obstacles often shapes our path more, even, than those obstacles themselves." (Samuel, 162)

There was some fragility to Samuel that demanded protection, at least if one loved him. (175)

His eyes were so full of what he expected to see that he wouldn't really look at them. It would seem impossible to him that such small bodies might contain depths. (186)

How could she not have seen and known all along...? How? By believing, always, her father above herself, even when this belief required averting her attention, suspending her judgment, putting out of her mind what she had seen, deciding she had not, after all understood anything. (215)

"Sometimes the ideas we have about the people in our lives aren't helpful to us." (Samuel to Eliza, 217)

Caroline could see well enough what he was doing, but seeing didn't help her. (221)

[These people] ferried all their terrors and joys like incidental luggage along with them, not hidden, not really, but not much looked at, since all the others were occupied in carrying their own. (255) ( )

Beam’s novel is an authentic voice of what the Transcendentalist movement. Were the ideals of progressive feminism just before their time or were they, as this novel seems to point to, the idea that women should be allowed to have a voice up to a certain point. Women were looked at as having an intellect but still their highest goal was to be married and have children. Other than Jo March in Little Women, I’ve never heard a voice as strong as the story told from Catherine’s point of view. An excellent book to read, particularly if you, like me, have questioned the idealism of the male Transcendentalists as they failed to let go of male power. ( )