The North Olympic Peninsula, in its beauty and loneliness, is one of the characters in Gemini, Dr. Carol Cassella’s novel.
The Bainbridge Island author, also a physician, has devoted many days to hiking the Olympic Mountains.
She was Peninsula College’s spring 2012 writer in residence, before penning Gemini, which has recently come out in paperback.
A native of Dallas, Cassella was enraptured by the peaks and labyrinthine waters in Western Washington.
And in Gemini, her third novel, Cassella wanted to go deep, to tell the story of a woman who grew up in the woods of east Jefferson County, out of sight of the summer tourist crowd.
This is Raney, a girl raised by her grandfather, a young woman who blossoms into an artist. She is also a friend to Bo, a boy whose divorcing mother and father send him away to live with relatives on the Peninsula.
Raney’s family has just enough money to get by, while Bo’s can pay for extended trips to far-flung places.
They might be soul mates, but financial realities split them apart. She gets to Seattle to go to art school for a while, but then returns to the Peninsula to care for her grandpa. Bo, well-funded by his disengaged parents, roams the world as a freelance writer.
One night on a dark county road, the middle-aged Raney is struck by a hit-and-run driver. She’s brought to a hospital in Seattle with nothing and no one to identify her; comatose, she’s put on a ventilator and labeled Jane Doe.
She becomes the patient of Dr. Charlotte Reese of Seattle who, it turns out, has a strange connection with her.
The stories of Charlotte, Raney and Bo drive Gemini along a twisting road: The novel is a love story, a mystery and a moral question. That last thing is what Cassella hopes readers will talk about: How far to go using modern medical technology to keep a critically injured, possibly brain-dead person breathing.
As a member of the medical community, Cassella wrestles with this as it applies to trauma victims and to elderly people. In Gemini, she writes about what goes through Charlotte’s mind as she stands by Raney’s bedside.
Yet another plot line is about twins, genes and what we pass on to our children. Cassella, the mother of two sets, one fraternal and one identical, has done plenty of research into the phenomenon of twins. She weaves her findings into Gemini’s conclusion.
And though it’s pretty clear that Raney’s own story won’t wrap up happily, Cassella sought to make the book’s ending a hopeful one. Raney’s son Jake helps bring it.
Cassella, the author of Healer and Oxygen, two other medical novels, is at work on another, which she expects will be in bookstores in 2017.
Like Gemini, it delves into ethical questions: The story follows a global health worker to the Syrian refugee camps, and confronts the vaccine issue both domestically and abroad.
The plight of the Syrian refugees, she said, “is the crisis of our age.”
