If only Staff Nurse
Sally Nesbitt could have fallen in love with nice young reporter Mike Amberton,
instead of carrying a torch for the surgeon Curtis Palmer, in company with all
the other nurses at the General Hospital!
GRADE: C+
BEST QUOTES:
“I like men with a bit of ‘go,’ but I don’t let ’em break my
heart. It’s made out of that new plastic stuff, you know, the kind that bends
but doesn’t break, always comes back to its original shape.”
“When you’ve had enough of this career business I’ll still
be waiting.”
“All the luxury in the world doesn’t make up for friends.”
“Nobody could possibly try to become romantic while occupied
in disposing of coffee and crisps!”
REVIEW:
My goodness, I’m really turning into a cantankerous old
goat. It seems like every VNRN I’ve read lately is one I have actually read
about five times before, and it’s making me discouraged to post yet another
C-range review. This is what happens when you’ve read 383 nurse novels: The truth
comes out that only about a quarter of them, and I may be overly generous in
that estimate, have anything resembling an original plot. Staff Nurse Sally, alas, is not one of these treasured few.
Sally is the quintessential Marjorie Norrell heroine, which
is to say beautiful, stalwart, honorable, intelligent, hard-working, dutiful,
generous, and kind. We can almost see the halo glistening above her softly
waving chestnut brown hair and crisp white linen cap. She’s dating reporter
Mike Amberton, who will love Sally until the day he dies and has already
proposed—and been turned down—four times, but she feels only a sisterly
affection for the poor dope. In about every other chapter we are treated to
more of Sally’s hand-wringing about why oh why can’t she love nice Mike the way
he loves her? But instead she has joined the throng of nurses who are devoted
to quintessential Marjorie Norrell hero Dr. Curtis Palmer, who “doesn’t appear
to know women exist except in two states, nurses and patients. They just don’t
exist otherwise.” This idea too is hammered home again and again, until you
just cannot imagine what Sally is thinking, chasing after this automaton.
Dr. Curtis comes to be aware of Sally’s existence when she
saves Francie Bodman, the only child of a wealthy family, who accidentally
falls off a bridge into a river. Sally’s clear thinking and strong swimming
save Francie’s life, and Francie and her family are so grateful that they press
Sally into specialing Francie, who has sustained the classic VNRN spinal injury
that means she needs months to learn to walk again but will be perfectly fine
in the end. Dr. Curtis comes to visit his patient Francie daily, whether she
needs it or not, and Sally naturally remains blind to all clues that it’s
really her that Curtis wants to talk to. For her part, Francie is in love with
a man who won’t marry her because she’s rich and he’s not, and it takes the
wise grandfather to rescue all these young women and their bumbling beaux.
Marjorie Norrell can write a pleasant heroine (see The Marriage of Doctor Royle, Lesley Bowen M.D., Doctor Geyer’s Project), and Sally
is certainly one. Ms. Norrell is sorely challenged, however, when it comes to
giving us a man we can feel rightly deserves these stellar women; in fact, I
can only find one really good one, and he unfortunately ended up with a dud for
a heroine (in Nurse Lavinia’s Mistake). Ms.
Norrell is a bit prone to the sin of introducing about five dozen different
characters by name, most of which you never meet again, and this makes it
difficult to keep everyone straight. She also has a tendency to blather on and
on about trivial details in a way that makes you suspect she had a word count
goal and that she’d come up short in the first draft. In the end this was a
perfectly good book, just not one I am going to remember in a week.
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