Friday, May 18, 2012

Healer by Carol Cassella

From national bestselling author Carol Cassella comes the story of one doctor's struggle to hold her family together through a storm of broken trust and questioned ethics.

Claire is at the start of her medical career when she falls in love with Addison Boehning, a biochemist with blazing genius and big dreams. A complicated pregnancy deflects Claire's professional path, and she is forced to drop out of her residency. Soon thereafter Addison invents a simple blood test for ovarian cancer, and his biotech start-up lands a fortune.

Overnight the Boehnings are catapulted into a financial and social tier they had never anticipated or sought: they move into a gracious Seattle home and buy an old ranch in the high desert mountains of eastern Washington, and Claire drifts away from medicine to become a full-time wife and mother. Then Addison gambles everything on a cutting-edge cancer drug, and when the studies go awry, their comfortable life is swept away. Claire and her daughter, Jory, move to a dilapidated ranch house in rural Hallum, where Claire has to find a job until Addison can salvage his discredited lab. Her only offer for employment comes from a struggling public health clinic, but Claire gets more than a second chance at medicine when she meets Miguela, a bright Nicaraguan immigrant and orphan of the contra war who has come to the United States 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.

291 pages (July 2010)



To find a discussion guide for this book in the NoveList Plus database, go to the Library's website, click on Novelist under "We Recommend" → "Book Services". Click on "Book Discussion Guides" in the right sidebar on NoveList's home page. Then, either enter the title in the Search box or search for the title alphabetically. (You will need your Salt Lake County Library card number to access this resource outside a county library.)
 
 


Carol Cassella interview with Author Magazine:

 
This title is available for download as an eAudioBook. Learn more about downloadables from the library here.

Title Read-alikes: All Fall Down by Jennifer Weiner; The Things We Do for Love by Kristin Hannah; Now That You Mention It by Kristan Higgins; Me Before You by Jojo Moyes; This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper; One Summer by David Baldacci; Summer Secrets by Jane Green; The Lemon Orchard by Luanne Rice; The Authenticity Project by Clare Pooley; Dead of Night by Jonathan Maberry; The Standardization of Demoralization Procedures by Jennifer Hofmann; When These Mountains Burn by David Joy; and Memorial by Bryan Washington.

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