If medical science could create new "blank slate" bodies for the sick and incapacitated, And Again posits, what consequences would come with transferring into one? Hannah the artist and David the congressman both were near death from cancer. Connie the actress had an aggressive strain of AIDS. Paralyzed in a car crash, wife and mother Linda spent eight years unable to move any part of her body except her eyelids. In a revolutionary clinical trial, doctors implant cross sections of their brains into new bodies grown from versions of their DNA--with the diseases deleted.
Delivered from death's door back into the arms of their loved ones, everything is different--and yet, nothing has changed. Hannah thinks her fiancé, Sam, and older sister, Lucy, who once dated and remain close, harbor a secret about the last days of her illness. David hoped a new body would free him from his bad habits, but still finds himself itching for a cigarette. Now that she has her physical beauty back, Connie feels alienated from the film industry that quit valuing her when she lost it. Linda returns to a lukewarm welcome from her children, who were babies when she had her accident, and immediate requests for more children from the husband she isn't sure she still loves.
In And Again, Jessica Chiarella provides a finely nuanced look at four people whose return to the living feels miraculous but provides no magical answers or happy endings in the long run. Strength and resilience abound in this deeply felt debut. --Jaclyn Fulwood, blogger at Infinite Reads