Gemini

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Cassella, Carol Wiley	4-week checkout	Due 04-29-2024
Westgate Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Cassella, Carol Wiley	4-week checkout	Due 05-16-2024

"A medical mystery wrapped in a contemporary love story, GEMINI is a stand out new novel from the Cassella, a practicing M.D. and author of the national bestseller OXYGEN. Think Jodi Picoult meets Abraham Verghese"-- Provided by publisher.

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Interesting premise, mediocre story submitted by willow on June 24, 2015, 10:43pm The book starts with an unidentified woman's transfer to the hospital for continued care, and her doctor's interest in determining both who she is and the cause of her injuries.

We then begin a change of perspective from Charlotte to Raney, with no sense of who Raney is or how this relates to the main plot, only the sense, from previous reading experience, that inevitably the answer will be revealed. This ultimately was drawn out for too long, and it became uninteresting and confusing. There was at least one incident in Raney's life where I thought the answer was coming, but instead (Surprise!) it was another car accident, but the outcome of that wasn't clear. It became confusing. Then, as Charlotte begins to dig into Jane Doe's life, the answers are never quite clear.

Mixed in is the biological clock-ticking worries of a single professional woman, vague ethical discomfort with having children if one has a serious disease, commentary about the lack of healthcare for those with low incomes, and a "lightning strikes twice" scenario of genetic abnormalities.

I was disappointed by the undercurrent of discussion of Raney's son Jake, who is constantly described in terms of his light brown skin and description as being non-Caucasian/non-white. This sounded much "older" than a character in their late 30s would talk and betrayed, I think, the author's own perspective. The fact that he is half white and half Fillipino (or...is he?) does not make him neatly racially categorized, yet the characters, especially Charlotte, refer to him as if this is a scientific fact, an easy binary categorization (white/non-white):
"Raney didn't know her own father. Who knows what race he was."
"It doesn't work like that," she [Charlotte] retorted. "She's clearly white -- a recessive gene. Why am I explaining this to you -- the one who's writing the whole chapter on genetics?" (p. 256)
Whatever "race" a Filipino person is supposed to be, we are never told Charlotte's thoughts on that, only that there are neat racial categories, despite the fact that Jake doesn't quite fit in them. The constant description of his brown skin became rather weird.

I thought the book dwelt far too much on the set up, and suddenly ended with an inadequate explanation of what caused the woman to become injured in the first place and a lack of clarity about what would happen to her next. The book seemed to drop her and move forward with Charlotte's life, but Charlotte was never interesting enough on her own, only as a plot device to propel forward the story of Jane Doe's identity and history.