LITERANISTA Dialogue on Multicultural Books, Tech & Life

Literanista September 27, 2010

Healer: A Novel 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.

About the Author

Carol Wiley Cassella majored in
English Literature at Duke University and graduated from medical school in 1986.
She currently practices anesthesiology in Seattle and was a freelance medical
writer specializing in global public health advocacy for the developing world.
She is the mother of two sets of twins and is working on her next novel. Visit
the author at www.carolcassella.com.

www.carolcassella.com