"He, like her" or "He, like she"

Question

I came across the following sentence in a book I am reading:

He, like her, did not die a natural death.

Should it be 'she' instead of 'her', since both 'he' and 'she' are performing the action (dying)? But "He, like she..." sounds strange to my ear.

Answer 1

I see three options (assuming that you were trying to reword this without major revision):

1. You could keep "like her"; it is a perfectly valid prepositional phrase. However, this could be interpreted as comparing him to her instead of his death to her death, so it perhaps implies something that you don't intend.

2. Though it might sound less colloquial, you could say: "He, as she [[did not die a natural death]], did not die a natural death."

3. Many people accept "like" as a conjunction with the same meaning as "as". (M-W gives the defintion: "in the same way that : AS".) You could therefore say: "He, like she [[did not die a natural death]], did not die a natural death." This sounds strange to my ear, too, because I don't like to use "like" in such situations.

The parts I've double-bracketed would, of course, normally be omitted.