GRADE: B+
BEST QUOTES:
“Now, Helen, you aren’t going to go fussy on me. You know I
wouldn’t have done a hysterectomy unless it was absolutely necessary. Don’t you
worry about a thing. A few little old shots and some pills and you’ll feel
younger than ever—prettier too.”
“Ladylike, that was the word for Linda. She would make a
good wife for a doctor.”
“Climb into bed with a grateful patient, and you were
climbing into bed with trouble.”
“I think she’s got trouble—doctor trouble.”
“She’ll stick around till he teaches her some facts of life
she’s never learned in textbooks.”
“Why does a woman choose to be split from stem to stern when
she could so easily produce her baby through the regular route? Maybe she wants
to be fashionable and keep a virginal vagina on top of everything—no pun
intended.”
“Witty women bore me. You’re just supposed to sit there and
look decorative.”
“You don’t mean you’re going to turn down an invitation to
go to this marvelous pool because of a bunch of crippled children?”
REVIEW:
This is an Ace double novel, meaning if you flip the book
over, another complete novel starts on the other side—which is why there is no
back cover blurb accompanying this review. This book is backed with Dr. Kilbourne Comes Home, which not only
features a male doctor as the star, but has no nurse, no matter what the cover
illustration might make you think. So you will not be seeing a review of that
story; I might put out a review of a book with a male protagonist if he ends up
with a nurse in the end, but if there is no RN in sight, neither will I be.
In the half of this book that does concern us, Nurse Linda
Shore is hopelessly in love with gorgeous OB/GYN
Dr. Shelby Tailor, who is a shameless cad. He strings her along, breaking dates
at the last minute when a better offer comes along, and she is hopelessly
smitten, the poor dolt. She’s working on the pediatrics ward when she meets
Adam Ralston, “an Abe Lincoln in specs,” Linda thinks of him. He’s studying for
a master’s degree in education, with a focus on handicapped children. He steps
in to comfort a frightened child, and Linda is impressed: “He had been so calm
and cool, and—oh—exactly right.” Adam has a son of his own, Teddy, who is
“spastic,” which is what they used to call someone with cerebral palsy. He has
a farm in the country, where he takes Teddy and a group of handicapped children
for a few weeks in the summer, but his dream is to turn this into a year-round
rehabilitation center. Where his wife is, he is slow to reveal—they’re
divorced, it turns out—but since Linda’s heart is irretrievably sworn to
Shelby, it doesn’t really matter, right?
Linda’s sister soon moves to town, and 18-year-old Robin
soon proves to be a quite the flirt. And when Shelby, who has been cooling
toward Linda, meets Robin, suddenly he’s stopping by more frequently. When
Linda finally gets wind of the fact that Shelby has been taking Robin out, he
smooths it over by telling her, “You’re becoming more important to me than any
woman I know.” And she falls for it, the dope. He keeps seeing Robin, calling
her multiple times daily, and she becomes increasingly petulant, demanding that
he drop Linda and marry her, but he is quite convinced that, despite his
obsession with Robin, he doesn’t want to marry her, so he’s in a bit of a jam
there.
His professional life isn’t going much better: He’s taken on
wealthy Gilda Dalrymple, daughter of the hospital chief of staff, as a patient.
He induces her labor for no medical reason, which is ethically and medically
dicey, and messes up the dosing of the oxytocin. Needless to say, Gilda’s labor
progresses too fast, her cervix tears, and she will never be able to have
another child. Not only that, but her son turns out to have Down syndrome: “He
was—dear God—he was an idiot!” Which is apparently worse than if he’d been
stillborn, as Gilda lapses into a near coma of depression and grief and refuses
to see the baby. Shelby’s career is in tatters, so he proposes to Linda—she’s
become good friends with Gilda during Gilda’s long stay in the hospital, and
“maybe she could put a good word in for him. Yes, it might be a very good thing
for Dr. Shelby Tailor to be engaged to Linda Shore.”
Linda saves the day, of course, by gently encouraging Gilda
to care for her son and by taking Gilda and her son out to see Adam and Teddy
at the house in the country. Adam helps talk sense into Gilda, diagnosing her
with postpartum depression, which her illustrious doctor failed to pick up. For
his part, “Teddy, who loved everybody, leaned against Gilda’s knee, and slowly
she overcame her revulsion for his braces and jerking movements, and her arms
went around him.” Gilda stays at the farm for a week, with Linda there to nurse
her, and soon she’s everything a new mother should be.
Now all that we have to do is push Linda into Adam’s arms,
and what better to do that than a classic VNRN device, the natural disaster? A
tornado blows through, destroying Adam’s farm—and the Black Cat, a seedy
nightclub, where Robin and Shelby were, coincidentally, out on a date! Robin
winds up in the hospital and, in her panic, blurts the affair to Linda, which
finally wakes up our pathetic heroine. She dumps Shelby, who departs for
Mississippi, and Gilda and her father are so grateful to her and Adam for their
help that they fund the transformation of the destroyed farm into the John
Dalrymple rehabilitation center for handicapped children, named after Gilda’s
son. Adam offers her a job there as head nurse, and she accepts—thinking of the
years she will devote to her career instead of a husband. And if Linda finishes
the book with a broken heart instead of an engagement ring, we understand Adam
will wait for her.
It’s a sweet ending, one of the better ones I’ve encountered,
particularly since it doesn’t brush off her love for Shelby with a flick of the
pen the way most VNRN writers do. The writing here is steady and enjoyable, if
not the most exciting. Patti Stone’s prior four books (Nina Grant, Pediatric Nurse; Sandra, Surgical Nurse;
Judy George, Student Nurse; and Big Town Nurse) have earned either a B+
or a C, and this is definitely good enough to win the former mark.
Just finished this one! You can't go wrong when the cover features both a nurse AND a woman running from a house!
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