Synopses & Reviews
Dr. Maggie Claymore is a leading neonatologist at a bustling Boston hospital. She works with the smallest and sickest patients: premature babies so ill that other doctors might give up on them. Maggie is fiercely devoted, despite the ethical conundrums that arise daily on the highest-tech edge of medicine -- and in spite of colleagues who feel she often risks too much. Nearly forty, happily married but childless by default, and supremely confident, Maggie knows her exact place in the world. She's the kind of woman who always makes a strong impression, for better or for worse.
Maggie's orderly life begins to unravel when she gets an anonymous note calling her ethics and reputation into question. At first she is able to ignore the increasingly virulent letters, but when her accuser goes public -- posting hate-filled warning posters around the hospital implicating her in a child's death -- Maggie finds herself mired in a personal and professional hell. With everything that she has and everything that she is thrown into doubt, Maggie must fight for herself even as she fights to keep her tiny patients breathing.
The Mystery of Breathing is not only an absorbing page-turner, but also a poignant examination of a woman struggling to maintain her hard-fought identity. Maggie's metamorphosis from fearful to indignant to self-doubting is complex and viscerally powerful. As gossip and innuendo overwhelm her workplace, Maggie's paranoia grows, and all the while lives hang in the balance.
Review
'\"An entertaining and intelligent twist on a psychological thriller that should appeal to men as well as women.\"'
Review
"Engrossing and tensely haunting."
Review
"It's ER, a whodunit, and a thought-provoking novel rolled into one . . . a real page-turner." --Parenting Magazine
Review
"It's ER, a whodunit, and a thought-provoking novel rolled into one . . . a real page-turner." --Parenting Magazine
"An entertaining and intelligent twist on a psychological thriller that should appeal to men as well as women." Publishers Weekly
"Engrossing and tensely haunting." Kirkus Reviews
Synopsis
An impassioned and gifted neonatal physician, Dr. Maggie Claymore fights for the lives of her newborn patients with a fierceness that has gained her the devotion of worried parents and sometimes the ire of her colleagues. Maggie is just shy of forty, and her career is on the rise: she is on the verge of receiving a coveted promotion at a prestigious Boston research hospital. That is, until an anonymous hate campaign calls her credentials and her ethics into question, threatening to destroy her professional reputation. Suspicion and doubt begin to shade all of her relationships, from her professional connections to her own blissful marriage. Worst of all, the rumors surrounding her begin to shake her deepest sense of who she is.
Psychologically riveting, The Mystery of Breathing explores modern personal and ethical dilemmas in a story of one woman's struggle to mainatain her identity.
About the Author
PERRI KLASS is a practicing pediatrician, an acclaimed author of fiction and nonfiction, and a prizewinning journalist. She has won five O. Henry Awards for her short stories, including three of the stories in Love and Modern Medicine. Her fiction includes two novels, Recombinations and Other Women"s Children, and a collection of short stories, I Am Having an Adventure. She has also written two collections of essays about medicine, A Not Entirely Benign Procedure: Four Years as a Medical Student and Baby Doctor: A Pediatrician"s Training. Her columns and articles have appeared the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe, Discover, and Parenting. She recently won a James Beard Foundation Award for an article in Gourmet, "The Lunch Box as Battlefield."Both Klass"s fiction and her journalism have dealt with issues of medicine and society. In her medical career she practices pediatrics at Dorchester House, a neighborhood health center in Boston, and is medical director of the national literacy program Reach Out and Read, dedicated to making books and literacy promotion part of pediatric primary care. Klass lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with Larry Wolff, a professor of history at Boston College, and their children.