Nurse Felicity grew up in the Georgia hill country and watched her father doctor the sick there. She understood the natives and they trusted her. But Felicity loved a strong-willed mountain lawyer who resented her work. Could she forget him and start a new life with young Dr. Aleck Potter, somewhere away from “injun medicine and voodoo witchcraft”?
GRADE: C-
BEST QUOTES:
“You and I are committing one of the scarlet crimes of nurses, gossiping about a doctor. Shame on us!”
“How a girl as lovely as you are could possibly be contented to disguise herself in a white canvas uniform I’ll never understand.”
“I am not nosy. I’m just interested.”
“So many girls are so busy being charming and alluring and seductive that they don’t give a man a chance to enjoy their company, because he’s so busy protecting himself from their feminine wiles!”
“Just as soon as you’re strong enough, you’re going to get the paddling of your life, sweetheart.”
“I wonder why you and I are foolish enough to put in years learning to practice medicine when just love will take care of any illness.”
REVIEW:
This morning I surveyed my bookshelf of VNRNs and sighed at the overly large number of books by Peggy Gaddis still waiting to be read. I decided I might as well get it over with and plucked Nurse Felicity out of the lineup, lured by its interesting cover. But it did not take many pages after opening that cover that I experienced that familiar sense of gloom, an inevitable complication of Gaddis’ books, as I watched Nurse Felicity Caldwell leap immediately to her feet when the call light went on at 3:00 am and hold a patient’s hand until he went back to sleep (you will understand my disgust if you’ve ever worked as a nurse on the night shift) and leap to her feet again when Dr. Aleck Potter enters the ward. The pair then enter into a lengthy conversation that exposes Gaddis’ prejudice against the Native Americans who live in the “Georgia hill country,” and discuss of Deenie Taylor, an orphan raised by Indians because her grandmother was a witch and when Granny had died “no white people would have her,” who now wanders randomly through the hospital apparently just for fun. She hates white people, see, and “some of the patients are so afraid of her that if she just stands and looks at them, they go off into a frenzy.” There’s nothing left for her but to learn witchcraft from the Indian medicine men, they decide. I sighed wearily and turned to page 9.
Dr. Potter is just working here for a year to pay back the state for his medical education, then plans to return to the city. Based on his dislike of rural medicine, Felicity “felt that she had never disliked anyone more,” which means he will either marry her or Deenie, but my money was on the latter. Felicity is dating local attorney Corbett Raiford who wants her to quit her job when they marry. “He can’t see any future for a woman finer than being a wife and a mother,” Felicity decides, and Aunt Ellen, who raised the orphan (there are three of them in this book; parents apparently die frequently in Georgia), doesn’t seem to be rooting for him, instead suggesting she go out with that nice Dr. Potter instead! On Felicity’s next date with Corbett, he tells her she should “snap out of that silliness of yours and consent to behave like a reasonable creature,” so you are definitely agreeing with Aunt Ellen, but she continues to go out with him, though every single outing we witness—and there are at least half a dozen of the tedious affairs—end with this same quarrel. So what’s a gal to do?
Well, she can have the plot diverted away from her stupid boyfriend by a beautiful young woman, who has clearly spent more than a day pushing through the densest woods anyone has ever imagined, tossing herself in front of the car of Len Mallory, a handsome and wealthy man from Atlanta who is in town to visit his mother, who has had a heart attack. The woman instantly lapses into a coma that lasts weeks, and no one knows who she is—until Deenie shows up and says she’s the insane niece of a woman who lived with her son in the deepest woods near the Indians’ settlement, and that the young woman had shot them both and set the house on fire. Len Mallory, sensing an opportunity when he sees one, asks Felicity out to dinner, when he tells her that he can’t marry her because (1) “I have not the faintest hope in the world of ever persuading you to fall in love with me,” and (2) he would never move to the mountains and she would never move to the city, so they could never be together. Some people have the most interesting dates!
Peggy Gaddis loves to introduce us to a passel of young men and women and then play musical chairs to see who ends up with whom. I was a little surprised how the six or seven young people we meet in Nurse Felicity played out, and not optimistic about our heroine’s choice working well for her. In between Felicity’s arguments with Corbett and her sparring with Dr. Potter (who always seems to piss her off to an extent that usually precedes wedding bells in Gaddis’ books), we get plenty of the usual Gaddis illogical nonsense that I guess you’re just supposed to gloss over, such as when the sheriff casually explains to an out-of-town visitor, “This Deenie Taylor is the granddaughter of a witch,” like that’s a normal thing here in the mountains, plus the usual doctor-as-lordly-being, spanking, and scheming, flirtatious women we always find. And in another more unfortunate recurrence, this book is obliging me to write another check on behalf of the White Doctor Foundation to try to atone for its racism; Peggy Gaddis has instigated 30 percent of those donations. I suspect, when I finally finish all her books, there will have been many more.
No comments:
Post a Comment