The Healer by Donna Freitas (review)

Even as an infant, Marlena has had the ability to heal the ill, and she's long been relieving peoples' ailments and giving weekly audiences to those in need of a miracle and those who simply want to witness one. Now at seventeen, she's chafing under her controlling mother's demands to maintain the pure, virginal, and distinctly childlike image of a saint, and she starts to wonder what a "normal" teenage life would look like. She enjoys rebellions such as wearing skinny jeans and taking a forbidden car ride with a friend, and she also enjoys meeting Finn, the young grad student of a neuroscientist who wants to study Marlena's brain to see if her gift is a biochemical anomaly. Marlena is believably naïve and understandably insecure as she moves from the solitude of sainthood to friendships with Finn and others. It's frustrating, though, that her main motivation to change is Finn (it's only when he advises her to take a break from healing that she decides to do so, when others around her have been saying it for years); the focus of her identity has only shifted from her mother to Finn and she never defines herself separately. The themes of faith and forgiveness are strong, though, especially in the possible rapprochement between Marlena and her mother at the book's close, and Freitas makes a solid argument that spiritualism and science are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Hints are laid out that Finn and Marlena's relationship might be doomed, so readers will be prepared for the heartbreak of its demise but nonetheless affected by it. KQG