And Again

Four terminally ill patients are chosen by lottery (more or less) to participate in a secret medical research project: They are cloned and surgery is done to transfer their memories and personality to their new bodies. They are given new bodies and sent back to pick up the pieces of their former

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lives. The four patients are very different from each other: A tattooed and wildly talented painter who was stricken with an aggressive form of lung cancer; a Chinese-American woman who has spent the past eight years in a waking coma, paralyzed from the nose down and unable to speak; a beautiful soap-opera actress who picked up a drug-resistant strain of AIDS from injecting heroin; and a slimy Republican politician with an inoperable brain tumor. They have nothing in common but the mode of their saving, and they each deal with the stresses of being "born again" in different ways. Author Chiarella does a great job making us understand and empathize with each character, and even though she shifts the viewpoint among the four of them it is never confusing or hard to follow. I found it impossible not to try to imagine how I would react to being in their shoes, and it wasn't an entirely comfortable thing to do. I'm glad I read it, and I expect I'll be thinking about it for a while.

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