Gemini

by Carol Cassella Narrated by Mozhan Marno

Overview

An ICU doctor in one of Seattle's most respected hospitals, Dr. Charlotte Reese is used to listening for the chop of the Medvac helicopter and preparing for the worst. But when a Jane hurtles through the doors of Beacon Hospital with tubes keeping her alive, Charlotte's stoic resolve begins to fail her and she becomes obsessed with unraveling the mystery of her patient's identity to solve what is looking more and more like an attempted murder. As Jane Doe's condition worsens over the course of days, Charlotte must decide what matters most as she grapples with the concept of life quality and the idea of letting Jane's fate be decided by a court-appointed guardian with no links to the patient. Filled with stunning medical detail and set against the backdrop of the Pacific Northwest, GEMINI is a vivid novel of moral complexity and emotional depth that will resonate with readers of Sue Miller and Jodi Picoult.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

01/06/2014
Love must endure both distance and death in the third novel from the author of Oxygen and Healer. An intensive-care doctor in Seattle grappling with her stagnant relationship and ticking biological clock, Charlotte Reese becomes engrossed in the case of a Jane Doe delivered to her hospital comatose after a highway hit-and-run. After no one comes to the hospital looking for the new patient, Charlotte take a special interest in the case, and with the help of her boyfriend, Eric Bryson, begins to dig into Jane Doe’s past. What she comes up with forces her to confront decisions both professional and personal. In chapters that alternate with those telling Charlotte’s story, readers learn about Jane Doe, who is a tough-talking farm girl named Raney, and her first love. In Cassella’s medical-drama-meets-love-story, the inevitability of death is paramount: Charlotte sees her job as “an interminable battle against the will of the universe,” Raney’s eccentric survivalist grandfather builds a bunker to prepare for TEOTWAWKI (The End Of The World As We Know It), and time is shown as “a grinding mudslide, shoving everything and everyone onward.” A book at turns heartwarming and heartbreaking, it invites us to accept, if nothing else, that the only way to live is to “cling to every moment even as you into the next.” Agent: David Forrer and Kimberly Witherspoon, Inkwell Management. (Mar.)

Lee Woodruff

"A natural born story-teller, Cassella's vivid novel, beautifully set in the Pacific Northwest, creates a haunting backdrop for this spellbinding examination of how family, loss, genetics and ultimately the triumph of love can connect and confound us all."

Bainbridge Review

It is a gripping fictional narrative that will spark conversations about the very real moral dilemmas we face in this age of medical miracles.

Susan Wiggs

"Carol Cassella's novel taps into the very core of every person's hopes and dreams...and their fears. Her beautifully crafted story explores the unbearable fragility of the human body, and ultimately celebrates the sturdiness of the human spirit. This book is a triumph of literary mastery and emotional resonance."

Kristin Hannah

"GEMINI is an engrossing, compelling page-turner of a novel that will keep you guessing until the very end. Carol Cassella's expertly crafted story about love, genetics, loss, and the search for identity will resonate deeply with readers."

From the Publisher

Overall, Cassella has created a work of insightful characterizations, finely crafted language and socioeconomic contrasts that are detailed in almost Dickensian fashion.”
—Bellingham Herald

RTBookReviews.com

Cassella delivers a mind-bending, emotionally charged story featuring tough medical and end-of-life issues. The plot slowly builds as we learn the backstory of a critically injured patient and the dilemmas facing her doctor. Not your ordinary mystery, this is an unusual plot and a great, thought-provoking read.

Seattle Times

This is a riveting, suspenseful story, full of vivid characters and stirring reflections on medical and genetic issues…Cassella is a gifted writer, gorgeously animating her landscapes and the forces of nature, underlining her theme that even medicine cannot save her characters from mortality.

Word Joy

Whatever genre you want to assign it, the suspense works, the setting is starkly beautiful, and the characters give the reader a lot to think about.

Jonathan Evison

With big themes, an unforgettable setting, high stakes, mystery, suspense, heartbreak, human triumph, and rare insight, Gemini surprises and fascinates at every turn. Nobody writes about the miracle of the human organism like Carol Cassella. Gemini is a novel sure to keep readers flipping pages deep into the night.

Maria Semple

Once again, Carol Cassella has written a novel full of gorgeously rendered characters, fascinating medical detail and tour de force plot twists. From its gripping first pages straight through to its stunning conclusion, Gemini is an unforgettable novel—a morality tale, a mystery, and a love story that will leave readers breathless.

Jan-Philipp Sendker

"Carol Cassella has written a wonderful novel. A deeply moving story about the heartbreaking pursuit of happiness by a courageous woman without means. Gemini is a page turner, I had a hard time putting down."

Bookreporter.com

I think the alternating-points-of-view-chapters device has been overdone in some recent works of fiction, but Cassella gets it right. We read along, anticipating the solution of juicy mysteries and dilemmas, suspecting from the tone that not everyone can live happily ever after. I highly recommend it!

Booklist

A compelling look at the collision of a physician’s professional and personal lives…A uniquely involving read.

BookPage.com

Cleverly but incrementally, Cassella—a practicing physician as well as an author—puts together the pieces of Jane Doe’s mystery even as she ponders, through Charlotte, the Big Questions.

Booklist

A compelling look at the collision of a physician’s professional and personal lives…A uniquely involving read.

Kirkus Reviews

2014-01-23
In a new mystery from Cassella (Healer, 2010, etc.), the lives of a doctor and her critically injured patient intertwine in unexpected ways. When the unconscious patient is brought into Dr. Charlotte's intensive care unit, very few facts are known. The apparent victim of a hit-and-run along a rural Washington road, "Jane Doe" lapsed into a coma after emergency surgery and was airlifted to Charlotte's hospital in Seattle. No family member has come forward to identify or make decisions for this Jane, and the police have no clues. Meanwhile, other characters take up the narrative in alternating chapters. Raney tells the story of her teenage friendship in the small town of Quentin, Wash., with Bo, a rich Seattleite whose parents have offloaded him with an aunt while they divorce. Eric, Dr. Charlotte's new boyfriend, has, after a long apprenticeship, become a recognized author of upmarket science books; he's currently contracted to write about in vitro fertilization. The stories of the three narrators intersect, as do the issues Cassella starkly delineates: the impact of poverty and class on health care choices, particularly when children are involved. Raney has a young son, Jake, who may or may not be Eric's child, and Jake too suffers from a congenital neurological condition, in his case, undiagnosed and untreated. Despite the potential ruination of her own future with Eric, Dr. Charlotte embarks on a determined quest to solve the puzzle of how this Jane Doe found herself in her present condition. Readers may well overlook Cassella's frequently interjected bromides about love ("Is it a room inside your soul that opens when your lover enters?") since this engaging medical mystery makes far more compelling points about economics and sociology.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170969982
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	03/04/2014
Edition description:	Unabridged

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