A nurse-companion on a Caribbean cruise sounded like fun to Laurie Fielding. But to make sure she got the job, Laurie tried to disguise her blonde loveliness before she went for the interview. The first person Laurie met on the Bianca was Jeff Anderson, so much the picture of the man every girl hopes to meet on a cruise that Laurie was instantly put on guard. As they cruised the exotic tropical islands, Laurie found herself paired off with the young professor writing a book on the West Indies and her beautiful employer with the attractive Jeff—with Laurie becoming more and more attracted to Jeff. A delightful and exciting story of a young nurse in search of adventure—with both danger and love lurking for Laurie in the blue waters of the Caribbean.
GRADE: C+
BEST QUOTES:
“I always thought most nurses looked like majordomos.”
“Nurses have a way of managing things—and people.”
“Isn’t every young, single woman who saves up enough money for a cruise on the lookout for husband material?”
“Fear flooded over her, and she wanted to turn and run. But her nurse’s training restrained her.”
REVIEW:
Nurse Laurie Fielding meets all the criteria for a nurse
position that she sees advertised—except the ad specifically requests that the
applicant be “preferably not too attractive.” Of course, Laurie does not fit
that bill, with her “natural blonde hair, big blue eyes, creamy skin, and a
figure that more often than not draws wolf whistles.” So she wears a hair net
and large tortoiseshell glasses to the interview, where young widow Irma Potts,
age 36, hires Laurie even though, she says, “I don’t want someone to outshine
me!” Irma is a flighty, vapid heiress with no actual illnesses other than a few
days of seasickness, so Laurie needn’t worry that she “wouldn’t like spending
all her time shut up in a cabin with her patient, when she was longing to enjoy
the sea air, the pleasures of the voyage, and the interesting sights.” In
short, Laurie is hoping for what she herself calls “a vacation” while getting
paid for not doing any work, and that is exactly what she gets! In fact, Irma soon
advises Laurie to quit dressing down, so even the “disguise” Laurie wears to
get the job is quickly abandoned—yet another dopey plot device that goes
nowhere.
On board, Laurie soon meets Jeff Anderson, and “there was something about him—perhaps because he looked so much like the sort of man a girl might dream about meeting on a cruise—that made Laurie dislike him.” She’s not wrong, actually; he’s not a likable man, aggressive, always pushing himself onto her and attempting to control her. She is frequently furious with him, but alas, we know what that means—she won’t have the sense or the ability to resist him much longer. Soon he’s kissing her on a regular basis. “If Jeff had wanted to kiss her again, she knew he would have, without asking,” and the thought gives her chills—of pleasure, unfortunately, because have I mentioned that Laurie doesn’t have much sense?
Laurie tries to make it her job to protect Irma from wolves and thieves, but it’s not going well. She suspects Jeff of being a crook in part because he refuses to have his photograph taken. “If he was the adventurer she believed him to be, his past might catch up with him,” she decides, but is unable to keep him away from Irma. And then Irma is travelling with an enormous amount of valuable jewelry and wears it all at once, so everyone is aware of it, and then she won’t keep it in the safe. Laurie has concerns about a few other suspicious people besides Jeff, starting with a man named John Harvey who uses crutches to walk and whom Irma constantly calls “pathetic” due to his disability. Laurie regularly catches Mr. Harvey in the hall outside Irma’s room, though his room is on another floor, but immediately decides not to say anything about it, deciding that it “most likely amounted to nothing.”
Eventually Laurie decides that the best thing is for her to keep the jewels in her own room, and guess what? The next night they’re stolen, and Laurie is a suspect! Now she’s trying to figure out who stole them and making a poor job of it. When she finds Mr. Harvey arguing with a rich older woman passenger, “it was another riddle that Laurie decided she might as well forget.” The next night, after finding Mr. Harvey in the hall again, she finds the empty jewel case back in her room—and promptly tosses it overboard. Then Laurie stumbles across a crewmember who is dying from a gunshot wound. He tells her, “The jewels—she found out I knew where they—” but she mentions this to exactly no one, and the man promptly dies. Laurie has the common sense of a gnat. Eventually she does something really stupid and almost gets herself shot, too, but almost every strong male on the ship shows up at the same time and she is rescued! And discovers she’s in love, too!
This is a perfunctory story whose plot makes no sense. On one hand, Laurie cannot put two and two together and constantly sabotages herself—until she is deciding she alone can capture the criminal, who she selects essentially out of the blue, and nearly gets herself killed by someone whose presence is unexplainable, too. Her—no surprise, this—love interest is portrayed in unflattering terms at every meeting, but after hating him for most of the story, she falls for him hard, and the sudden conversion makes as little sense as pretty much everything else in the book. To cap it all off, we have the consistently insulting descriptions of Mr. Harvey’s handicap, and, on visits to numerous ports of call, all the typical colonialistic, patronizing attitudes about Caribbean citizens and countries. My White Doctor Foundation is making a dual donation following this review, to the UNCF and the Cabrillo College Accessibility Support Center (a favorite cause of disabled and most beloved VNRN author Bill Neubauer). You can avoid the particularly noxious ick factor I had to wade through by just refusing to get on board Nurse Laurie’s Cruise.
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