Queen of Hearts
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction for Young People and the IODE Violet Downey Book Award, and an American Library Association Notable Children's Book and a Kirkus Reviews Best Book
It's 1941, and Canada is two years into World War II. Meanwhile, in rural Manitoba, fifteen-year-old Marie-Claire Cote begins a war of her own as she and her brother and sister, all stricken with tuberculosis, are taken by their anguished parents to "chase the cure" at nearby Pembina Hills Sanatorium.
While her roommate retains a dogged cheerfulness that is both heroic and irritating, Marie-Claire resists with all of her prideful strength while she fights her own illness and tries to seek privacy where there is none. Her father, overwhelmed by fear and guilt, never visits. And her young brother, Luc, who is losing his battle with TB in another wing of the infirmary, sends notes to her penned for him by his nineteen-year-old roommate, Jack Hawkings.
This is a story about surviving loss, and finding friendship, and love, in surprising places.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When 15-year-old Marie-Claire and her younger brother and sister are diagnosed with tuberculosis, they are admitted to Quebec's Pembina Hills Sana-torium, where they separately struggle with the disease. In the 1940s, the only cure according to Marie-Claire's nurse is "rest.... besides eating properly and breathing in fresh air at night and during rest hours and, sometimes, surgery." Brooks's (Mistik Lake) premise may not instantly click with readers, but they will sympathize with the book's prickly heroine, who feels as though "my world as a normal person has just ended." Marie-Claire has many anxieties, from worrying about her siblings to fearing a grisly operation. But as Marie-Claire recuperates, she grows up, too, beginning a sweet romance with another patient and learning to support those she loves, even though "bad things happen and will keep on happening." Marie-Claire and her fellow patients' fears will be recognizable to contemporary readers in a heartbreaking scene, another girl, Signy, wonders, "And who will love me?" And those worries gain real depth from truly being a matter of life or death, instead of just feeling that way. Ages 12 up.
