Friday, November 30, 2018

The Queen of Hearts: Kimmery Martin

"A debut novel set against a background of hospital rounds and life-or-death decisions that pulses with humor and empathy as it explores THE HEART'S CAPACITY FOR FORGIVENESS...


"Zadie Anson and Emma Colley have been best friends since their early twenties, when they first began navigating serious romantic relationships amid the intensity of medical school.  Now they're happily married wives and mothers with successful careers -- Zadie as a pediatric cardiologist and Emma as a trauma surgeon.  Their lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, are chaotic but fulfilling, until the return of a former colleague unearths a secret one of them has been harboring for years.


"As chief resident, Nick Xenokostas was the center of Zadie's life -- both professionally and personally -- throughout the tragic chain of events during her third year of medical school that she has long since put behind her.  Nick's unexpected reappearance at a time of new professional crisis shocks both women into a deeper look at the difficult choices they made at the beginning of their careers.  As it becomes evident that Emma must have known more than she revealed about the circumstances that nearly derailed both their lives, Zadie starts to question everything she thought she knew about her closest friend."


This book took me nearly a month to finish (as evidenced by my relatively long hiatus posting reviews on here), and this does not really bode well for a stellar review.  I will cushion this statement with the truth that I’ve been dealing with health issues and some personal/familial tragedy, so I’ve simply been unable to force myself to read all that much.  Granted, a brilliant book can be an escape from the rigors and draining nature of the real world, but the medical nature of this sotry had some rather poor timing in my personal life – this is, of course, not really the book’s fault.  I was initially drawn to it via yet another Pinterest search.  This was also a new release at my local library and all the pieces just seemed to fall into place.

I began reading The Queen of Hearts very shortly after I finished the book I reviewed just prior to this one.  I was immediately sucked into the fast-paced worlds of Zadie and Emma.  One of the biggest draws for me was the happy realization that it was set in Charlotte, North Carolina – where I happened to live for a year while attending college.  It’s always very entertaining to run across places with which you’re familiar; it breathes a special kind of life into a book.  An added bonus is that my uncle was a doctor in Charlotte as well, so I was familiar with the hospital and lives of these surgeons (I’ve yet to ask him if he’d ever worked with Dr. Kimmery Martin, the author).

The first part of the book had excellent pacing.  I was introduced to Zadie and Emma, the interesting nature of their friendship, and the very different lives they lead.  The pacing does change and I think that was part of my problem.  It began to feel a bit choppy.  Eventually, the story bounces back and forth from intense present events to the pivotal time in 1999 when Zadie and Emma were still medical students and tragedy struck.  They learned what it is like to be a doctor, and they also learned how to cope with their own mistakes and suffer through unexpected loss.  This use of perspective  – bouncing not only in time and space, but also between Zadie and Emma – sometimes got a bit more confusing than was pleasant.  There was a concerted effort to create a stark differentiation between the bubbly, scattered Zadie and ice queen Emma, but it fell short.  I lost their unique voices a few times in their different sections and had to go back to remind myself whose perspective I was reading.

The dark secret was, I thought, handled fairly  well.  Snippet after snippet was revealed, making me think, “There it is…  No, this has to be it!” several times.  When the real secret does finally come to light (in its entirety), it truly was deep and dark…and I can understand why she (I won’t tell you which “she”) did her best to cover it up all this time.  I must also admit that everything following the admission of the complete truth felt a bit rushed – literally the entire book led up to this moment and it wound up finishing before I got any real satisfaction from experiencing the aftermath.  The friendship between Zadie and Emma was so time-tested and the secret so powerful that I was left feeling a bit hollow at the end – the “resolution” felt a bit unrealistic to me.  This might come off as not making much sense, but I cannot give too much away without revealing huge plot twists (and I certainly don’t want to ruin those for you).  All said, I think I would have liked the “big reveal” to happen sooner, or to have more time to watch the characters absorb the truth.  The ending was tied up a little too quickly and neatly for my personal taste.

The medical aspects of this book – their lives as medical students and careers following some twenty years later – read a lot like “Grey’s Anatomy”.  If you’re a fan of medical dramas (complete will on-call room booty-calls), then you’ll enjoy this book.  I am a fan of “Grey’s” (especially the older seasons), so this was no trial for me.  In fact, it was part of the draw of this book.  So many people not directly in the medical field don’t realize what doctors – especially surgeons – go through on their path to their ultimate career.  It’s a life filled with exhaustion, stress, loss, triumphs, pain, and mental strain.  Reading about this from an author who is also a doctor was refreshing and very realistic.  I would be very interested to know just how many of the patients Zadie and Emma encounter in this book were borrowed from real-life experiences of Dr. Martin and her colleagues.

While I liked parts of this book, the rapid shifts in time and perspective sometimes left me a little bit lost.  Even with the impending revelation of the deep, dark secret, the latter half of the book dragged much more than the beginning did.  As I mentioned before, this was partly due to my own inability to focus, but I won’t take all of the blame here.  I think part of it was the writing style and then some of it was the addition of unnecessary details – especially in some of Zadie’s medical school flashbacks as they pertained to her group of friends.  I can see what Martin was attempting to achieve (again, sort of like the close-knit misfit group in “Grey’s Anatomy”), but I didn’t feel that it always necessarily added something.  Some passages could have been used for an entirely different book.  The ending of the story wasn’t as satisfying as I was hoping.  I liked the characters’ personalities and some of my favorite scenes were those between Zadie and Emma with their respective husbands; however, the voices sometimes blended together with all of the bouncing around.  Is this book worth trying out?  I would say so.  Do I give it a glowing recommendation?  Not necessarily.  There’s nothing terribly wrong with it, I just wasn’t as sucked in as I would have liked to have been.  I'm not totally sold by the forgiveness at the story's conclusion, but perhaps there's something to be said for the power of Zadie and Emma's relationship.


Happy reading!

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