Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Book 14: Healer

Don't fret, I am still reading. It has been quite a while since the last post, but I knew that the momentum of the beginning of the year had to slow down at some point. An upsurge in work has taken me away from the time I had for pleasure reading, but I'm still slowly making my way through three other books.

I finished Healer by Carol Cassella today. I give it three stars. This is April's book for my RS book club.

I don't have a lot of time to think up a crafty way to summarize this book, so I'll give you what's already been written about it.

Claire Boehning's medical career is just about to blossom when her brilliant husband, Addison, makes a breakthrough medical discovery. His biotech start-up strikes gold, and their family is catapulted into a life of luxury. Claire eventually drifts from medicine and decides to leave her promising career behind to be a stay-at-home mother. However, a risky gamble on a new cancer drug soon sends the couple into irreparable debt, and now they must move their family to a dilapidated farmhouse in rural Hallum, Washington. Claire must go back to work, but her only offer for employment comes from a struggling public health clinic. There, she gets more than a second chance at medicine when she meets Miguela, a Nicaraguan refugee on a secret quest to find the family she has lost. As their friendship develops, a new mystery unfolds that threatens to destroy Claire's family and forces her to question what it truly means to heal. Healer exposes the vulnerabilities of the American family, provoking questions of choice versus fate, desire versus need, and the duplicitous power of money.

It took me a bit to really get absorbed into the story, but once I did there was no turning back. It weaves around but all gets connected in a pretty interesting way at the end. I think the author has a real gift for storytelling and for describing human emotions, as well as the ways those emotions are manifest physically. I really liked this book.

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