Hi everyone. Welcome back to Bibliophilia Book Reviews. Today I’m reviewing Pulse, the first book in the Vital Signs Series by Judy G. Walters. To get a copy of this book, visit the publisher’s website here. For this review, I was contacted by the publisher and kindly received an ARC by the author in exchange for an honest review.
Pulse by Judy G. Walters is a fast-paced, gut-wrenching, and prone-to-tears (in some places), medical drama fiction book set in the emergency room of a hospital in Texas. Trigger warning for death of a child and drowning. The main character, Dr. Bobby Jackson, is a well-respected, well-liked, and successful emergency doctor whose prosperous medical career is severely weighed down by his utterly unsuccessful marriage to his abusive wife. After the death of their son two years before (no spoiler here because this happens at the beginning of the book, in the preface), Bobby is not in a good place. Leaving his job at the hospital where Jeremy died, he decides to start fresh at St. Mary’s Emergency Department where nobody knows about his past or has ever met his wife. Unfortunately, he cannot do the same thing at home and his relationship with Jaqueline is beyond repair.
This is something that I liked about this book. The contrast between a successful career and an ailing personal life. On the one hand, there’s the emergency room where everything happens so fast you barely have time to breathe without risking someone’s life in between, and this constant reminder of the fine line between life and death never lets us forget how ephemeral life actually is; thus the events related in the preface of this book never leave our minds. I think the author did a really good job at portraying the high-speed, adrenaline-pumped life of an ER doctor. On the other hand, there’s the main character’s life outside of the ER and the remains of it after the train-wreck. Losing a child is hard, and I would never wish that on anyone. But this side of the story is also very well done. The death of a child can ruin a marriage, with one parent placing blame on the other, and this, I think, is what happens here. The book is about grief and how the loss of a loved one can make you stop living altogether in the aftermath, and I thought this was a very interesting topic to address considering how many people have lost family members in the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This ultimately was a book for them. But I did think that Jaqueline’s grief wasn’t addressed as well as it ought to have been. After all, she too lost a child, and I couldn’t help wondering at times how Bobby and Jaqueline’s marriage was before Jeremy’s death. I admit that I would have liked to see that at some point during the novel (though Bobby does reminisce about it in several chapters). This however is not the direction the novel goes in, and that is fine. I just couldn’t help wondering sometimes.
The emergency cases during Bobby’s shifts, however, were too quick to make much of an impression, with some exceptions; these too were quick to remind us, in case we had forgotten, of the frailty of life. And I get why this is so. Their fast-paced nature portrays accurately the speed with which cases go in and out of the emergency room in real-life (and this was very well done) but at the same time no case resonated enough with me (or stayed long enough with me) for me to see them as part of Jackson’s path to healing from his son’s death.
People put what they want the world to see on the outside, but what’s really important is always on the inside.
Some parts of the novel felt told. And this occurs both at the emergency room and at Jackson’s house. Particularly, in scenes where I was expecting him to take the reins of his personal life and start fixing it, but most were summarized in a small paragraph and told. And I think that scenes such as these (and several others) would have been better served with dialogue. Another example is when Jackson defines (or explains) a medical condition to us. I agree it is important to let us readers know what medical conditions afflict the patients, but I didn’t think that Jackson was the best choice to let us know. Again, I think dialogue would have been the best choice here.
I did like that the book never stops reminding us that tragedy can strike at any moment, and it did that too at the ending. Although I admit that the ending felt rather sudden and disconnected to me from the rest of the book, and I was not expecting that. But that doesn’t mean that the book isn’t good. It is. And I enjoyed reading it despite the fact that it took a completely different turn at the ending than I was anticipating, and it caught me off guard. This in itself, however, is not a bad thing and I liked that the author kept me at the edge of my seat notwithstanding.
I also liked Dr. Birchfield, and I think he deserves his own book, BTW.
I gave this book 3.5 stars.
