• Age: 0
• Grade: p to 12
• Reading age: 0

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.

Martha Brooks lives in Winnipeg. Her book Traveling on into the Light was named to the international 1996 IBBY Honour List and is an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults. Two Moons in August and Paradise Caf and Other Stories were Governor General’s Award nominees; the latter also received the 1991 Boston Globe Horn Book Award for distinguished children’s fiction. When not writing, Martha can be found performing in local jazz clubs. Maureen Hunter is one of Canada’s most successful playwrights. Her work has been produced extensively on Canada’s major stages, in the United States, and Britain, and by CBC and BBC Radio. Atlantis was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award and Transit of Venus, premiered by the Manitoba Theatre Centre, became the first Canadian play ever staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company of Britain. A native of Saskatchewan, Maureen now lives on the banks of the Red River in Winnipeg.

Martha Brooks' profile page

• Commended, YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults
• Commended, ALA Notable Chilren's Books List
• Commended, Kirkus Best Teen Books of 2011
• Short-listed, Manitoba Book Awards McNally Robinson Book for Young People Award
• Short-listed, Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction for Young People
• Short-listed, Manitoba Young Readers Choice Awards
• Commended, CCBC Best Books for Kids & Teens, Starred Selection
• Commended, OLA Best Bets
• Short-listed, IODE Violet Downey Book Award

...a moving portrait of hope.

Quill & Quire

...a careful, graceful novel, robust with sorrow and triumph in equal measure. It will leave the reader with both a chill down the spine and a lump in the throat.

Globe and Mail

...an emotionally rich, stirring story about loss, friendship, love and healing.

Kirkus Reviews, STARRED REVIEW

...a story of survival and friendship...

Winnipeg Free Press

Much like a play in its discrete, focused scenes, this novel is that rarest of birds, a happily ending, nonsappy young adult romance.

Book Magazine, STARRED REVIEW

...Brooks has been called the premier writer for the older adolescent. As great a compliment as that is, I think that sells her short.

Lögberg-Heimskringla

...[readers] will sympathize with the book's prickly heroine...

Publishers Weekly

Brooks masterfully re-creates a TB sanatorium through the protagonist’s experience and believable characters. A well-drawn, innocent, yet compelling work of historical fiction

School Library Journal, STARRED REVIEW

Readers will be held by the story’s heartbreaking truths, right to the end

Booklist

Brooks is rather a 'queen of hearts' herself when it comes to the depiction of a girl's adolescent intelligence, annoyance and desire, and here she works her magic once again.

Toronto Star

Queen of Hearts

It is always a pleasure to review a new work by Martha Brooks. Like her earlier novels, Queen of Hearts is lovingly based in Manitoba, but here the author has created the intimate emotional and medical landscape of a TB sanatorium.

Fourteen-year-old Marie-Claire can see the San across the valley from her family’s farmhouse. As the book begins, Marie-Claire welcomes the reappearance of her favourite uncle, Gérard. But Gérard brings the family not only his captivating stories, but tuberculosis, “a hungry wolf that nobody saw coming” — a wolf that will not only kill him, but attack all of the children. Gérard, Marie-Claire, her beloved brother Luc and little sister Josée are sent to the Sanatorium to “chase the cure.” Only two will come home.

The first-person voice of Marie-Claire is that of a not very patient patient. Her grief, her anger at God, her frustration with the rest required for recovery, her courage are vivid. She wants nothing to do with new words like pneumothorax and thoracoplasty. With difficulty, she arrives at a fuller understanding of her family and her complicated friendship with her roommate, Signy. World War II is going on in the outside world; the girls listen to Tommy Dorsey and write to soldiers overseas, but the battle in the Sanatorium is for their own lives.

Although Brooks acknowledges valuable primary sources used in her research, it is her own experience growing up as the daughter of the medical superintendent at the Manitoba Sanatorium that gives her creation of this world such immediacy and poignancy. One feels fully the longing of the patients on the screened balconies, watching life unfold on the lawn below. The San is a unique, contained world of the TB patients and the community who care for them. It is a world in which flying a kite or simply holding a friend’s hand can be as life-giving — and charged — as a kiss from a young musician. The modern teen reader will understand the universal truths: the need to grow, the need to love and be loved.

This novel is a gift that rewards further reading with even greater riches.

Queen of Hearts

It’s 1941, and Canada is two years into World War II. Fifteen-year-old Marie-Claire Côté begins a war of her own as she and her siblings are stricken with tuberculosis and are sent to a sanatorium to “chase the cure.” Marie-Claire longs for privacy, finds a loyal friend in her roommate and falls for fellow patient Jack Hawkings, the 19-year-old musician with the heart-stopping smile.