Welsh slang is awesome!- A Broken Hearts Series (Partial) Review

You know, I have a bone to pick with you Booksy, Bookbub and Reading Deals.  You are the reason

Yeah, I'm looking at you Booksy!

why my TBR pile stretches all the way to Texas. Every day I log into my emails and say “I will not download the free books. I will NOT download the free books. Dammit, I downloaded the free books.” Every day I lose this battle with myself and it becomes increasingly infuriating.

Why? Oh I’ll tell you why, because you never have me download a book that is a stand alone or a one off. I’ll see a book and think “Ooh it's the only book! I won’t fall into the hole of an extended book series! Saints be praised!” And each and every time I get sucked into a world that is full of amazing side characters and find myself wondering if they would get their own time to shine if the author got their own way. Then POOF! By the end of the book I am reading the beginnings of the next book in a brand new series. Just take my money! And take all of my free slots in my kindle unlimited as well, why don’t you?!

With that being said one book that that tricked me was Broken Heart Syndrome by Susie Tate. It’s a contemporary novel set in Wales and combines near flawlessly two of my favorite things on this planet. Romance and Grey’s Anatomy style antics and story line. It’s the story of Frankie and Lou and Dylan too, three med school friends who are doing what I can only equate here in the US to their residency. Tate, being a doctor turned author was able to keep me intrigued not only through clever dialogue and amazing story telling, but also with great emphasis on how the medical system works abroad. I will only be covering two books out of this series because the last two, while in the same series and continuity, follow along a much different path and delight me in a different way.

Poor missish Frankie

Frankie is quite possibly one of the shyest characters that I have come across in all of my years of reading. Having been bullied through her formative years by classmates, and dealt with a verbally and emotionally abusive boyfriend, she is noticeably a doormat for others. Her self esteem is completely shot, yet she has a heart of pure gold. Frankie does however pine away for one man and one man only. Thomas G. Longley. He is an Adonis in her eyes, and to her the rugby player can do no wrong. During a drunken night out and about with Lou at the college pub, her living breathing dream takes her in his arms and makes out with her in front of the entire bar. When she realizes that he is absolutely hammered (see “steaming” in British urban dictionary) she pushes him away and is then declared to be something along the lines of “Frigid Frankie” by the rugby team. Fast forward ten years and Frankie, Lou and Dylan are in the last leg of the race to becoming doctors.

When Frankie and Dylan end up being at the same hospital where Lou is a consultant (that would be like an attending for us here stateside,) the problem is that not only is Lou a consultant there, but so is Tom Longley. Frankie spends the first third of the book completely clueless as to why Tom seems so on edge and angry with her at every waking moment. Which in turn makes her cross and angry with him. Frankie spends a good chunk of the book under the misguided notion that he doesn’t remember her or the encounter at the bar. Both assumptions are totally wrong. Tom has loved her since she was a first year in medical school and tries to get her to be as open and happy around him as she is with everyone else in the hospital. The other issue that he has, is that he cannot figure out why she isn’t putting her entire being towards cardiology, and why she just sits and draws on notebooks and hospital charts all day. It turns out she wanted nothing to do with cardiology, but instead wanted to focus in palliative care. Or hospice care for us here across the water. Any way, our beautiful Frankie both falls for Tom once again when he finally gets her to realize that he cares for her, and then within the span of a month or two shoves him away again due to a misunderstanding. Wait, I have explain this “our beautiful Frankie” line and why it grates me to type this line and also a little on why I thought Tom was the scourge of the Earth for a little while.

We as the reader spend almost the entirety of the books inside of Frankie’s head, so we get a telling of Tom from her eyes. Tom seems genuinely like a jerk. I’m serious when I say that I spent the entire first third of the book angry and wondering how any modern woman would pine away for some callous jerk the way that she does. I even almost took into account the fact that her self esteem is just about near zero and that she didn’t think that she could land a guy quite that hot. However, it is revealed much later in this book that Frankie is a damn bombshell. At one point Tom’s nephew describes her as looking like Princess Jasmine from Aladdin. I had to seriously set my kindle down at that point!

Seriously?

As a fluffy woman myself with my own self esteem issues that occasionally rear their ugly heads, I had to stop and wonder why this character could possibly feel ugly. Then I got to the section of the book where the bullying is explained. I had to remember that kids are cruel little jerks that sometimes grow up and out of that mean tiny little shell that they start out in. But that bullying never truly goes away for some and scars them for many years afterwards.

The other thing that I had to take into account is the fact that with the story being so focused on the inner workings of Frankie’s mind, when Tate switches the perspective over to Tom in third person it is shocking. She could have honestly told his side from the first person and I wouldn’t have been as jarred. Tom turns out just to be a confused former dude bro who has pined away for a woman he thought that he would never have. The man could have been less brooding and mopey and told her from the outset that he remembered not only her, but also what happened. He wouldn’t have had to go through half of the heartache that he himself endured in this book.

Eventually the two fix their issues and get back together. It is during the epilogue that we get a glimpse into another issue that was boiling over during the course of the story. Lou and Dylan has been having a lover’s quarrel as well throughout the whole story. However it is played out so subtly that I almost missed it a few times because of how sarcastic and amazingly funny the two are towards each other. Well funny until they have to dance that line of sarcastic joking and hurtful honesty. This was actually the hint that I was walking directly into a second book. And I was not wrong.

Sticks and Stones is the follow up to Broken Heart Syndrome and follows the secondary duo from the first book. I kid you not, the book opens immediately up to Dylan having drunken flashbacks of a night spent in the arms of a beautiful woman. Only to wake up to none other than the exceptionally gorgeous Lou. When he asks her if they actually did bone down, she jokingly denies it and tells him that he was drunk and that he should go home. This scene is partially played out in the first book and it is snuck in covertly and it doesn’t draw any questions because it is explained that he always is at their house after a night of drinking. However as you can probably guess, our Lou is very much head over heels for Dylan and would much rather deny that the drunken night didn’t happen. Why? Because Dylan is for lack of a better words, a womanizer. He always just sees Lou as nothing more than his best friend. In fact, Dylan spent the first years of their friendship in love with Frankie. Lou, to his mind wasn’t even remotely his type even though the three of them were virtually inseparable. In fact, it is partially his fault that Frankie and Tom didn’t get together during their early med school years.

The differences in Frankie and Lou are astounding. Lou is outspoken and abrasive, curses like a sailor, and is devastatingly glamorous. Her confidence is her weapon and she wears her beauty like a suit of armor. Honestly, she is a woman after my own heart. She refuses to put up with anyone’s crap and doesn’t let the small things get to her. The other thing that I could see in the character that I see within myself is the fact that she lets the large things build until it boils over into a spectacular messy explosion. Lou is a great friend to Dylan and Frankie, but doesn’t really ask them or allow them to go to the same lengths for her that she does for them. And when Dylan jeopardizes both of their careers, she takes the brunt of the punishment without ever telling him. He sees it as she is just trying to torture him and that she is being manipulative. He even goes so far as to cause a huge scene at the hospital and embarrass her in front of all of their colleagues. Yet she still loves him.  Their “friendship” becomes so contentious that when her life and career begins to completely collapse around her, all she can do to keep herself mentally healthy is to flee from all of her problems to Africa.

This is yet another one of those ways where I could see myself in Lou. I do not deal well with massive

Friends and family when I melt down

stress and confrontation. I do not handle rejection well. Heck, I barely manage to deal with stress in a healthy manner. When it all comes tumbling down, I run away as fast as possible. Be it to another state for a few mental health days, or a complete shutting out of any and everyone who knows me. It gives me time to focus on hobbies and rebuild myself from the ground up. Is it healthy? NO! So when Lou runs away to Africa and basically rebuilds a hospital as a means to feel like she is doing something worthwhile, while simultaneously avoiding Dylan and the train wreck that her life had become, I nodded and felt her heart break. Sometimes the strongest people are the most fragile.

I do not like that we were not allowed to actually read Dylan’s growth over that year. It was disappointing to see that he was just magically a better person a year later versus actually getting to see him resolve those issues over the course of a couple of chapters. True in real life when you aren't around to see a person grow, the changes can come as a shock, but in a book there should be that level of exposition. But I digress. In the end, there is a huge danger aspect that comes into play after her return within the last third of the book and it is best not spoiled. She recovers, they resolve things, and they live happily ever after.

I loved this series. From the Welsh settings, to the inside look into the healthcare system of the UK, and even all of the different kinds of slang! I seriously had to google what some of the terms that weren’t explained with little asterisks (*) meant. If you are willing to give a modern, chic series a try but are willing to forgo steamy sex scenes, then this will be a nice little treat. Just be prepared to rearrange some US English words around in your mind as they mean different things in the UK.