Tuberculous is a dreadful diagnosis any time but especially before antibiotics existed during the first half of the twentieth century.  Queen of Hearts is a realistic and heartwrenching story of how this disease touched lives in a Canadian sanitarium at the beginning of World War II.  This young adult book hooked me and kept me emotionally charged as I followed the story of Marie Claire and her family as they battled this disease.  People of all ages and all stations in life spent months to years in TB sanitariums.  This historical novel does what I love in any good novel set in a prior time; it made me want to find out more about the history of tuberculosis. In the nineteenth century it was  named the romantic disease because people suffering from tuberculosis were thought to have been bestowed with heightened sensitivity. The slow progress of the disease allowed for a “good death” as sufferers could arrange their affairs. It wasn’t until the development of streptomycin in 1944 that cures became the norm.  Now with multidrug resistant strains there has been a resurgence of the disease. Every year, nearly half a million new cases of multidrug-resistant tuberculosis are estimated to occur worldwide.