Dr. Garrett’s Girl

By Miriam Lynch, ©1970 

Why did the name of Dr. Kennett Garrett turn every face hostile, and seal all lips? Lovely young nurse Julie Garrett desperately wanted to find out. For she was Dr. Garrett’s daughter, too young to have really known him, when he died, and now back for the first time in the closely knit New England town where he had practiced. Quickly Julie found work in the office of Dr. Robert MacDougall. Soon she had lost her heart to the handsome young physician, and earned the hatred of the beautiful, willful woman who wanted him for her own. But the trials of love paled beside the threat of terror as a shadowy figure tried to force Julie to give up her search for the key that would unlock the doors of mystery that surrounded the past—and free her to find happiness with the man of her dreams.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“He could be impatient with middle-aged women with lives of such paucity that they wasted his time and their money with imaginary ailments. Once Julie heard him snap at one of them to stop reading medical columns in magazines and go home and scrub her kitchen floor and thank God for her good health.” 

“He, like all doctors, never wrote anything that could be deciphered without eyestrain and loss of temper.”

“They tell me it’s not cause for gossip these days if a girl goes to a man’s apartment at dinnertime.”

REVIEW:
Julie Garrett is on vacation when she arrives in Riverford, the town in which she spent her first six years, and where her father, Dr. Kenneth Garrett, was the town doctor. She’d wanted to see her early home, but is startled when the proprietor of the shabby and struggling hotel turns her away after she reveals she’s Dr. Garrett’s daughter: “I don’t have a room in the place for you. Just remembered,” he tells her convincingly. Confused, she stumbles into the current doctor’s office and meets Dr. Robert MacDougall and finds that he is “someone she had fashioned in her hopes and dreams.” He, of course—overworked, over-dedicated small-town GP—is clueless about the mystery that makes door after door close in Julie’s face after she accepts Dr. MacDougall’s desperate plea that she accept a job in his overrun office and looks for an apartment to rent, to find only a room in the house of elderly spinster Charlotte Spencer, who is clearly lying to Julia when she denies any knowledge of Dr. Garrett. 

Of course there is the usual rich, evil woman longing to hook Dr. Robert, and she is Flavia Harrison, a widow with a four-year-old diabetic son and heir to the fortune of the Lawrence family, who founded the hospital, school, and even Dr. Garrett’s education. She literally stomps over Julie at their first meeting, as she pushes her way past a room full of patients for an “urgent” confab with the doctor, who seems unable to tell her to take a number. Julie is not able to say no, either, remaining at her job for only the crumbs of attention of the overworked doctor who never has time to thank her for her overtime: “He was completely absorbed in his work, and he evidently saw no reason for praise or comment on her long hours and hard work.”

Then the calls in the night, a rasping voice croaking, “You’re not wanted here,” the letters adorably composed of cutout newspaper letters stating the same, the slashed tires, all convince her that she’s wasting her time pining after a man who cares not for her and who is so clearly in the sights of a very determined woman. On the verge of packing her bags, she meets Craig Farnsworth, Flavia’s brother, and now Julie is the one being chased—taken out every night for dinners and dancing. Robert, damn him, amiably chats up Craig in the office when the young man pops in to wait for Julie at the end of the day, “did not even seem to notice that she had a suitor,” such a cute word!

You can see the natural disaster peeking over the horizon at mid book, so you will not be surprised when it starts to rain. The river, so close to a community of poor folks too proud to ask for help, begins to rise. Curiously, this also coincides with a  huge surge in disease requiring hospitalization, so Julie is sent to help staff the local hospital, where she works about 30 hours straight without sleep or even meals—and for once, no “note of recognition or hostility. She had simply been one of them, working as hard as she could to keep death at bay.”

While on her hospital tour, she cares for an attorney, Martin Balfour, as well as her landlady, Charlotte Spencer, both of whom cough up more than a little pneumonia-associated phlegm as they reveal that they, along with Julie’s father and Eleanora Lawrence, town darling and original heir to the town founder’s fortune, were a firm foursome as young people—one wonders if Charlotte hadn’t been, along with the two young men, in love with Eleanora. More truth unfolds—though it’s hard to see how this will improve Julie’s standing in town—though it is perplexing why she is held responsible to such a high degree for alleged sins of her father, who had died 20 years previously—not much to think about in small towns, apparently—but so too does the truth between Julie and Robert emerge, so there’s half an unsurprising happy ending for you.

Though the writing is not much more than average, I did appreciate this book for the actual surprise, after 500+ nurse novel reviews, this book offered in the reason for Julie’s ostracism, as well as in its climactic scene, in which the motivations and villains are laid bare. If the repercussions—does the villain get away with it, as it seems they will? Will Julie be accepted by the community at last?—and the problem of the heroine falling in love with a man who barely recognizes her existence and who promises only that “although he left her often, he would always come back to her” are left unanswered, overall this is a book with at least a bit of novelty to it that makes it worth reading.

Nurse at the Cedars

 By Peggy Gaddis, ©1964

He took Susan to his private island to be his private nurse. The old gentleman had only two weeks to live when Dr. Scott Murdock gave him a new wonder drug. Then it looked like he might pull through—and Doctor Scott and Nurse Susan began to find they had more than medicine in common. The country doctor had won the heart of the city nurse. But when greedy relatives, who expected their rich uncle to die, found him convalescing instead—real trouble rocked the little island!

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Relax, Merrill. I’ve had breakfast, and I rarely gobble up nurses before lunch. You are perfectly safe.” 

“If just one more white-clad individual comes at me with a treatment tray and a needle big enough to vaccinate a horse, I’m not going to be responsible for my actions!”

“There’s two schools of thought about raising kids. One was to bring ’em up the way they ought to be; and the other was just to let the FBI handle it later on.”

REVIEW:
My copy of this book was sent to me by a reader of this blog, so the first thing I have to say is Thank you Joanne, for thinking of me! Secondly, I am relieved that Peggy Gaddis here has produced something she’s not often capable of—a good book. Here we find Susan Merrill nursing Mr. Cantrell, a rich man of 68 at a hospital in Atlanta when he decides he would prefer to go home to his estate on an island off the coast of Georgia to die—he has subacute bacterial endocarditis (and there’s an overly dense explanation of the disease that seems like it was lifted from a medical textbook for you to wade through) and has two weeks to live. Of course, he’s decided to take Susan with him as his nurse.

There she meets Dr. Scott Murdock, who is called “Dr. Murdock” throughout the book, even during tender scenes between him and Susan. He is an orphan (Susan, of course, is, too) whose education, residency and present clinic in town were all arranged and paid for by Mr. Cantrell, so since the gentleman’s diagnosis he has been burning the midnight oil researching treatments and has come across an experimental medication that might prolong his life by years, and he persuades Mr. Cantrell to try it.

Then the expected happens: Two greedy nephews and a niece show up, hoping to witness their relative expiring before their eyes and leaving them all the dough, and they are not at all pleased to find the old man is recovering! As Susan and Dr. Scott endeavor to cure the old man while protecting him from his family, they naturally and perfunctorily fall in love as the book hits the halfway point, and 14 pages later Susan essentially proposes. “I should have waited for you to propose to me, all formal and everything, I suppose. I guess I—well, sort of jumped the gun, didn’t I?” Given that they’ve only known each other two weeks, um, yes, you did, honey. But it’s actually a nice change from Gaddis’ usual method of the heroine becoming deeply hurt and insulted over her man’s inability to declare a love she has blindly refused to see.

To be honest, not much happens for a bit, though there’s a lot of flurry with the relatives and the insinuation that one of them might resort to murder, but it never comes to that—the old man conveniently drops of a stroke, as you knew he had to. Now there’s just the reading of the will, and you can probably guess the outcome of that scene, which concludes with Susan slapping the niece! Unfortunately this scene occurs only on page 102, and the rest of the book is a bit of a slog, with many characters coming and going from the house and long discussions about the various lawsuits that will follow, but though this does bring the book down somewhat, overall it is still a good one for Gaddis. The heroine really is a strong character who doesn’t metamorphose into a silly kitten the minute her man is near, and indeed when he tries to send her back to Atlanta, she refuses to go and tells him, “Hush trying to give me orders.” Gaddis does like to latch on to words—here someone is speaking “huskily” or “nodding soberly” every page of the first chapter, but she seems to have decided to reach for her thesaurus as the book progresses. Overall, it’s a satisfying achievement for Ms. Gaddis, so if you are curious to see what she can do when she’s firing on most cylinders, Nurse at the Cedars is not a bad opportunity to find out.

Send for Nurse Alison

By Marjorie Norrell, ©1965
Original title: Only Time Will Tell

Alison Gray wanted so much to forget the unhappiness of her last weeks at St. Hilda’s Hospital that it seemed providential when Merlin Bleckworth asked her to come as industrial nurse in his father’s factory. But was Merlin only interested in her professional ability?

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“Too much agreement is as bad as too much argument.” 

“Life’s not too bad. It’s a great deal what we make it, and the unexpected turning up—like your theoretical thunderstorm—can often be a challenge and quite interesting. It depends how we tackle things.”

REVIEW:
Alison Gray was training to be a nurse when she fell hard for the young cad Dr. Graham Hoyland, who never returned her affections and ended up marrying the daughter of a rich patient. From her tragically broken heart Alison recovered, throwing herself into her studies so that now, a year later, she’s graduated with top honors and is able to work alongside Graham in the ED with nary a flutter to her healed heart. Nonetheless, when the hospital matron out of the blue tells her, “I feel it is important for you to get away for a time,” suggesting Alison take a job in a hospital far away and giving her no reason why this is “the best course for her to take,” Alison curiously is suddenly certain that this is what she should do so that “she need never again have to come into contact with Graham Hoyland or his wife-to-be.” That afternoon she tells her friend Lisa she’s resigning, with no plan for what she’ll do next, only “the strangest feeling everything in my life is being arranged for me.” How convenient!

So she and Lisa head off for a three-week vacation—can you imagine such a thing?—when Alison leaves her job, and when that’s over, as she’s driving out for an interview for a  job she doesn’t want, she sees a small boy fall off a cliff—he and his brother are hunting for gull’s eggs, yum yum—and rushes to his aid. Another car, “a big, opulent estate car,” pulls up, and handsome young Merlin Bleckworth bounds out, assists with the rescue, and helps drive the young victim to the hospital. From there it’s only natural that he should take Alison to dinner, learn she is a nurse, and offer her a job caring for the workers at his family’s industrial manufacturing business.

They drive to his house that night, where Alison is welcomed as one of the family—subjected to frank, heart-to-heart conversations with the housekeeper, his sister, and his mother, all of whom hint to varying degrees that Alison should stay and marry Merlin. When she doesn’t run screaming from the building, they pop her in the old nurse’s suite—the last nurse they had, now leaving to get married, lived in the house—and the next day driver her out to the factory. There she immediately aids with a young worker who has crushed his foot to a jelly, doses an anxious man with a toxic medication no longer in use, diagnoses him with too much stress from living with his in-laws who won’t let him work in their garden, and suggests to Merlin’s father Joseph, the owner of the firm, that he build housing for his factory workers. Then she flies everyone back to the family manor in her invisible jet.

This all having taken half the book to cover, now pretty much nothing else happens. We meet a new character, Dr. Ian Meltham, whom Alison immediately identifies as “a philanderer.” He incessantly pesters Alison for a date, though she never once agrees, except for the time they meet by accident in a department store, where Alison’s ability to say “no” departs her, and she is coerced into having tea with him—and the ensuing scandal requires pages of maneuvering to recover from! Merlin’s would-be girlfriend, the “tall, extremely slender, elegant girl with jet black hair and slanting green eyes,” falls for Dr. Meltham halfway through the book and is therefore completely wasted as one of those evil, scheming gold diggers out for our heroine’s man—though she does show up at the house to ask Alison in a “deadly quiet tone” if she is in love with Dr. Meltham, and Alison randomly decides the woman is on the verge of a “hysterical attack” and diagnoses her with bipolar disorder and calmly talks her out of what we are told is mania, but the description reads more as if she’s just upset and under a lot of pressure from her family to marry Merlin.

Truthfully from this scene on it seems that Alison is the one who has lost her mind, as, realizing she is in love with Merlin, “she would make no plans, no special moves, to draw him towards her,” so she plans to move out of the area that very afternoon without telling anyone because she decides she’s not going to be dumped again, a sentiment that has not haunted her one bit through the year after Graham picked someone else and all the time she’s been at Merlin’s home. Of course there’s an accident that rights everything again, but all through the book runs the theme of trust, and after this very bizarre stunt of Alison’s, It’s hard to believe anyone would ever trust her, again much less propose marriage to keep her from sneaking off. I, on the other hand, having been disappointed and blindsided by the wild leap of her otherwise sturdy character, was not sorry to see the back cover close on Nurse Alison.

Hospital of Bamboo

By Juliet Shore, ©1965 

Vivienne and Toby, nurse and doctor in a military hospital in British North Borneo, were both victims of broken romances and unwilling to become involved again. But they seemed fated to find their names linked—even though Avril Wade did her best to come between them.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“People were as they were created, and it was much more important to be likable than to be pretty.” 

REVIEW:
Vivienne Carlson has decided that “having had much of the smooth in her chosen profession a little of the rough would do her no harm,” so she has signed up for a stint in Indonesia. She’s left her young man, Graham, at home, and we know how that’s going to work out! He hasn’t written in six weeks, but when the unusually thin missive finally arrives, it’s to tell her that not only is he dumping her, he’s already married the other woman!  Well, the gossip at this small outpost would be more than she can bear in her heartbreak, so her best friend helpfully tells everyone that Vivienne has dropped Graham for Dr. Toby Chiltern! How embarrassing! Especially when the gossip reaches Dr. Chiltern’s ears! 

When she corners Dr. Chiltern to apologize, however, he does the obvious and chivalrous (and clearly self-benefitting) thing—he offers to be her beard. “If this rumor helps you at all, why not leave it? I don’t mind in the least,” he tells her, helpfully pointing out that “we will have to act it up a bit,” so they start going out on faux dates, which they both enjoy maybe slightly—and predictably—overmuch.

Now comes the big wrench, in the form of Avril Wade. She was once Toby’s fiancée, but the night before their wedding he caught her in the arms of his would-be best man and headed for the hills of Indonesia. Avril will have her man and her revenge in the end, and is so devoted to this cause that she has become a nurse and chased Toby to the Far East. I mean, that’s dedication! When she hears that a nurse in her own hospital is about to be sent to Toby’s, she trips the woman on the stairs, causing her to break her ankle, and then wangles her way into the spot. Upon arriving, she immediately arranges a date with Toby—which rankles Vivienne to a degree that surprises no one except Vivienne herself—to announce her intentions. Toby, however, remains unimpressed with Avril, but agrees to keep their former relationship a secret from everyone, including Vivienne.

Avril, the usual foxy vixen with “sultry lips and veiled, long-lashed eyes” and a vigorous work ethic devoted solely to her own appearance, then proceeds to play the entire staff like the virtuoso she is, convincing everyone that Vivienne is a driving, mean harpy. She even reads Vivienne’s diary, discovering to her delight that Vivienne and Toby’s relationship is a sham. “It was too pathetically easy to stir up strife among innocent people and be made a heroine for doing so,” she exults. Toby, however, is immune from Avril’s machinations, and soon declares his love for Vivienne—and she, amazingly, realizes she was never in love with Graham at all, and that Toby is her true love!

The pair arrange a four-day vacation on the beach, where Toby intends to press Vivienne to marry him right away after their few weeks’ courtship: “Don’t keep me waiting long,” Toby pleads, failing to mention for what exactly? But Vivienne knows: “Women have feelings, too, Toby. I want you. We’ll just have to be patient a little while longer. Although I love you I feel I hardly  know you, and I want to know you very much.”

But then pesky Graham turns up at the hotel where Vivienne is waiting for Toby to join her later that day, as they are travelling separately. Graham wants to apologize in person for destroying Vivienne’s hopes and dreams, and just happens to be in the neighborhood. Though annoyed by Graham’s egotism, she agrees to meet with him. “With luck she could get Graham out of the say, assured of her present feelings and future happiness, and then proceed to welcome Toby with all her hungry heart and its yearnings,” because of course she is not going to tell Toby that she is meeting Graham.

On his side of things, Toby is blackmailed by Avril into driving her to the same town he is headed to on his vacation, as she casually mentions that she still has Toby’s old love letters, and it would be such a shame if anyone else should see them. “He would have liked to tell Viv all about Avril and her threats, but she might wonder why the confidence had not been made sooner”—um, yeah, and she isn’t the only one—so he continues the lie by omission with the excuse, “He loved Vivienne dearly and she must be protected from his ex-fiancée at any cost.”

But what a cost! Toby and Avril show up at Vivenne’s hotel just as Graham is pecking her on the cheek in goodbye. She is compelled to introduce everyone, and now hypocritical Toby is pissy that Vivienne hadn’t mentioned the meeting. “He became furious and miserable by turns. Didn’t she know her own mind, then? I love you one minute and kissing somebody else the next.” So Toby spends most of his vacation ignoring Vivienne and frolicking with Avril on the beach, “subjecting her to humiliation never dreamed of by Graham, who had at least made a clean, sharp thrust in ending their fare.” Back at the hospital, Toby continues to play up to Avril. “It was all rather sickening. Not once had he approached her to try to patch up” their relationship, mopes Vivienne back at the ranch.

Of course there’s the usual crisis that brings the pair together again, Vivienne being amazingly generous and forgiving of the really horrible behavior of her boyfriend. But overall this is an entertaining book with some very pretty writing ("Flies merrily buzzed in, met the blast of DDT in the antiseptic atmosphere and drunkenly barged out again”), interesting characters (as usual, the villainess Avril is the most intriguing person in the book), and minimal racism (though I will be making the usual donation on behalf of the White Doctor Foundation). You could certainly do a lot worse than to spend some time in Hospital of Bamboo.

Senior Staff Nurse

By Hilda Pressley, ©1965 

Annette was confident that she could return to her old job as staff nurse at the Royal Hospital and face her ex-fiancé David without a qualm. But how would she really feel when they came face to face? Was there really ‘nothing so dead as a dead love’?

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“Since when was human behavior consistent?” 

“Any person’s the richer for having loved. Nothing—either time or distance—can take away the effect of love. It builds something into a person, into their character. Something permanent.”

“It’s only too easy to make all the virtues—trust, kindness, simplicity, meekness—appear like foolishness, instead of sterling qualities.”

“There’s far more to people than proteins, fats, carbohydrates and so on.”

“Time and love are strangers to each other.”

REVIEW:
A year and a half before this book opens, Annette Cochrane and her fiancé, resident anesthesiologist David Hadley, had argued over her wish to complete her training before getting married. “I don’t want my wife working. I’m earning enough for both of us,” he’d trotted out. But she’d gone anyway: “I want to feel I’ve achieved something before giving up,” she replies, already having given up “the secret ambition she had once had to specialize” as a scrub nurse. So off she goes to a hospital a hundred miles off for six months more training while he waits around for her to come home. Or not, as it turns out when she comes back that he’d been taking out chief nurse Janet Hughes in her absence. But he’d suggested they end their engagement, so she’d slipped off her ring and gone off for a year of surgery training.   

Now back at the hospital, she’s doing her best not “to fall in love with David all over again, suffer the same heartbreak.” He’s being very helpful with that, acting all cold and snippy, yet still always seems to be around for one reason or another. She starts dating the new surgeon, Andrew Knight, who seems to have fallen for her in a big way, but every time she takes him to her apartment, David is there visiting her roommate. Meanwhile there are the usual troubles with her colleagues: the chief nurse is cool and unfriendly, and one of her subordinates is deliberately sabotaging her, but Annette is ultimately able to negotiate her work difficulties. After many dates with Andrew, he eventually proposes, but she is still waffling about whether or not she still loves David, and goes “all sentimental every time he came into her mind,” deciding it’s “habit for her heart to gyrate every time he came near her or touched her.” Sure it is! So we spend a great deal of time watching Annette and David slowly drift into the painfully obvious ending we saw from the first chapter.

It’s curious that this book presents working as one of two choices: one either marries and gives up her career or becomes “a hard-bitten, career-driven woman who thinks of nothing but work and expects everyone under her to do the same.” Annette decides out of the blue, halfway through the book and after having gone to considerable trouble to maximize her nurse training, that “there were more important things in life than achieving an ambition,” thinking that “marriage can be more important for a woman than a career.” It’s an odd position for someone who was hell-bent on finishing her training at the expense of her relationship. The most irritating part of this is that in the end—spoiler alert—when she’s ready to chuck her career David replies, “My darling, you don’t have to. It’s entirely up to you. But the fact that you were willing to—” He doesn’t say what that does for him, but it made me want to throw up, and was an irritating way to end a book that had been largely only dull up to that point.  

Nurse of Spirit Lake

By Dorothy Brenner Francis, ©1975 

Ellen Ferris was aghast at her first sight of Scarlet Point Lodge. Never had Aunt Madeleine mentioned that the hotel she had recently purchased on the shores of Iowa’s Big Spirit Lake was in fact a run-down four-story monstrosity with a red tile roof and Gothic-arched Spanish belfry towers. Even more astonishing was Aunt Madeleine’s revelation that she had only four guests—really five, she carefully explained, if you counted sandy-haired Doug Cooper, the young writer who helped out with odd jobs in exchange for his room and board. But Aunt Madeleine had plans—ambitious intentions of restoring the lodge to its former graciousness—and she had hired Frank Welborn, an architect with blond hair and deeply tanned skin, to supervise the renovation. Resignedly Ellen tried to concentrate on setting up a first-aid station for the lodge’s four elderly guests. It was for this purpose that the blue-eyed nurse had come to spend the summer at Spirit Lake. And she had welcomed the invitation, because it afforded her time to ponder the problem that had arisen during her last semester of teaching at a California nursing school. Before long, however, Ellen’s problem was eclipsed by the thornier ones involved in running Scarlet Point Lodge—and in managing her own unpredictable heart. And then the odd occurrences began …

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“No matter how far a guy travels there’s nowhere to look for subject matter except within oneself.” 

“Good food can distract almost anyone from unpleasantness.”

“Sincere compliments for work well done never spoiled anyone.” 

“History is a crop that sometimes gets plowed under.”

“Every place in the world is special, but life moves so fast that it takes a magician, or an artist, to make people stop and notice the uniqueness right at their doorstep.”

REVIEW:
Ellen Ferris had never wanted to be a nurse, but had been forced into it by her Aunt Madeline, who had raised her after she had been orphaned at 15. But she’d gotten her way in the end, becoming a teacher at a nursing school after she had obtained her RN. Now she’s again doing her aunt’s bidding by coming to Scarlet Point Lodge, the run-down hotel on the shores of Spirit Lake in Iowa, to serve as staff nurse for the whopping four guests at the lodge who seem to be staying all summer as well. She’s in a bit of a pickle at school: A wealthy man’s daughter is flunking Ellen’s class, and if she flunks the student, the father is going to change his mind about the endowment he’s planning to give the school. So Ellen is hoping this little sojourn away from school will help her figure out if she’d rather keep her principles or her job.

Before long strange things start happening: food is going missing from the pantry, and Ellen finds a hair ribbon on the third floor, which is closed to guests. And someone has used the rowboat! Aunt Madeleine also demonstrates some erratic behavior such as standing on the railing of the third-floor belfry and becoming too frightened to get down, not to mention staffing and stocking out a first aid station for a meager four guests when she has better things to do with her money, as her hotel is literally falling apart and the lawn isn’t even mowed. But that doesn’t seem to bother Ellen as much as the hair ribbon does.

Meanwhile there are two young men to compete for Ellen’s hand in marriage, because it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a heroine of a nurse novel must be in want of a husband. There’s Doug, a writer with a gloomy outlook—he obsesses a lot about the history of Native American massacres in the area, constantly calling Ellen’s attention to the site of this attack or that one—and he has some odd ideas: “I believe there’s a universal thought bank that’s made up of every thought and every idea that has ever existed. And I believe that each individual mind is an inlet that’s in some mysterious way connected to this huge thought bank,” he tells her, adding that he’s tapped into this thought bank, because “even if I’d never read a word about the Spirit Lake massacre, I know I would have sensed a feeling of death when I visited this area. It’s all around us.” Because no one anywhere else has ever died. She likes him anyway, but does think “there was an unrest about him that troubled her, interested her.”

The other young man, Frank Welborn, is the architect that Madeleine has hired to spruce up the hotel. He’s “a sleek type who might have stepped from a clothing advertisement in a slick magazine,” and we first meet him when Ellen discovers him in her room, allegedly measuring the space for future renovations. She dates him too, even though he uses the adjective “super” in about every other sentence, but on the plus side he’s never even heard of the Spirit Lake massacre and “never cared much for local history,” so he’s not bringing up dead people all the time. He tells Ellen to pass her student and move to New York City with him. “You aren’t afraid to try making it in a big city, are you?” Luckily he decides they should head out on the dance floor before she’s obliged to continue this “uncomfortable conversation,” but there she decides, apparently based on Frank’s smooth dance moves, that “Frank was a man a girl could build a dream around.”

When she’s not kissing boys, there’s lots of other action at Scarlet Point Lodge for Ellen to get involved in. There’s a huge storm in which the 77-year-old guest decides to go for a walk and a tree falls on him, giving him a head laceration, which Ellen treats with sedatives and then sends him off to bed, possible concussion or brain bleed be damned! The fireplace chimney gets blocked and smokes out the ground floor, causing one of the guests to have a severe asthma attack and vows to check out immediately. “Madeleine Ferris is an idiot,” he pronounces, having only just arrived at a conclusion that would have been painfully obvious from the first minute on the place. But Ellen shows who the idiot is when she distracts him from his idea with a buttered muffin. Then she finds a runaway girl, 12-year-old Lori Wilde, who has run away from a foster home while her mother serves six months in jail for shoplifting food. Lori, intent on not being seen, is shining a light around the dock and singing along to a radio in the middle of the night when Ellen timidly ventures out to see who is making all the ruckus. Lori might not be as dopey as her hiding skills make you think, as right away she asks Ellen, “Why are you bothering to ask me dumb questions?”

Janey van Allen, the young woman who Ellen caught cheating on the exam, turns up after driving 1,500 miles and tells Ellen that the reason she cheated on the exam, though she is otherwise an A student, is that she had been caring for her 7-year-old sister with severe tonsillitis for the previous three days and hadn’t had time to study. She begs for forgiveness and swears she will never cheat again. It’s curious that this story hadn’t surfaced weeks earlier, at the time of the actual incident, but hard-hearted Ellen is unimpressed. Then Doug proposes, but he’d just gotten a letter from someone named Julie Jackson and doesn’t explain it to Ellen, and then she sees Frank holding Janey’s hand and there’s lipstick on his cheek, so there go both of her men, as easy as they came. Only a hotel fire will put everything to rights!

Honestly, you’d swear Ellen is jinxed the way one calamity after another happens to her. She herself is a confusing character, as she is determined to do the “right” thing by expelling her student from school but herself repeatedly fails to report the runaway child, leaving the girl to sleep in the woods for days. She also doesn’t seem to have much sense as she navigates the world, freaking out about Doug getting a letter from a woman and swooning for the asinine Frank. Overall this book and a number of its characters, Aunt Madeleine in particular, are a bit perplexing. Failure of logic and inconsistent characters are two of the most common problems VNRNs have, and Nurse of Spirit Lake has both in abundance, so you might want to save your time and pick a different book.

Nurse at Ste. Monique

By Juliet Armstrong, ©1966

That foggy London morning, when someone tried to snatch her handbag, was to have far-reaching consequences for Maura O’Shea, sending her winging across the seas to a new life in the sunny West Indies. It was indeed a far cry from the renowned St. Matthew’s Hospital in London to the little nursing home at Ste. Monique, but Nurse Maura was to find that the emotional problems facing her there were far, far greater than ever they were in London.

GRADE: B+

REVIEW:
Maura O’Shea is the Irish stereotype, red-haired and feisty; “You could deal out a very smart box on the ear, if you thought a chap deserved it,” she’s told. She is working in London when right there on the first page her handbag is stolen and she is knocked to the ground. “A tall man, carrying a suitcase, strode over to her and lifted her to her feet with his free arm, firmly but gently, as though she were a precious piece of china.” Do we think this gentleman makes an appearance on the last page of the book as well? We sure do! His name is Paul Lasalle, and he is in town on business for his plantation (yeesh) in the Caribbean. Because the robber is soon nabbed, he is required to come back to town to testify at the trial in a few weeks, so the pair go out regularly before he heads back home. But his brother, Claude, is also in town—and he’s a more social fellow, frivolous with his emotions, soon taking her out on a regular basis and calling her “darling,” which makes Paul’s eyebrows rise concernedly when he returns, and he’s a bit too brusque for Maura. “Was it that he suspected her of setting her cap at Claude, and regarded her as on a lower social level than the Lasalles?” 

But Claude has to return to the Caribbean soon, and Maura tells him she’s not going to see him any more—so he shows up and proposes marriage. It’s arranged that she will sail to the Caribbean in a few weeks, and at the first stop she gets a telegram telling her to get off there, though she’d planned to finish her trip at another island, and when she steps off, she’s met by Paul, who tells her that Claude has gone back to his ex-wife—whose existence surprises Maura. When Paul tells her he will pay for her to fly back to London on the next flight, instead of being grateful, she’s rude: “You’re in a great hurry to get me out of the island! I might have the plague!” she snaps, not at all grateful that he’s trying to help her out of a huge jam. Instead she takes a room in a boarding house and gets a job at a nursing home, but Paul warns her that the nursing home is on the verge of going bankrupt, because although it’s a profitable business, the owner, Mrs. Martin, took on a lot of debt to finance its startup and is having trouble paying her creditors as well as the business expenses. Again, is she thankful for the tip? No, she is not!

Yet he keeps popping around to see her or take her to dinner, and they inevitably squabble, mostly about his concerns about the men she is dating—his motivations transparent to everyone except Maura, who thinks, “How hard and distrustful he could be, how lacking in charity”—although one time when they are driving to dinner and she has fallen asleep in the car she dreams that he gently kissed her lips … and then suddenly, out of nowhere, Maura decides “to part with him finally and forever, would be utterly unbearable”! This is one of the worst sorts of plot twists, completely inconsistent—even if completely predictable—with the character we have followed in the last hundred pages. Yet she still argues with him at every turn, and then does her best friend Phyllis a bad turn when she dates her boyfriend and he thinks he’s fallen in love with her. Only a series of crises with both Paul and Phyllis—again, completely predictable—sort out everyone’s true feelings, although one of the crises, which lands Paul in the hospital, is so bizarre it’s hard for me to imagine Paul would ever look at Maura again.

In the meantime, Maura is being quite rude to a coworker who, it must be confessed, is not a nice person, though she should know even at 22 that she’s not helping the situation. Oddly, she is reluctant to visit Paul in the hospital but finally goes a week or two later, “cost her what it might in pride,” though it’s clear to me that she owes him a lot more than a visit—but he’s left the hospital days ago. She meets the nurse who had cared for him there, and now she’s stupidly in agonies that Paul has fallen for his nurse, wondering if she “was the reason for his silence”—and never mind that she hasn’t reached out to him at all, either, so maybe he’s wondering about her silence, but “she was too proud to ring up the Lasalles, as she would have loved to do.” Maura is her own worst enemy, and it’s a little difficult to understand what all the men see in her. And now she’s decided to leave the Caribbean in two weeks, another smart decision. Then her feud with her co-worker lands her in hot water at the immigration office, as she’s been working without a permit, and is told to leave the island the next day. What will happen next?

The obstacle with this book is that Maura is a stupid and not very likeable person. She deserves little of the good that happens to her and all of the bad. But the writing is good, even if I found nothing for the Best Quotes section above, and the other characters in the book are interesting. If you can tolerate a very predictable plot (but then, aren’t all VNRN plots very predictable?) and a foolish heroine, it’s not a bad read.