A Nurse for Sand Castle

By Arlene Hale, ©1969 

When her doctor fiancé was killed while serving in Vietnam, lovely nurse Leah West wanted only to forget. Gratefully she accepted an assignment to care for a child seriously injured in an auto accident, for it meant going to live in the isolated mansion of Sand Castle, far from painful memories. But soon Leah found it was not that easy to escape. In her appealing, yet tragically embittered young patient, Leah had to meet her greatest test as a nurse. And in the impassioned rivalry for Leah’s affections between the child’s wifeless father, the brilliant and sardonic Alan Saber, and his handsome playboy brother, Hutch, Leah had to face her most agonizing test as a woman.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“These days when he went out he went for the sort that could ony be described as a dish.” 

“Why are you so upset over a harmless little kiss?”

“Sometimes the people that need our help most aren’t sick in bed.”

REVIEW:
With A Nurse for Sand Castle, the prolific queen of average writing, Arlene Hale, has churned out another C novel. Here, if you must, you will meet Nurse Leah West, who is tragically mourning the death of her fiancé, Dr. Paul Gardner, killed in the Vietnam War six months previously. As we open the book we watch Leah’s friend Dr Jerry Bartley insist that she leave Grover City Hospital to recover from her “nerve exhaustion,” telling her, “You need to fall in love again.” And so she sets off on an assignment to nurse six-year-old Sarajane Saber, who wears leg braces and requires crutches after a car crash a year ago.

Sarahjane and her father Alan had returned to the family mansion, Sand Castle, located on the beach, three weeks before Leah was hired by Alan’s brother Hutch to care for the little waif. Alan is a painter, and spends all his time in one of the turrets working, drinking, and staring at a portait of his wife Celia, who is never to be discussed, apparently killed in the car crash. Hutch also has his issues, and is livid with his brother for abandoning his daughter—he only spends time with her twice in the book, once when the child is seriously ill and once when Leah insists that he come on a picnic with them, and when she crawls up the steps to his attic studio and asks to be let in. “How many times have I told you not to bother me when I’m working?” he shouts before slamming the door in her face. I personally think that’s a pretty serious crime, but Leah thinks there’s more to it than that. “Why hadn’t he done more to help Alan?” Leah wonders. “Why had he allowed some old antagonism from the past to stay between them?”

Needless to say, despite Leah’s crushed heart, she is soon kissing both Alan and Hutch—though it must be confessed that Hutch actually just grabs her the first time—and also threatening to walk off the job, even packing and booking a plane ticket, when Alan tells her, “Do you think that you’re doing your job as well as you could? I don’t. Because you’re holding back part of your heart. You’ve got it all locked up for Paul—a dead man!”

Eventually Leah has little Sarahjane walking again, and all the pathetic, obvious secrets everyone has been carrying are turned face up on the table. Everything winds up exactly as you knew it would, with several characters staging wildly unbelievable about-faces in their personalities, and now we can close a dull novel with no interesting character and little plot. When the only interesting feature is that Hutch has quit smoking and instead eats apples, always tossing one to Leah and her “fielded it expertly,” it’s not a promising sign. Next time you meet a book by Arlene Hale, take my advice and give it the cold shoulder, because it won’t give you much, either.