I’m always on the hunt for new books and, personally, I’m always head over heels for stories that tackle gritty topics and make that their central point. Having said that, I wasn’t sure about this book as I’ve never heard of the author and this seems to be his first book. It also didn’t help that the author isn’t a native english speaker, but wrote the book in english. Note that I’m not saying people who aren’t native speakers shouldn’t write in whatever language makes them comfortable, I’m just saying that, given how this looks like it was his first publishing, I had my doubts. For context, I share the authors nationality – we’re both portuguese – and I saw this book at my local library, but if you are in any way interested in the book, I believe you can order it online, and there’s obviously always the e-book format, which is a format I very much despise…
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Having said all that, I decided to give it a shot after skimming through a few loose pages on each chapter and I thought “why not?”.
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The gist of the plot is that we follow the week of a psychologist, doctor Heart, and his interactions with the patients that he gets everyday. I will straight off the bat say that doctor Heart’s schedule wasn’t something that was on the author’s mind, as in most days he only sees one person and then on another he sees two – mind you this is just me nitpicking, and it is just a nitpick, because the meat and potatoes isn’t in the realism of schedules but the problems discussed with each person.
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For as much as english not being the author’s native language was a doubting point for me, the grammar seems fine. The author clearly had different personalities in mind for each character and, to my untrained eye, each character does speak and act in a way that’s realistic and most of all fun. Fun as in everyone has something unique to them that’s believable, by the way.
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As it might or might not be obvious, this is a very character driven story; there is an overarching plot revolving around Heart’s past and how he deals with trauma, but that is sprinkled in each chapter. As we read through each chapter, it’s clear that we’re starting to see much more of Heart and the story eventually shifts from Heart & Patients, to Heart. I will say that in the first chapter, Heart was a bit of a blank canvas, for me at least, as he just looked like the usual doctor-type and was there as a stand-in for the audience as we found out what was wrong with each person. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, I was just pleasently surprised when finding out that Heart did have more to his character than just “doctor gives advice to patient”.
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Like I mentioned, each character is unique. Mind some spoilers, but if you’ve read so far then I believe you don’t mind it. There’s a teenager struggling with suicidal tendencies and gender identity, a soldier who struggles with alcoholism, a lady who self-harms and has a broken heart (pun not intended), a florist who’s husband commited suicide, and another psychologist who suffers from anger problems. Each person has very diverse personalities and I quite liked everyone. The only person I could say I didn’t like quite as much was the teenager, but maybe that’s because of the way the author presented their dialogue.
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The story is told to us as if it were a doctor’s appointment. Heart records the sessions (with the patient’s permission) ala Ben Harmon from AHS, and we proceed with getting to know the patient. Because this is structured to feel like a conversation with people who are quite emotionally unstabble for whatever reason they might have, some bits of conversation feel like they’re all over the place. I felt this mostly in the first chapter, with the teenager. As we’ve established, the teenager is suicidal and deals with gender identity issues. I liked that the author focused on the teen’s life and feelings without hammering home the point that they are suicidal or whatever, thus making it feel a bit more genuine. Because of this, however, the characters go from Heart asking the teen how they view their own life to why they feel like their gender isn’t right for them. To me, at least, this felt a bit poorly structured, but nevertheless I still enjoyed the chapter. From chapter 2 and onward I didn’t notice much of this, whether it was because they were topics I could relate to more, or because the author did a better job at communicating the topics, I don’t know.
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Despite anything I’ve implied so far, I loved the characters, especially the last person Heart sees before the big finale. It’s as if I was talking with one of my friends and that felt awesome. Speaking of the finale, I think it’s where it might make or break, for some people. I personally really liked it, and shared this story before with a friend of mine who suffers from the same issues the author seemed to describe in the chapter and she says that it checks out (to add to this, since I’m trying not to spoil too too much, she did also mention that what happens in the finale has happened to her, and can happen to others like her, but the severity depends from person to person). Nevertheless, realism or lackthereof aside, I’d recommend suspending your disbelief for the finale, even though I did quite like it.
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I’m sure I did a horrible job on reviewing this book. This was my first review and I’ve only discovered this sub a few days ago, so apologies. All in all I quite liked the book and feel like the topics were tackled with a gentle touch. I don’t know if the author has any experience with the traumas mentioned in the book, but I think he might, considering how in depth he goes in some of them (again, this is just me speculating), and so that helped make this an easy read, despite how graphic some descriptions can get (graphic as in the author doesn’t try to sugarcoat it when characters are suicidal, for example). I also liked that the author didn’t try to sell me on some “hope and love is all I need” type of message – mind you, at the end of the story it does feel like that’s what we’re left with, but through Heart we see the author being quite real and saying that just because a character feels better after their session with Heart, it doesn’t mean they’ll get better all of a sudden and that the battle against, say, depression, is an everyday struggle that people unfortunately have to deal with.
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I recommend you check Doctor For The Broken Hearted out, I bought it for like 13 euros and some change, but I saw that it goes for about 13-15 euros online. That’s about it from me, thanks for reading!
by Kirumototep