Queen of Hearts

Finished March 11
Queen of Hearts by Martha Brooks

This teen novel is set in rural Manitoba in 1941-42. Marie Claire Côté is fifteen and living with her parents and younger sister and brother near St. Felix. Her wandering uncle Gérard comes to visit as he has often in the past, but this time he stays longer. He isn't well, and finally is diagnosed with tuberculosis. There is a sanatorium on the other side of the valley from the Côté farm, and Gérard goes there. His pet name for Marie Claire is Queen of Hearts and the two have a special closeness. Even though she is told not to, she sneaks away to visit her uncle.
When her younger brother Luc gets a bad cold and their hired man leaves, Marie Claire is drafted into helping out, working hard either with her father out on the land or with her mother in the kitchen. She becomes lethargic as well, and when her brother takes a turn for the worse, all three children are found to have tuberculosis and go into the sanatorium. Marie Claire takes it hard, at first rebuffing the offered friendship of her roommate Signy, a girl slightly older than her. But then she finds that the sanatorium is its own world, and begins to form relationships.
This is an interesting novel of a certain time in our history, and one gets a sense of the world Marie Claire lives in.

Historical Fiction

Finished September 28
In the Fabled East by Adam Lewis Schroeder
This is the second novel by this author, and it follows two main characters from France into Indo-China. Pierre Lazarie goes to Saigon in 1936, fresh from a degree at the Sorbonne. He has a fascination for the East and thinks this will be good to explore as he awaits an opportunity to teach at the Sorbonne. However, his plans take an abrupt turn when Captain Emanuel Tremier asks for assistance in tracking down his mother Adelie who left France for Saigon in 1909 and never returned. Pierre is drawn to her image and eagerly follows the trail, traveling up the Mekong with his fellow bureaucrat Henri Le Dallic.
The other story is Adelie's herself. She is in the late stages of tuberculosis and desperate to get well to keep her young son Manu out of the military and immersed in his artistic world. She latches onto a fable heard of a secret spring in the Laotian jungle that offers a promise of immortality. We see her desperation and her travels into the jungle.
We also see incidents from a later time period, 1954, where Emanuel himself leads a team through the jungle in the last days of a later war.
Mystery, magic, fable, and dreams wind their way through this story in a way that is unexpected and yet flows naturally. A haunting story and a very engaging one.