The Law of Similars: Summary and book reviews of The Law of Similars by Chris Bohjalian, plus links to an excerpt from The Law of Similars and a biography of Chris Bohjalian.
The Law of Similars
by Chris Bohjalian
Hardcover: Jan 1999,
288 pages.
Paperback: Mar 2000,
255 pages.
From the best-selling author of Midwives comes a startlingly powerful story of three people whose lives are irrevocably changed by illness, healing, and love.
Two years after his wife's sudden, accidental death, a Vermont deputy state prosecutor, Leland Fowler, finds that the stress of raising their small daughter alone has left him with a chronic sore throat. Desperate to rid himself of a malady that has somehow managed to elude conventional medicine, Leland turns to homeopath Carissa Lake--who cures both his sore throat and the aching loneliness at the root of his symptoms.
Just days after Leland realizes he has fallen in love with the first woman who has mattered to him since his wife, one of Carissa's asthma patients falls into an allergy-induced coma. When Carissa comes under investigation, straight-arrow Leland is faced with a moral and ethical dilemma of enormous proportions.
Set against the ongoing clash between conventional and alternative medicine--between what we know science can offer and the miracles that always seem to be just beyond our reach--The Law of Similars is a haunting and deeply atmospheric tale.
Chris Bohjalian is known for the compassion and grace that mark his characters as well as for the sheer storytelling power that propels his fiction. With The Law of Similars, he has offered something more: a page-turning examination of the fragile threads that hold people together when the worst that can happen really does...and the unexpected and luminous ways we are made well. It is a remarkable achievement.
BOOK REVIEWS
Media Reviews
Kirkus Reviews
Bohjalian (Midwives) returns to small-town Vermont for a meditation on grief and healing. But what begins with a strong voice and slow pace loses its center, becoming by the end fraught with strained dialogue and inconceivable plot.
Publishers Weekly
As he proved in last year's Midwives, Bohjalian is adept at examining social and moral issues fraught with ambiguities. Here, again, he focuses on a fallible protagonist whose lapse in ethical judgment is motivated by love and need.
Boston Globe
While Bohjalian did a good job depicting the psyche of a 14-year-old girl in ''Midwives,'' he seems to have hit his literary stride with Leland Fowler, whose voice is intimate, credible, and sure in illuminating the shadows of his soul. Readers who tend to be interrupted should think twice before starting this novel. Once opened, ''The Law of Similars'' is a hard book to put down.
New York Times Book Review - Liz Rosenberg
...[F]ast-paced and absorbing. Few writers can manipulate a plot with Bohjalian's grace and power.
Recent Reader Reviews
Review (not rated)
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