Zadie Anson and Emma Colley have been best friends since medical school, where Zadie fell in love with their chief resident Nick Xenokostas, who ends up breaking her heart. A couple of decades later, Nick joins the medical team at Emma’s hospital, and his reappearance opens old wounds and threatens to bring long-buried secrets to light.

The Queen of Hearts is a romantic medical drama that reminds me somewhat of Grey’s Anatomy and ER. The author is an emergency medicine doctor herself, which explains the depth and detail of medical knowledge included in the text. I didn’t understand a lot of the terms, but I liked how these scenes made the story feel more realistic and really rounded off Emma and Zadie’s characters as doctors.

I liked Emma and Zadie’s friendship, and the glimpses of their lives in medical school. I liked how Emma’s a really beautiful woman who chooses dorky but confident guys as her boyfriends, and I thought Zadie and Nick had fantastic chemistry.

I really liked the big reveal near the end, which without giving any spoilers away, is related to the reason Nick broke Zadie’s heart and yet has much farther reaching impact amongst the characters. I wish this reveal had happened earlier, because there’s so much I wanted to unpack about it, and I felt like the most interesting parts of the book were all crammed near the end. I’m glad I did read to the end, but I thought it started off slow and most of the book was just okay for me.

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Thank you to Penguin Random House Canada for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.