Healing in Hallum

Bodies are not the only things that sometimes require healing. Sometimes that's true of marriages, relationships of all kinds, our grief, even our own attitudes about our place in the world. That, in brief, is the gist of Carol Cassella's compelling 2010 novel Healer.

Two factors caused Claire Boehning to abandon her medical profession just short of certification 14 years earlier. First came the birth of her premature daughter, Jory, and the need to give her her full-time attention. Then there was the stunning success of Addison, her husband, a medical researcher who struck it rich with the development of a cancer drug. Money poured in. They built a spacious home in Seattle, became accustomed to a luxurious lifestyle and even bought a vacation home in a rural area in the Pacific Northwest.

Now, without first talking it over with Claire, Addison has lost everything but that vacation home trying to finance development of another drug after tests go awry. So while Addison struggles to find financial backers to resurrect his research, Claire and Jory are stuck in their small house in Hallum, Wash. Jory misses her friends and her former lifestyle, and somehow resents her mother more than her father for their present isolation. Claire, meanwhile, wonders if her marriage can be saved and, more immediately, if she can make a living practicing medicine in Hallum.

Despite her lack of certification, she is finally hired by a clinic that mostly treats migrant workers. Her pay is minimal and she speaks little Spanish, yet she soon enough becomes indispensable, especially when Dan, the aging doctor who hires her, develops serious medical problems of his own.

In an important subplot, both Claire and Jory develop a close relationship with Miguela, a Nicaraguan refuge who keeps hanging around the clinic even though she does not appear to have any medical condition. It turns out she is trying to learn why her daughter got sick and died after coming to Hallum to work.

A medical school graduate with another degree in English literature, Cassella has written a brief series of novels with medical backdrops. Oxygen was terrific, and the same can be said for Healer.