tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8644711217777784242024-03-17T23:03:52.686-04:00Vintage Nurse Romance NovelsSusannahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12417568186428454938noreply@blogger.comBlogger578125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-864471121777778424.post-40858151394361911942024-03-09T15:26:00.009-05:002024-03-14T19:02:07.449-04:00Hurricane Nurse<p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7KJc20daMZ6zZbOEd7wqoDcUOo3MwikVlxJIsf9eHTOtKS-CO5EGBTjeeGH9skzYDgiCSIob32Q0OLUP4cSSJAYrrvPB7zAN6Hz74_3Wqa33LnCPaBaTSGS9RqCS17yW0i3V3jN147ad-9paDkMG_Sqd8Z4eaW0ZFomt5D-lkon1f6sby-gpeW1hTyh1d/s432/Hurricane%20Nurse%20-%20Sargent.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; font-weight: 700; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="432" data-original-width="321" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7KJc20daMZ6zZbOEd7wqoDcUOo3MwikVlxJIsf9eHTOtKS-CO5EGBTjeeGH9skzYDgiCSIob32Q0OLUP4cSSJAYrrvPB7zAN6Hz74_3Wqa33LnCPaBaTSGS9RqCS17yW0i3V3jN147ad-9paDkMG_Sqd8Z4eaW0ZFomt5D-lkon1f6sby-gpeW1hTyh1d/s320/Hurricane%20Nurse%20-%20Sargent.jpg" width="238" /></a><b><span style="font-family: verdana;">By Joan Sargent<br /><i style="font-family: verdana;"></i></span></b><b><span style="font-family: verdana;">(pseud. Sara Jenkins Cunningham), ©1962 </span></b></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>A hurricane in Miami draws a cautiously mixed assemblage to
the Flamingo Elementary School for shelter. Among them are: Donna Ledbury,
red-haired school nurse, the current girlfriend of the school principal. Hank
Fincher, who, according to the school grapevine, had a new girl each year, and
who had just jilted Mary Hendley, first-grade teacher, who still carried a
torch for Hank; Cliff Warrender, a “gangster” lawyer in Donna’s opinion, but
whose worse fault was in defending the oppressed whether they were in the right
or not; Melissa and Jack Hartson, whose first baby was destined to be born in
the cafeteria of the school, with the aid of Donna and Baby LaRue, an
ex-strip-teaser, now in her seventies, who welcomed the hurricane season as a
relief from the humdrum of life; Old Dr. and Mrs. Ward, gentle people whose
greatest fear was of dying and leaving the other alone—a fear that was never to
be realized because of the hurricane; Dusty Hosey and his leather-coated gang
of teen-agers, who came looking for trouble, but found their match—and
incidentally, friends—in the school nurse and Cliff Warrender. There were
others, of course, at the schoolhouse during those three days of the storm, but
how the lives of these people were changed by a cataclysm of nature makes an
exciting and intensely human nurse story.</i><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>GRADE: </b>D<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>BEST QUOTES:</b><br />
“You’re polite enough for a divorced couple meeting for the first time in public.” </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“Nothing draws two
people together like a common dislike.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“Wouldn’t it be
painful to be the complete lady all the time?”</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“New lipstick had
made the menace of the storm seem less imminent.”</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“Even if you haven’t
been here but a month, surely you have heard of hurricane parties? They’re one
of the nicest features of our fair city.”</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>REVIEW:<br />
</b>You’d
think a major hurricane bearing down on a school full of frightened Floridians
would make for an interesting book. Though there are quite a few adventures in
this <i>Hurricane Nurse</i> (see also <a href="https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/864471121777778424/4085815139436191194"><span style="color: blue;">Peggy Gaddis’ version</a> with the same title),
unfortunately the story dwells mostly in stupidity—and the primary sinner
unfortunately is our heroine, Donna Ledbury. She is a 22-year-old school nurse
about to experience her first hurricane, which she did not realize means that
she has to ride out the storm at the school with whatever refugees show up,
though that seems an important part of a job description to neglect to mention
to your new hiree. She’s not alone, though; principal Henry Fincher is there to
lend a hand. He’s a rather hot guy, and the pair have dated a few times—and
“she liked Hank. She always had fun when they went out together. But was that
love?” Well, a hurricane is certainly just the ticket to help her figure it
out!</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">So off she goes to
the high school, unfortunately accompanied by Cliff Warrender. “He was a
lawyer, not the sort of lawyer she wanted to know. ‘A mouthpiece’ they called
his sort in gangster novels. He had got Genio (the Ox) Alcotti off from a
bookie charge. She didn’t want to be friendly with Cliff Warrender.” She’s even
scornful of the fact that he is well dressed, though “there was nothing garish
about him.” The problem with him in my view is that he comes on too strong,
constantly saying things like, “This is my girl, but she hasn’t caught onto it
yet,” adding that he’s going to win her over despite her prejudices. She snaps
back, for some strange reason, “If you are implying that red-haired girls are
man-crazy—”. But Cliff just helps her into the car and off they go to the
market where he purchases lots of helpful supplies, and everyone greets him
like he’s their best friend. But she’s angry that he’s going to defend a woman
who was arrested for shoplifting, even though the woman told him she did it.
“She was disgusted with him,” we are told, but the sad part is that Cliff never
is allowed to explain to this moron what defense attorneys do, that they are
there to keep the system honest and keep people from being given unfair
sentences if they are convicted. So her prejudice against his occupation is
never dealt with in any satisfactory way, just swept under the rug.</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Over at the high
school, people show up—even after the hours after which the staff is supposed
to turn away anyone seeking shelter, like that’s a good idea? There’s a
90-something couple married for 65 years, each expressing privately to Donna
that they can’t imagine how the other will survive after the other dies.
There’s a gang of “smart alec” “young squirts,” initially sassy to Donna, but
quickly brought in check by Cliff, before he takes off on a run to the hospital
to obtain medical supplies that Donna never thought to bring. Baby Larue, a
70-year-old former stripper, shows up in a tiny dress and three-inch stilettos,
and carrying her mangy parrot, which Donna stuffs in a locker in the dispensary
and promptly forgets about.</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Once the storm gets
underway, the hijinks ensue! A bunch of middle-aged men show up with cards and
whisky, and spend about two solid days gambling, only to take a break for a
knife fight, which Donna treats with a tourniquet. Later Donna hears loud voices
in the hall and “resolved to do nothing about it.” It turns out it’s a married
couple and the husband is beating the wife. With a crowd watching, the man “hit
her with his fist with force enough to lift her from her feet. She fell several
feet away, whimpering, accusing, begging somebody, anybody, to save her from
being killed. None made a move. They only stood.” When Hank finally steps in
and is knocked unconscious, Donna, too, just stands and watches. “She did not
move to Hank’s side”; only Hank’s wannabe girlfriend comes to his aid. Which is
appropriate for a woman who’s always saying that she’s not allowed to do
anything unless a doctor tells her, but still!<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Then one of the women
staying there is robbed of $100, and one of the male refugees is found to have
given the kids marijuana. But Donna, now back in her manic phase, insists that
everything is fine: “We haven’t had any crime, not really,” she insists, “still
argumentative.” “And we haven’t had a death,” she adds—but she should be
careful what she wishes for, because while having cake with the old couple, a
palm frond comes flying through the window and whacks the old lady on the head,
killing her instantly—and her husband has a fatal heart attack at exactly the
same instant. Donna’s first words after this calamity, interestingly, are, “I’m
glad,” because now they won’t have to be alone. Awww.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">You will not be
surprised to learn that as soon as the lights go out, though, Donna falls
apart. Her hands start trembling, and she’s convinced that everyone in the
place is going to die, especially a young woman in labor who can’t walk from
one building to another, yet is “pacing up and down, flinging her arms about
wildly, moaning and muttering” during her contractions, wailing, “Why doesn’t
my mother come? She would stop all this hurting. I want my mother.” Donna is
equally helpless: “She had a sudden picture of the girl dying because she was
inept, because she was ignorant, because it was dark.” Soon it’s “time for her
to grow more nervous, to feel more helpless.” As Cliff heads off to let her
deliver the baby in peace, she’s “fighting off the desire to cling to his arm,
to beg him not to leave her alone with the responsibility that was hers.”
Everyone really needs to pull themselves together! But Baby Larue shows up with
some whiskey, gets the mother-to-be drunk—with Donna’s permission—and stays to
help, proving to be of far more worth than Donna: “Baby had a good deal of
practical experience with the work in hand. And best of all, she remained
self-confident and cheerful.” In the next sentence, the baby is born, and now
Donna starts worrying that the baby is being held by too many germy people. “I
do hope she’ll stay well. We haven’t been able to keep her in sterile places,
and she’s already been handled by unsterile people.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Now one of the young
kids in the place gets sick, and Donna promptly starts obessing again: “She
fervently prayed that it would not turn out to be acute appendicitis, with an
operation indicated.” Guess what? It’s not! But what is it? “Polio? Scarlet fever?”
As more of the kids start dropping with the same symptoms, she spends literally
two days worrying about what it might be—until the first kid gets a scarlet
rash, and now she’s so relieved, because it’s just measles! Even though most of
them have gotten their vaccinations!<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Between caring for
sick kids, she’s starting to flirt more with Cliff, who again and again proves
himself to be useful and reliable. But “she didn’t believe that Cliff was the
man for her. She honestly couldn’t approve of his idea of the practice of law.
He spent most of his time defending criminals. The right sort of lawyer would
defend the law, not support those who broke it.” Then, in a very bizarre scene,
Donna joins the teenagers dancing in the gym and completely loses control while
dancing with one of the hoodlums. When the dance stops, “she saw disapproval in
hard adult faces,” and she’s pretty much shunned—Principal Hank even suggests
that she may lose her job after such a shocking loss of decorum. “She had made
a spectacle of herself. She felt shamed by the scorn of the older faces,” and
for the rest of the book she’s apologizing for disgracing herself and the
school. But what she’s really upset about is that Cliff had gone off to talk to
another woman while Donna was dancing, giving her “a feeling of being lost in
the great reaches of the universe, as lost as a child who knows not where to
go. Somehow it was in the midst of that feeling of being lost that she knew she
was in love with Cliff Warrender.” But wait! Two sentences later, “I can’t be
in love with him. I have more sense than to get a crush on a stranger. Even a
crush. Certainly I wouldn’t fall in love with one.”</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Again and again while
reading this book I was overcome with the desire to slap Nurse Donna Ledbury
silly. She is badly trained and without the disposition to be caring for a
complex group of refugees with few supplies and even less sense; she’s
frequently telling everyone that she does not have the authority to dispense
medicines, bandage wounds or practice any kind of medicine apart from taking
temperatures—but she can’t sterilize the thermometers, so there’s only so many
times she can do that. “Nurses don’t give whiskey to patients except on order
from a doctor,” she says, after she’s already gotten the mother-to-be drunk.
She is a complete disaster as a nurse and as a human being, and I could only
feel pity for the man she ended up with. I don’t want to have to pity you, too,
so take my advice and run for shelter if you happen to encounter this
appallingly awful <i>Hurricane Nurse</i>.</span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p><p></p>Susannahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12417568186428454938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-864471121777778424.post-83021238649121969292024-03-04T12:45:00.000-05:002024-03-04T12:45:00.764-05:00Doctor’s Nurse<p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZvtyI1sBnInGqMrnyeqUJmqYAB9V3193VMiMBtWYS4JFYnJAUneOSe7GydbqBwu9BAFVhv82Iw5JhfcUvDVNKu8SYmKba6CYLJaaSwzBF0e-DMD3lFZhTCf4YiiZZND3UoyeASLdxzxitjGMac7JUalA4rr8bbNBXgvXHWKyQI7ckG5ggc_zqmA0oCzou/s2247/Doctor's%20Nurse%20-%20Ames.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2247" data-original-width="1480" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZvtyI1sBnInGqMrnyeqUJmqYAB9V3193VMiMBtWYS4JFYnJAUneOSe7GydbqBwu9BAFVhv82Iw5JhfcUvDVNKu8SYmKba6CYLJaaSwzBF0e-DMD3lFZhTCf4YiiZZND3UoyeASLdxzxitjGMac7JUalA4rr8bbNBXgvXHWKyQI7ckG5ggc_zqmA0oCzou/s320/Doctor's%20Nurse%20-%20Ames.jpg" width="211" /></a><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span>By Jennifer Ames
<br />(pseud.</b><b> Maysie Sopoushek), ©1959<br /></b><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>Cover illustration by O.
Whitlock</b> </span></span></p><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">She promised not to marry
… that was the condition on which Gail Stewart went with Dr. Grant Raeburn’s
research unit to Hong Kong. Gail was as pretty a nurse as you could hope to see
and Grant made her promise if she joined his staff not to marry for two years.
That seemed easy for Gail loved Grant—and he never even noticed Gail as a
woman! But when she met Brett Dyson in Hong Kong—well, things took on a very
different hue …</span></i><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="color: black;">GRADE:</span></b><span style="color: black;"> C</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: black;"><b>BEST QUOTES:<br /></b></span>“All men know whether or not they’re good looking, though they pretend
they don’t.” </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: black;"><b>REVIEW:<br /></b></span>Poor Nurse Gail Stewart is the victim of so many nurse novel tropes!
She’s an orphan—her parents died in a war camp in Hong Kong when Gail was six,
she herself having been packed off just in the nick of time back to Britain—and
she is smitten with her boss, Dr. Grant Raeburn, who is one of those cool,
aloof, driven men who has never looked at a woman in his life (is he gay or
just autistic?) and is not especially kind to his staff; he is described as a “withdrawn
and unsympathetic” “martinet” who “drove his staff hard, almost ruthlessly.”
But he’s cute, so that’s OK! </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">He is off to Hong Kong to do research for two years and has asked his
office team to come along. There’s Dr. Bobby Gordon, the usual foil who is
hopelessly in love with Gail and has absolutely no hope of ever being loved in
return, and Mildred Harris, a plain spinster who types and is passionately in
love with Dr. Raeburn. Gail is asked to come along, but she has to agree to a
special rider on her contract: She is not to marry for two years, because
apparently if a woman gets married she is no longer able to work. But it’s not
a problem for her to make this agreement because “the only man she had ever
dreamt of or contemplated marrying was himself.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">So off she goes to Hong Kong with a secret agenda stowed safely in the hidden compartment of her
attaché case: She’s going to track down the man who betrayed her parents, who
had gotten them
locked up in that prison camp where they died, and the rat fink had stolen
dad’s lucrative business to boot! “She had to make this man pay,” she decides,
though she does not know who he is or even the name of her father’s business,
and it was 16 years ago that all this betrayal transpired. But sweet revenge
will be hers: She vows, “I’ll kill him with my bare hands!”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">So off she goes, delayed by a month because her aunt gets sick, and meets
a cute but lazy rich boy on the plane, Brett Dyson. He is going to Hong Kong
with the intention of not working for his godfather, Tom Manning, as much as
possible, and to marry a rich heiress. He is, in short, the antithesis of
everything she believes in, and of course “She disliked him intensely.” But then, bizarrely,
her plane crashes in Persia, and she spends a night delivering first aid while
Brett very uncharacteristically acts as her capable assistant—and as the sun rises, she
passes out and he carries her behind a rock and makes out with her when she
wakes up and tells her that he’s falling in love with her because he’s so
impressed with her strength and skill and stamina. Naturally he spends the rest
of the book trying to bully and dominate her, insisting that she go out on this
date or that drive and that she marry him immediately.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">She, however, remains committed to Dr. Grant and her work with him, and
of course to her plot for revenge! Even though she is “strangely drawn” to
Brett and his kisses, she does ask herself lots of questions about whether
it’s love or lust (Gail asks herself a LOT of questions). And though Grant
tries to express an interest in Gail and takes her out to dinner, she allows herself to be
dragged off by Brett, whom they naturally meet in the restaurant, and swoons
over his rudeness: “She knew Grant didn’t like it, but for the moment she
didn’t care. Her heart was singing; she was strangely, almost unbearably
happy. ‘Is this love?’ she wondered,” even though she had just been thinking, after </span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">the doctor asks her to call him by his first name,</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> that “intimate friendship seemed natural, love was a beckoning shadow lurking
just around every corner.” Her behavior on this first date does cool Grant’s ardor noticeably, and
he asks her if her penchant for late-night parties is going to impact her
ability to do her job well. “She felt they were no longer friends—almost they
were enemies,” and cries herself to sleep, but then goes out with Brett almost
every night, even oversleeping one morning and angrily deciding that Grant’s
insistence she not marry is unfair. Gail is, in short, an erratic, unstable character.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">But</span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">—</span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">speaking of erratic, unstable characters</span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">—</span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">out on a deserted island one afternoon with Brett, he presses her yet
again to marry him, and when she refuses him, he takes off in the boat and
leaves her there. She takes a nap in a cave while waiting for him to return,
and when she wakes up, she is trapped by the tide—the waves eventually lapping
at her knees while she clings to a cliff—until her screams attract the
attention of a fisherman who takes her back to Brett’s godfather’s house, where
she is tucked into bed for days, and one gets the impression that Godfather has
no intention of letting her leave. But on the third day she’s home alone and
heads off for the phone in his office, and while rummaging in his desk for a
phone book, she comes across a large pile of passports. What could this be about?</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Though she might have been drowned by Brett’s alarming stunt, Gail
promptly forgives him—“Why should she hold this against Brett?” Ummm, because
he almost killed you when you refused to be bullied by him?—and continues
dating him. Now Gail decides she’s going to buckle down and find out what
happened to her parents, so she goes around asking everyone at Godfather’s
cocktail parties if they knew who killed her parents—it’s kind of a
mood-killer, actually—and soon everyone is telling her that she’s in danger and
she’s feeling uneasy all the time.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Dr. Grant, meanwhile, apologizes to Gail,
telling her that he grew up poor and had to work two jobs to get through
medical school, so he doesn’t know how to relax, and asks her for another date.
He eventually tells her he’s thinking of leaving Hong Kong because his boss is
thwarting all his research efforts, and he thinks his work is being stolen for
other governments. Suddenly Gail realizes—and you will be stunned to hear
this—that she’s in love with Grant, “something she hadn’t realized. She knew
now that deep down within her she had been in love with Grant for a very long
time.” Right, since that time it occurred to her on page 8.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Now we have only to clear up the mystery of who is the murderer—and since
the list of suspects includes only three people, it doesn’t take long—Gail
connecting some extremely tenuous plot points in order to do so, but leaving a
larger number of mysteries for us to puzzle over once everything has been
“resolved.” If Godfather Tom is already rich, why is he fencing passports? Why
does she instantly abandon her life-long plan for revenge, not even pressing charges since he’s
done a few nice things in his past, and is suddenly declaring he has been
planning to return the company to her anyway—sure he was!—and even forgiving
him, which she sees as somehow a prerequisite for her continuing to be friends
with Brett—though it’s not clear why she wants to be friends with Brett at all.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Logic and common sense are not widely employed in this book, which left
me mostly irritated with heroine Gail for being such a wimpy, gullible victim
who all but begs for the bad guys to come bludgeon her over the head. Gail’s
adversarial relationship with the secretary Mildred is a cheap, unfortunate side note, as the
desperate spinster is too blatantly mean, when her legitimate feelings of
jealousy toward the beautiful, popular Gail could have been explored with more
interest if the pair had actually been friends. (And there’s a creepy twist at
the end when Mildred starts dating Grant’s evil boss and is seen staggering out
of a restaurant with him: “What had Dr. Kalavitch given her to drink? And to
what purpose?” Even enemies don’t let other women get date raped.) The food and
scenery in Hong Kong are beautifully and lovingly depicted, but the few Asian
characters in the book are not drawn without prejudice, and Hong Kong is
described as a city with a veneer of civility but “there are innumerable
rackets; gangsters in high positions—gangsters who would stop at nothing, not
even murder.” So it’s another contribution from the <a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2019/07/white-doctor.html">White Doctor Foundation</a>
from me. I had high hopes for another book by Maysie Sopoushek after her
fabulous <i>Doctor’s Wife</i>, but Doctor’s
Nurse was a profound disappointment in virtually all respects, and I will
approach her next book with a bit less of Nurse Gail’s wide-eyed innocence.</span></span></p>Susannahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12417568186428454938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-864471121777778424.post-20778537348038967052024-02-25T17:21:00.002-05:002024-02-25T17:21:35.362-05:00Navy Nurse<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc_uCaiIczlYrMec744_c88KJ-RG3JEJm-NlKFilkDeYLyqVpjVBl1FyZ0n9RG415LEE4ikmeSGGx5PkAt2P_xzVMR4ZmnH1PWHx7tnL3eYQ4-pUhHOTda5pS7BO7Z-Rdqk3hkGcUnZO7B1IY3VNbdwVgliJ84FOSa8dZc4Ed5m91cDi7o9qKBtSdazCbH/s2078/Navy%20Nurse%20-%20McCall.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2078" data-original-width="1237" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjc_uCaiIczlYrMec744_c88KJ-RG3JEJm-NlKFilkDeYLyqVpjVBl1FyZ0n9RG415LEE4ikmeSGGx5PkAt2P_xzVMR4ZmnH1PWHx7tnL3eYQ4-pUhHOTda5pS7BO7Z-Rdqk3hkGcUnZO7B1IY3VNbdwVgliJ84FOSa8dZc4Ed5m91cDi7o9qKBtSdazCbH/s320/Navy%20Nurse%20-%20McCall.jpg" width="190" /></a></span>By Virginia McCall,
©1968</b> </span></p><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Lieut. Tracy Moore is
shocked to discover that on her first sea assignment she is the only nurse
aboard a naval transport sailing to the Far East. Trouble starts happening in
sick bay immediately. Several emergencies—including an operation for
appendicitis during a typhoon—test Tracy’s skill to its fullest. Tested too is
Tracy’s love for Dick Simpson, the biologist she left behind. For on shipboard
she meets and is attracted to handsome Lieut. Wade Cochran, who makes no secret
of the fact that he is falling in love with her. With her superior officers
watching her professional performance carefully, and Dick waiting for her
answer back in port, Tracy knows that this voyage will determine her future as
a Navy nurse—and as a woman.</span></i><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">GRADE:</b> C</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>BEST QUOTES:<br /></b>“Sukiyaki and kimonos—and no Dick, she thought, with a
sudden foretaste of loneliness. She would be leaving Dick behind.” </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>REVIEW:<br /></b>Tracy Moore is a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy, and a nurse
stationed in the Oakland hills, when she gets orders that she is going to be
shipping out soon. Tracy has been seeing Dick Simpson, who appears to be a
graduate student at U.C. Berkeley studying migratory birds, but their
relationship seems to be foundering. When they’re together, Dick can only talk
about birds, and he certainly never talks about getting married! He even makes
Tracy late for an important Navy appointment—and spatters her beautiful dress
uniform with unsightly gunk!—when he abruptly pulls over on the Bay Bridge and
wades into the muck of the bay to rescue a loon encased in oil. “Not that she
was willing to admit that she was falling in love with Dick!” Well, she
certainly doesn’t act like it. But her young man’s name does make for amused chuckles,
such as when reading the line, “In the back of her mind she was constantly
thinking of Dick.” So juvenile, but there it is.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">She’s attached to a transport vessel, which seems mostly
like a sort of Navy-sponsored Carnival cruise line in which hundreds of women
and children are shuttled from one side of the Pacific Ocean to the other;
there’s even an officer in charge of scheduling movies and activities and
entertainments for the passengers. Tracy’s job is mostly to keep their tummies
soothed when the waves get choppy, plus manage anything else that might come
in. And a few emergencies do; there’s a bleeding ulcer that receives more than
a dozen units of blood (pumped from the blood bank of sailors also being
ferried on the ship) and one cute 19-year-old who gets an appendectomy during a
typhoon, but apart from “tying everything down” (not sure how one ties down
sterile instruments), even that back-cover-worthy event passes without much ado.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Onboard ship she is attracted to the only single male
officer, Wade Cameron, who is a smooth and unfathomably handsome man who pays
her some passing attention but doesn’t seem especially interested—at least
until the end of the cruise, when he starts hanging around in her group more
frequently. And so with little plot or interest we arrive at the end of the
voyage, when Wade is telling her that he has something important to discuss
with her. But when Tracy calls home to talk with Dick and he is out with her
roommate, that is all that she needs after months apart to come to her senses!
“I’m in love with Dick,” she realizes, after having given him little or no
thought except exasperation at his letters, which blather on about ducks and
other waterfowl. Now all she needs to do is head Wade off at the pass, but he
wasn’t really interested in her anyway, because he only wanted to ask her if “a
confirmed bachelor has any right to allow himself serious attentions when he’s
off to Vietnam. You’ve relieved my mind,” he tells her when she mentions her boyfriend,
so I guess he wasn’t that smitten after all. Back in port, she has only to sort
out her future with Dick in four days before she hits the sea again, but it
doesn’t even take that long, as he presents her with a “modest” diamond ring.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The best thing that can be said about this, the fourth book
titled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Navy Nurse</i> I have read (see
also <a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2011/03/navy-nurse.html"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Navy Nurse</i></a>, <a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2013/08/navy-nurse.html"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Navy Nurse</i></a> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2024/02/navy-nurse.html">Navy
Nurse</a></i>), is that the Navy jargon is not so thick that you can’t
understand what the heck they are talking about. The plot is ho-hum, Tracy as a
main character is kind of paradoxical—flying into rages and shouting at people
out of the blue while displaying little gumption or backbone apart from
creating a first aid kit that the U.S. Navy should have come up with on their
own decades ago, and demonstrating little to no interest in her boyfriend until
she thinks she may be about to lose him. One of the best parts of the book is
the descriptions of the drive from Berkeley to San Francisco along the mud
flats of the bay—one I have made many times and which felt very nostalgic to me.
The descriptions of the Asian ports did not veer into stupid racism the way may
of VNRNs do, though they do take a very American view of those
countries—sukiyaki and kimonos is all she can picture when she imagines
Japan—so the armchair travel is limited here. In short, it’s not all bad, but
it’s fairly blah. The C-grade book, I have said before, is the worst
kind—neither cold nor hot—and so I suggest that unless you have a burning
interest in the 1960s Navy, you should leave this one on the shelf—and the
cover illustration should make that choice easier.</span></p>Susannahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12417568186428454938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-864471121777778424.post-73528315193129587302024-02-17T14:51:00.000-05:002024-02-17T14:51:39.414-05:00Navy Nurse<p><b><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLkGaV1GqmNCfvaxX7OvHl1wGRI8Uy7BRkA967wbRqBLX9Znkl3qHRohwy2w3hIKuZHcuswkJTObNVV80vb7ZymeEMoLkLlZUxqchR5fHZ99QvjUKYjWFkEfTDkQmOQcE2aW9uhmAYW26wbbvCvtrKOZHfKCuVSgvcLePBGXqDEhcJqN6nGA05PgMX6yq6/s2043/Navy%20Nurse%20-%20Humphries.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2043" data-original-width="1240" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgLkGaV1GqmNCfvaxX7OvHl1wGRI8Uy7BRkA967wbRqBLX9Znkl3qHRohwy2w3hIKuZHcuswkJTObNVV80vb7ZymeEMoLkLlZUxqchR5fHZ99QvjUKYjWFkEfTDkQmOQcE2aW9uhmAYW26wbbvCvtrKOZHfKCuVSgvcLePBGXqDEhcJqN6nGA05PgMX6yq6/s320/Navy%20Nurse%20-%20Humphries.jpg" width="194" /></a></span></b></div><b><span style="font-family: verdana;">By Adelaide
Humphries, ©1954</span></b><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Ensign Dorothy
Phillips was beautiful; life was beautiful; her work was wonderful; and
everything was right with her world—until the day, her arms laden with bundles
for the Chief Nurse’s surprise birthday party, she was almost run down by a
carload of brash young Air Corps officers. An impudent apology, yelled by a
handsome lieutenant, was the crowning insult. Then the lieutenant appeared
unannounced at the party—revealing himself as Lieutenant Keith Cameron
Townsend, and the dour Chief Nurse’s nephew, no less! The fact that Dorothy was
engaged didn’t mean a thing to Keith. The more she snubbed him, the more
persistent he became. It takes a battle at sea—and all the suffering connected
with it—for the ensign to realize that love and hate are often akin.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>GRADE:</b> C-</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>BEST QUOTES:<br /></b>“Oh, you know a kiss or so doesn’t mean anything. At least
most people don’t think it does in this progressive age.” </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>REVIEW:<br /></b>Author Adelaide Humphries, who has previously given us two
A-grade novels (<i><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2010/08/nurse-landons-challenge.html">Nurse Landon’s Challenge</a></i>
and <i><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-nurse-knows-best.html">The Nurse Knows Best</a></i>), here has
achieved a truly remarkable feat: She has written a novel in which not a single
one of the five leading characters is a likable individual. One might wonder
why you might want to write a book about spoiled, selfish, inconsiderate
people—and a skilled writer might even craft a thought-provoking, Pulitzer
Prize–winning
epic from such a cast—but alas, here we are just left to grit our teeth and
endure through to the end—or just toss the stupid book aside and move on to
something better. I advise the latter. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Let’s start with leading lady Ensign Dorothy Phillips. She is
the most gorgeous woman in the entire world, somehow made even more dazzling by
her uniform: “Ensign Phillips had features and skin a poster-girl could never
have surpassed,” so “when a beautiful girl like Ensign Phillips donned her Navy
nurse’s uniform, wolf whistles were the order of the day.” Oh, boy! When the
book opens, she is on the sidewalk, carrying purchases for an
upcoming party, when a car overflowing with Air
Corpsmen </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">whizzes around the corner</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">. She’s pulled back from stepping into the street, knocking her
packages askew and somehow keeping her from getting run over though she was
never actually in the street, and one of the men in the car leans his whole
torso out the window, shouts something unintelligible and waves his arms above
his head—it actually seems as if his life was more at risk in this incident
than Dorothy’s. These brief seconds leave her “with an impression of laughing
black eyes, a flash of white teeth in a tanned, handsome face—and a burning
sensation around her heart.” Yes, she’s in love already, and this is why she is
overwhelmed with a relentless, obsessive hatred for the young man.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The fellow who had kept her from stepping into the street, Charles
Henry Hale, who unfortunately chooses to be called Skid, is the closest we have
to a decent human. As a first-class gunner’s mate, he is outranked by Dorothy, a
fact that is made much of, and Dorothy’s condescension to even speak to such a lowly
creature is treated with great admiration. Don’t worry, though, she is
ultimately extraordinarily cruel to the respectful young man, who kindly and
humbly helps Dorothy with her packages and carries them back to the launch for
her (she is stationed in a hospital ship off the coast of San Diego). He
hopefully suggests they have coffee, though noting the invitation is “entirely
too brassy,” but Dorothy condescends to accept, after first having berated him for
causing her to drop her packages.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">During coffee, Dorothy decides that Skid is a “darned nice
boy,” and he, of course, falls immediately in love with her and asks to see her
again. “Dorothy despised anything that hinted of snobbery,” we are told, so she
immediately wades into it, thinking, “An enlisted man couldn’t get seriously
involved with a Navy officer. It would lead to all kinds of gossip, and no
telling what it might lead to.” The only reason she decides to agree to see him
again is that she spots that darned guy who almost fell out of the car that
didn’t hit her, and becomes furious that he seems to be laughing at her, so she
“deliberately turned her back on him” and gives Skid an overly enthusiastic wave and
shouts that she’ll see the poor dope next week!</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The party she is helping to plan is a surprise birthday
party for Chief Nurse Capt. Nettie Leonard, the quintessential gray-haired
spinster martinet, and who should turn up at it but that darned guy again, who
is revealed as </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Capt. Leonard’s nephew, </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Lt. Keith Cameron Townsend (the two male leads both absurdly
have middle names)! Darn the luck, her entire day is
ruined! At the party Dorothy’s </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">flirtatious and </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">backstabbing roommate, Micky,
flings herself at Keith, scorching her own boyfriend in the process, but Keith
manages to grab Dorothy and tell her that he will win her, “no matter what or
how long it takes,” because all women find stalkers irresistible! And when
Keith crashes her next date with Skid, Dorothy takes her revenge on Keith by
telling him that the pair have known each other since childhood and that they
are engaged. “She felt good. She was glad she had told that big fib. She would
whiten it by explaining later on to Skid, although she didn’t know just what
her explanation would be.” This is the same woman who, “besides believing that
the best policy was to stick to the truth, believed that when a person gave
his word to someone else he should do his level best to live up to it.” Let</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">’</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">s see how honest Dorothy is going to play this out.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">So having gotten herself into one bad situation, she now
plans to make it worse: “It looked more and more as though there was nothing
she could do except try to make this trumped-up betrothal authentic,” because
the honorable thing to do is to marry a man you’ve just met to spite someone
else. Dorothy also promises Micky’s boyfriend, Dr. Tommy Simms, that she will
keep Keith away from Micky, though this goes completely contrary to her life’s
purpose of never speaking to that horrid man again. It doesn’t exactly work, as
Keith presses her and Skid into double dating with him and Micky on a regular
basis—though, out one evening celebrating their engagement, Dorothy dances with
Keith and discovers “one dance had made all the difference in the world,” because
Keith kisses her and tells her that he is in love with her—and that “you’ve got
a lot to learn, Dorothy. But you will.” So the next scene finds Dorothy admitting
to Skid that she does not love him, but that she’ll agree to get married if he
wants to. Ugh!!</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">When word gets out that Dorothy is engaged to Skid, however,
the chief nurse becomes unprofessionally hostile and assigns Dorothy to night
duty out of spite, and then calls a staff meeting in which “everyone present
agreed that it was a mistake for an ensign in the Navy to become engaged to, or
even go with, an enlisted man.” Now nothing can possibly save Dorothy from this horrible situation—except a really big sea battle! So off her ship chugs,
following the battleships into war—I’m not exactly certain which war we’re
supposed to be fighting—and on the eve of the big battle, Skid sends Dorothy a “beautiful”
letter in which he tells her that he loves her because “she was so sincere, the
kind of girl a fellow would be proud to take home to show off to the home
folks.” Clearly this man barely knows her</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">—</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">and her true character is again revealed
by her reaction, which is not remorse or shame, but rather “fatality”—and then
she hopes that she’ll get a letter from Keith. But when she hears Keith has survived
the battle, she’s remembering “his pride, that masculine ego of which he had
more than the average share. His pride would demand that he, an officer, must
never give up trying to win a girl away from an ordinary enlisted man.” That jerk!</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Soon Skid turns up on the medical ship, one of the worst
burn cases in a coma for days, his chances of survival a hundred to one, and
“it will take plastic surgery to restore that burned face.” Dorothy tells him
with tears and kisses to get well, that they’ll be married as soon as he’s
better, but “Skid knows Dottie doesn’t love him. He probably knows she feels
sorry for him and so is willing to make the best of a bad bargain.” And so he
does the decent thing, committing suicide by willpower and dying in his sleep,
because “if a fellow wants to die—well, nothing any doctor, or anyone else, can
do will help him,” declares Dr. Tommy Simms. “He had the courage to die—because
he wanted you to be happy,” adds Micky. Dorothy replies, “It makes me feel
almost as though, instead of helping him, I had caused Skid’s death.” Probably her first honest thought</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">—and her last, as </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">without another thought to her likely role in manslaughter, she steps off the
ship to “where she belonged—in a certain handsome young lieutenant’s arms.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">There is not one admirable quality in Dorothy, her manic
roommate Micky, or the egotistical and domineering Keith, and not much better in
the vindictive chief nurse, or even Skid, who is self-sacrificial to the
ultimate degree. Dorothy’s stint in the Navy makes it look like a casual weekend
gig, and her commitment is definitely wanting; early on she confesses that
she’s not sure why she joined the Navy since she has a deep-seated phobia of
water, gets seasick easily, can’t remember all the darned rules and regulations,
and after six months she <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">still</i> cannot
get the hang of military time! But she gets excellent training in the Navy, and
she doesn’t have to work very hard—“a navy Nurse’s duties are much lighter
nowadays; they’re mostly supervisory.” Interestingly, it is
suggested that if she were to marry, she would just resign her post. I’m not
sure how that could ever have been a thing, because my impression of the
military is that it’s not an optional sort of arrangement. This book, however,
is optional for you, and so I recommend that you forego it, and instead try the
much more interesting <a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2011/03/navy-nurse.html"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Navy Nurse</i></a> penned by one of my
favorite authors, Rosie M. Banks—it’ll be much smoother sailing.</span></p>Susannahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12417568186428454938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-864471121777778424.post-86941474882265416752024-02-10T14:23:00.001-05:002024-02-10T14:23:06.691-05:00Nurse March<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRvHeYhUt-Iu1UMV1ems443o0t1eDOBgcS7uTwtF4wmzU4w7bec7cADENVnOFlVJDaprFNeAmd63sQBi1zfPjNdphB5Y7nCJBhXgpjFcZWPybxR09ROZ86k96TdV4xDzztfPXQDgR7Al5oX9tzwnysurgZKYQGMS4HGBRd2muTL1aPeIAKJ793a5_I_7di/s1884/Nurse%20March.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1884" data-original-width="1222" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRvHeYhUt-Iu1UMV1ems443o0t1eDOBgcS7uTwtF4wmzU4w7bec7cADENVnOFlVJDaprFNeAmd63sQBi1zfPjNdphB5Y7nCJBhXgpjFcZWPybxR09ROZ86k96TdV4xDzztfPXQDgR7Al5oX9tzwnysurgZKYQGMS4HGBRd2muTL1aPeIAKJ793a5_I_7di/s320/Nurse%20March.jpg" width="208" /></a></div><b><span style="font-family: verdana;">By <a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/p/william-neubauer_26.html">William Neubauer</a>,
©1957</span></b><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Dawn March had her
future all planned—she would marry handsome Dr. Ken Jones and they would settle
in the little seacoast community that she loved and build a happy and beautiful
life together. But Dawn hadn’t figured on a couple of interferences that became
substantial obstacles to the realization of her dream. The first was Ken
himself. There was a side of his nature that Dawn was slow to recognize, that
shocked her when she did. Ken fancied himself a big-time success, and his
impatient ambition was such that it left little room for the kind of life that
Dawn had hoped they would share. Another was the entrance of Mrs. Clara Royce,
a divorcee of great wealth, considerable beauty and no scruples whatsoever. Clara
Royce offered Ken the fulfillment of his dreams—and a short-cut to the success
he craved. Dawn began to realize that even the best-made plans of bright young
nurses can sometimes get pretty well upset!</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">GRADE:</b> B+</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>BEST QUOTES:<br /></b>“Oh, I know you young girls. You simply refuse to eat proper
meals and sleep proper hours. Dash here, dash there, hurt this young man, hurt
that young man, call the district attorney a liar, call the newspapers liars,
and go careering on your way straight to a nervous breakdown.” </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“What you ought to do is marry me while you still have
something to offer.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“I ought to break a leg. That would interest you, wouldn’t
it?”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“A girl so lovely, so obviously decent and well-intentioned,
ought to have been married long before this. What had happened? What was her
problem?”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“Lovely women aren’t often interested in business.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“I’m told a woman never quite forgets her first husband.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">REVIEW:<br /></b>Faithful readers will know that I am a big fan of Bill
Neubauer, a truly interesting individual (<a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/p/william-neubauer_26.html">check
out his biography</a>) and the author of about 20 nurse novels (this is the 11th book of his I have read). With <i>Nurse
March</i>, he again proves he is capable of a meatier book than most authors,
imbuing his story with multiple plot threads that, even if they don’t all
easily weave together to create a cohesive whole, nonetheless make for a more
interesting read than the usual VNRN. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Nurse Dawn March is a 24-year-old visiting nurse who
provides free care to the residents of Port West, a seacoast California town. She
has a “sense of duty that had always kept her moving along and had earned her
the reputation, at least in certain quarters, of being a girl dedicated
wholeheartedly to her career.” As part of her duties, she is sent to the shack
of Dan Colby, an artist who lives at the town dump, who is diagnosed with a
fractured patella. He is receiving a monthly stipend from a local business
magnate who fancies himself a patron of the arts, which allows him to
concentrate on his painting without needing to waste all that time earning a
living or even selling the paintings he produces.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Dawn does not<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>agree
with this arrangement and has it out with Dan who, for his part, explains that
he doesn’t like to sell his work because “the subjects mean a great deal to me.
Or perhaps because expression of any kind is too personal a thing to sell.” She
argues with him about it, and he tells her he’s not interested in compromise,
which would force him “to paint pretty birds that aren’t birds at all, to paint
the sea as it never is, but the way some editor thinks it ought to be.”
Ultimately he decides, “She had the same sort of mind that his father had. Bend
to the storm! Sell your heart’s blood, if necessary, to provide material
comforts for the rest of your body! And live, therefore, without dignity,
without meaning!”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Unfortunately, when Dawn finds out that Dan has turned down
several offers of work—selling his art to a gallery, accepting commissions from
magazines to create artwork for a magazine—she feels it’s her job to make him
change his ways. She starts by telling him he’s a bum in a rut, but he responds,
“It sems to me that I have a pleasant existence, one with considerable point. I
paint. I work very hard to learn what I need to know. I grow. Now what
precisely is wrong with all that? Perhaps in another society there would be
room for people who like to paint.” It</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">’</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">s not a bad point.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Appallingly, she takes it upon herself to meet with Dan’s
benefactor, Mr. Patton, and convince him that he’s ruining Dan’s life by
supporting him. Though several art critics have stated that Dan has a lot of
talent, she declares that Dan is not gifted or even working on improving
his art. She tells Mr. Patton that Dan works “only as it suits him to, and when
it suits him to. And he does not learn, and he therefore does not progress,
because the only work he does is the work he chooses to do in the way he
chooses to do it. That isn’t the way to develop.” Which is ironic, because we
have witnessed Dan fielding criticism that the feathers of a painting of a
seagull were overdone, and he appraises his work and finds that the evaluation
was true, and decides to alter his technique.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">It seems Dawn’s biggest complaint
is that Dan is receiving the charity of the city through her nursing visits
while not contributing to society by earning a living. She misses the point that
Dan is in fact being paid to paint, whether he offers a canvas in exchange for
the money or not, and it</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">’</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">s not her call as to whether the exchange is worthwhile. “I simply think he must</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">learn the same things we all learn—that is, to earn our living while
we’re also preparing ourselves to do the sort of work we want to do. He owes it
to himself and to the community to accept the commissions he’s offered. He’s
had free medical care and nursing care. To that degree he’s certainly obligated
to the county and to the community.” When Mr. Patton offers to pay for Dan’s
medical care, she turns it down, telling Mr. Patton that his patronage is
turning Dan “into a bum.” Unfortunately, she prevails, and Mr. Patton cuts Dan
off. She smugly decides, “She’d at last managed to do Dan some real good.” God forbid
anyone else she decides to “help”!</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">
<!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">In her personal life, Dawn is also on the wrong tack. She’s hopelessly
smitten with dentist Ken Jones, who is essentially just a pretty face. He’s
been dating Dawn but doesn’t bother to remember the anniversary of their first
date; it’s his kind and generous sister Hattie who invites Dawn to dinner at
her and Ken’s house to mark the occasion. Curiously, though, when Ken expresses
a desire to open a chain of dentistry offices throughout Southern California
and in so doing reap large profits, with the investment of Clara Royce to back
him, Dawn is outraged. “I think you should work as my father works, for
something other than purely personal gain.” She’s convinced that Clara’s
attentions have given him too<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>much
ambition: “Much of this big talk hadn’t been hatched in the mind of Ken Jones.
Just a month ago, he’d been happily talking about the pleasure he found in
living and working in Port West. Then, quite suddenly, here he was talking in
grandiose terms and dreaming grandiose dreams.” So she dislikes one man</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">’</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">s lack of ambition but also decries what she feels is too much in another. Apparently Ken is not impressed with meddling women either; ultimately he nakedly says to
Clara Royce in front of Dawn, “You stop leading me on, and I’ll stop leading
her on.” Ouch!</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The man who actually loves Dawn, Wes Overton, is a real estate agent
with some interesting ideas, and who seems to fall into Dawn</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">’</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">s sweet spot as far as ambition goes. “I think a fellow owes it to himself and to
society to do a good hard day’s work every work day of the year. But I don’t
think life should be twisted into a mean grubbing for money. I think a life so
twisted is a life without dignity.” He believes, he tells Dawn, that “a person
has an obligation to himself to do whatever will make himself and his loved
ones happy.” But never-happy Dawn sneers at his attitude, telling him, “There you are just
plodding along as you’ve done all your life.” </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Toward the end of the book, the now endowmentless Dan is forced to hire an agent
and accept commissions to paint particular subjects for wealthy movie moguls.
Dawn is elated, but I was not. Dawn’s father hints that “of late you haven’t
been yourself,</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">”</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> but it’s not clear what he’s referring to. Her meddling with
Dan’s life? Her moping over her ill-fated romance with Ken?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The book has a truly interesting and complex idea at its
heart, that everyone must earn a living even if that means doing something they
don’t enjoy on their path toward getting to what they really want. But if
the person can find support by some other path, even if that means accepting a
sponsorship or charity, is that wrong? Is Dawn forcing Dan to be in some
respects a whore to do work he does not value? Should an artist be supported by
the community on their path toward developing their technique in a way that a
doctor or nurse, for example, is not, and may be forced to work, say, as a
nurse’s aide or EMT to pay for their training toward a more complex career? The
problem with how this issue is handled in Neubauer’s story is that Dawn is a
hypocrite, chastising both Ken for his ambition and Dan for his lack of it and ignorning Wes</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">’s happy medium</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">; she believes Ken
should be doing more for free and settling for less, while Wes should be working
harder to expand his business. And why is it her job to wreck the good life Dan
is enjoying for himself, and even Mr. Patton’s enjoyment in helping Dan achieve
that?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The end of the book holds some real surprise twists, and
Dawn ends up with a man who deserves better. I had hoped that the
self-righteous and shallow Dawn, meddling in affairs that didn’t concern her
and chasing a pretty boy with no character, would face some sort of
come-uppance that would cause her to realize the error of her ways, but she did
not, and I can’t feel that Dawn is a better person at the end of the book. But
the story did give me a lot to think about, and talk over with other people who
hadn’t read the books, so in that respect it was successful. As usual, Neubauer
gives us delightful characters and charming writing, so if the heroine was not
all I wish she had been, this book still has a lot to offer, and my high
opinion of Bill Neubauer remains unchanged, and even fleshes out my ideas of
what his character was that he produced a book with this message. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><o:p></o:p></p>Susannahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12417568186428454938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-864471121777778424.post-86319502883490397552024-02-03T16:26:00.004-05:002024-02-03T16:26:29.853-05:00Dedication Jones<p><b><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYm0AyQcBTwBsERFtl0153oQ4FmD2CMIiBTkmCyBh-Hl0eHm6kwY6lP1pcSrgW1LbZ0jS09WFpYdH9NAVM_3QQZb_1u7j7fb6I5xb9mwp_kT9otQ898TYSVF-qjnnrB_2NzOs6WfjYTtW7sUg07hhUSZ_-XU1DA3Ta9UAHLTkqdfrtWee1qBTaXClJ8ewG/s2073/Dedication%20Jones.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2073" data-original-width="1242" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYm0AyQcBTwBsERFtl0153oQ4FmD2CMIiBTkmCyBh-Hl0eHm6kwY6lP1pcSrgW1LbZ0jS09WFpYdH9NAVM_3QQZb_1u7j7fb6I5xb9mwp_kT9otQ898TYSVF-qjnnrB_2NzOs6WfjYTtW7sUg07hhUSZ_-XU1DA3Ta9UAHLTkqdfrtWee1qBTaXClJ8ewG/s320/Dedication%20Jones.jpg" width="192" /></a></span></b></div><b><span style="font-family: verdana;">By Kate Norway
<br />(pseud. Olive Norton), ©1969</span></b><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Staff Nurse Didi Jones
was torn between enthusiasm for her interesting new job and the feeling that
she ought to be “settling down” as her fiancé wanted. But would there have been
any problem, if she had really cared about him?</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">GRADE:</b> B+</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>BEST QUOTES:<br /></b>“I don’t know how you dare to argue with that woman. She
terrifies me. I go all hemiplegic at the sight of her.” </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“The way to a man’s heart isn’t through his stomach anymore.
It’s through his twin carburetors or his new putter, old dear. You’re not with
it.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“Depression in a young woman of under twenty-five is either
a psychosis or it’s reactive to the boy-friend situation.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“In competent people are always terribly bossy, just to try
to prove that they can control things.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“Gossip can be psychotherapy. So can cigarettes, love
affairs, fast driving, a good boo-hoo or a nice cup of tea.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“You’ve had too much vitamin B. You’re getting aggressive.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>REVIEW:<br /></b>As we meet “dedicated” nurse Delia Jones (she also goes by
Didi, unfortunately), she is working at King Edward VII Memorial Hospital in
England and has fallen victim to the classic romance trope in which her fiancé
is not an especially charming individual who is always pestering her to quit
her job and get married even though she really loves her work. “Geoff didn’t
approve of wives who worked. He didn’t understand, I told myself. Teddy’s
wasn’t like a shop, or an office. It was a life.” So you know there’s going to
be a lot of tedious back-and-forth about that, when the answer is obvious. Her
best friend, Rose—a delightful, flirtatious, sassy type—tells her, “If you
marry him, dear girl, you’ll just be a—a chattel.” And worst of all, for you
literary folks, “Geoff didn’t approve of Muriel Spark. He had found Miss Brodie
unsavoury.” Just leave the bum! </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">In the meantime Didi has started working in the Isolation
Ward, which for some reason includes a lot of psychiatry cases. This means she
is seeing a lot of a certain Dr. Dwyryd Ffestin-Jones (he’s Welsh). He’s kind,
firm, but a little distant—in short, the quintessential British nurse novel
love interest.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Next comes trope #3, in which Didi has mailed her engagement
ring back to Geoff, but he’s been injured and may never walk again, so it’s not
clear if she feels free to keep walking out the door. Then suddenly Dr. F-J is
not speaking to Didi, and she’s not sure what has happened—so naturally she
comes down with flu and is in a coma for a week, but fails to recover because
she’s so upset about Dr. F-J’s behavior that she is shipped home to recover for
a month or two. Only a chat with a psychiatrist—just not <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that</i> psychiatrist—helps her get caught up with hospital gossip and
figure out what the problem is. She promptly takes action and saves her own day
…</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Overall the book is very formulaic, but it has pleasant
characters—again, per usual, the best are the strong, independent heroine and
her feisty roommate, as well as a few other nurses who come across well, while
the men are mostly limpid and uninteresting, including Dr. F-J, I’m sorry to
report. There is a subtle humor throughout, such as when Didi tells a friend,
“If I don’t spill to some neutral observer, I shall burst,” and he replies,
“And I’m no surgeon, so we can’t have that. Spill away.” Once again Olive
Norton, here writing as Kate Norway, lives up to her solid reputation as a gem
of an author, and I can again recommend the tenth book I have read by this
excellent writer, and hope that she’s written a lot more nurse romance novels
that I can look forward to.</span><o:p></o:p></p>Susannahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12417568186428454938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-864471121777778424.post-7954812135186492122024-01-28T15:13:00.002-05:002024-01-28T15:13:20.927-05:00Nurse Jane and Cousin Paul<p><b><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnEqaRevS9GEolQAxYHpTa6PkAtiLqVBjtagGyExWqU5MfNYnI5GbD9gYc2Lk8GMqkNEBYoV7yu_V-zidjSCD0ch8LB1KBHDR_-4X_p0-MqzajtaH5wnvxl6bByrJ99ETxP_cJiiItD1jTDxtZstoRqfE34qn9O0tlc8ZJ4hX7TLDjPKHpg3szBv4xtyQW/s2003/Nurse%20Jane%20and%20Cousin%20Paul.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2003" data-original-width="1252" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnEqaRevS9GEolQAxYHpTa6PkAtiLqVBjtagGyExWqU5MfNYnI5GbD9gYc2Lk8GMqkNEBYoV7yu_V-zidjSCD0ch8LB1KBHDR_-4X_p0-MqzajtaH5wnvxl6bByrJ99ETxP_cJiiItD1jTDxtZstoRqfE34qn9O0tlc8ZJ4hX7TLDjPKHpg3szBv4xtyQW/s320/Nurse%20Jane%20and%20Cousin%20Paul.jpg" width="200" /></a></span></b></div><b><span style="font-family: verdana;">By Valerie K. Nelson,
©1964</span></b><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i>From what her dear
friend Jeremy had told her, Nurse Jane Ashley had the worst possible opinion of
his cousin Paul. What a hard, managing old man he must be, she thought, to try
and force Jeremy to study for a career which did not interest him. “Sometimes
you remind me of Paul,” Jeremy told her. “Like him, you’re fifty years behind
the times. It’s that hospital and all those Florence Nightingale sentiments. I
must get you away from it, double quick.” Then, Nurse Jane met Paul—and began
to think that, if he was fifty years behind the times, it was not a bad place
to be!</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>GRADE:</b> C-</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>BEST QUOTES:<br /></b>“You’re not going to faint or anything, are you? But perhaps
that’s another of the Victorian fashions which is coming back again.” </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“Oh, you know what men are, my dear. So brief in their
explanations that they’re positively maddening.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“I thought nurses were <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">always</i>
hungry.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“Ordinary-looking people very often have some unsuspected
depths.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>REVIEW:<br /></b>This book has taken all the most overused VNRN tricks and
thrown them into one package: Orphaned heroine? Check. Wimpy, shallow boyfriend
nobody could possibly like? Check. Angry, domineering man more than a decade
older than her? Check. Spunky heroine fighting constantly with the arrogant
bastard and suddenly discovering she’s in love? Check! If all of this sounds
appealing to you, then this is the story for you!</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">If at this point you have any interest in learning more
about this story, by all means, press on: 19-year-old Nurse Jane Ashley is in
love with a shallow cad named Jeremy who is clearly lying to her left and right.
She is in her first year of nursing school in London—so she does not even
qualify as a nurse—when she is persuaded by Jeremy to get a job “nursing” his
aunt, Meriel Darling, an imperious, wealthy hypochondriac who lives in a manor
far out into the country. She sets out for the interview that has been
arranged by Jeremy, only to find the house empty and a severe rainstorm coming
on. Drenched to the bone with a cold coming on—and concerned that the woman she
has been told is an invalid might be lying out cold on the bathroom floor—she
gets in through a back door. While investigating the premises, the doorbell
rings, and she opens it to start her first fight with 31-year-old Paul Rowfield
(a creepy 12 years her senior, if math isn’t your bag). He literally drags her
around the house with a hard “hurting grasp” on her wrist and accuses her of
being the local burglar. Naturally, “he affected her in such a strange way … a
different way from which she’d ever been affected before. When he looked at
her, her heart began to beat faster, and she seemed to tingle from head to
foot.” Sigh.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">She lands the job—turns out she herself has weak lungs and needs six
months in the country to recuperate—though Meriel doesn’t need any nursing and
Jane is really just a maid. She continues to be bossed around by Paul, and
Jeremy shows up now and then for clandestine, brief meetings in the garden in
which he spoon-feeds her endless lies and she gobbles them up like they’re warm
scones with homemade strawberry jam and clotted cream. “A man who wants to meet
you on the sly hasn’t really much use for you,” advises Paul, who for once is making sense.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The local doctor, Robert Eccles, who had cared for Jane
during her illness, has a sister Nina—a jealous wench with her hopes pinned on
Paul, who recognizes a rival when she sees one—as well as a brother Ray,
invalided at 26 by a severe heart condition. She also meets an ill woman named
Iris Eccles, who suggests she is married to Robert, and a man named Brian
Draper who “happens” to be on hand when Iris swoons from illness in a café and
helps Jane cart Iris back to her shabby flat. Now there’s a number of mysteries
to solve—who are Iris and Brian really? Who is burglarizing the neighborhood?
Does Jeremy really love her?—shenanigans of Jeremy’s that Jane attempts to put
right with little success, plus a very cold and businesslike proposal of
marriage from Paul in which he completely fails to express in the most ardent
language the violence of his affections, yet Jane can’t even turn him down flat
and agrees to think it over. Toward the end of the book she comes to her senses
as far as Jeremy is concerned, but that doesn’t stop her, oddly, from flying to
meet him in the garden at every possible moment, never once putting off his
tepid assurances.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Ultimately—and I hope you will not be too upset at the spoiler—Paul
again insists they marry, telling her, “you must, you know. I announced our
engagement an hour ago,” in “the same arrogant voice, but undershot with a
world of tenderness.” Which makes it all better, of course, that he has essentially
bullied her into marrying him—and has been scheming to do so from the very
beginning: “From the moment I’d met you, I’d been quite determined that you
were going to stay. I’d got Bob Eccles to see that you were given the post with
Mrs. Darling, while I waited to get in touch with your guardian to gain his
consent to our marriage. I’d thought we might wait until you were twenty, but
now I’d decided that waiting was a waste of time.” Instead of screaming in
horror and fleeing the county, Jane meekly agrees. Ugh!</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The ultimate climax of the book involves some secret
relationships and crimes that I found difficult to follow, leaving Jane locked
in a lighthouse, possibly to starve to death or be assaulted (she decides she’d
rather leap to her death rather than have the man “put a caressing hand on her,”
such a delicate reference to rape)! But in the end, she’s found less than an
hour later, and feels “unutterably depressed” by her hysteria upon first being
imprisoned. I shared the feeling, actually, to a lesser degree, upon reaching
the end of this long, mediocre, insulting book that has little respect for its
heroine and less for its readers if it thinks that this is what we all would
appreciate in a love interest. And it’s not even really a nurse novel, since
Jane has quit nursing school and is not working as one! The last straw! So with
that, I can give you no reason whatsoever to spend any time with either not-a-Nurse
Jane or Cousin Paul. </span><o:p></o:p></p>Susannahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12417568186428454938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-864471121777778424.post-64311999874700238862024-01-21T15:25:00.003-05:002024-01-21T15:25:14.751-05:00Nurse Rivers’ Secret<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b></b></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgi7EOZKLTMotq5CTZEmVcr7ahV_7jCN2KlVsBrsIPCzAlizS67Kpwor7ZpJVCI57D8ynFP5vg1ubzw3uCUP1AcnMqbDpxEAnVybskhdSsFPHdxnzkFJRRE6FmoyQb9lC_2W8aQ8g1hyphenhyphenxIUPejk6IjRhf-0DCOOA2BbEtt-IbAdHAeAdyeSPB-QCYerPoU7/s610/Nurse%20Rivers%20Secret.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="610" data-original-width="388" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgi7EOZKLTMotq5CTZEmVcr7ahV_7jCN2KlVsBrsIPCzAlizS67Kpwor7ZpJVCI57D8ynFP5vg1ubzw3uCUP1AcnMqbDpxEAnVybskhdSsFPHdxnzkFJRRE6FmoyQb9lC_2W8aQ8g1hyphenhyphenxIUPejk6IjRhf-0DCOOA2BbEtt-IbAdHAeAdyeSPB-QCYerPoU7/s320/Nurse%20Rivers%20Secret.jpg" width="204" /></a></b></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>By Anne Durham, ©1965<br /></b><b>Cover illustration by
Bern Smith</b></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Everyone at Ripplegate
General Hospital was tremendously excited when the film star Dawn Delaney was
admitted as a patient—everyone, that is, except Nurse Nina Rivers, who knew
Dawn only too well and dreaded the complications she would inevitably bring
with her.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">GRADE:</b> B+</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>BEST QUOTES:<br /></b>“She’d be a proper corker out of that horrible uniform.” </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“No one looks at a nurse unless she’s doing something to
attract attention.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">REVIEW:|<br /></b>Nurse Nina Rivers
has made a life for herself apart from her family; she comes from a fairly
broken home. Her father died when she was very young, and Mother married Alexander
Fitchworth, a very nice man who had been a real father to Nina. Of course, he
went and died, and Nina became a sort of Cinderella to her temperamental and
beautiful stepsister Alexandra, waiting on her hand and foot. Astonishingly,
when Mother and Alexandra had decided to move to America, Nina elected to
remain in the U.K. to become a nurse, and neither of them has ever forgiven
Nina for “abandoning” them and what would have been a life of unappreciated
drudgery.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Imagine poor Nina’s
surprise when her sister is brought in to her hospital as a pampered private
patient—under the name Dawn Delaney, as she is now known, as she is a rising
movie star and is making a film in a castle nearby; Dawn had fallen through a
rickety balcony when she had been up there outside of working hours with a film
mogul who could do things for her career. Nina is immediately sacrificed at
Dawn’s altar by none other than Mommie Dearest. Not a hug or word of affection
passes from Mommie’s lips after years apart from her first daughter before she
is exhorting Nina not to tell anyone of the relationship. “You’ve always said
you didn’t care for that sort of life. This is what you prefer, and as soon as
Alex has recovered, she will go right out of your life again, and not trouble
you,” she says, blaming the victim. “You must come and have tea with us one
day,” she adds, finishing the job with a knife to the heart.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">But Dawn/Alex is a
spoiled brat, always on the call light and sobbing in self-pity, and the only
one who can soothe her is Nurse Rivers, who is constantly pressed into duty to
pat the limpid hand of her sister. Dawn is also one of those ladies who “always
found the men belonging to other girls much more acceptable to her than other
men. She didn’t mean any harm; she just couldn’t help it.” Yeah, right. And of
course the first man she notices is Dr. Antony Alsford, who is all but engaged
to Nina—if only they can settle the thorny issue of whether she will quit working
when they get married. “I just want a career of my own,” she tells him
repeatedly, but he is having none of it. “He didn’t like his girl-friend to be
the one with ideas, the one to want to make plans. He would want a yes-woman,
Nina felt.” It’s clear why she wants to marry him and why she is heart-broken
when he becomes starry-eyed over the dewy, rose-colored Dawn—and breaks off
their engagement with a story about how he is doing her a huge favor by ending
it. “I’m standing in your way,” he generously explains. He has no idea how
right he is, and unfortunately neither does Nina.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Because there’s nice
old Dr. Stephen Cornwell to help her over the rough patches, give her a lift
into town and buy her tea and pass over his handkerchief. Though he starts out
“much as a kindly uncle,” his charm grows naturally on Nina, and he is clearly
in love with her—though she, of course, is the last one to figure this out. She
does come to understand something her own feelings early on, however—“a rather
special feeling towards Dr. Stephen Cromwell, that had begun deep down in her
almost imperceptibly, and was now like a glow of warmth on a cold day, stealing
gently yet swiftly all over her. A glow that made her want to be with him all
the time.” Unfortunately Dawn, recognizing the attraction between the pair, now
decides that, having won Antony for her own, she no longer wants that fickle
man and has her heart set on winning poor Dr. Cornwell. “She hadn’t really
wanted Antony permanently; she had just wanted to feel that she could take his
attention away from another girl, and now she was finished with him.” What a sweet
girl!</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Now Dawn is making
herself sick with longing for the good doctor, and Nina feels she has no choice
but to exhort Dr. Cornwell to go along with the charade that he loves her in
order to help her recover. “Dawn wanted him, and they must consider her,
because she was so ill,” she decides. He flat out refuses, however, proving
himself to be a man of principles and character. “She’s behaving like a spoilt
child. She wants something. She must have it. It doesn’t matter if it’s some
pretty toy or a man’s attention, it’s all one to her. And I, for one, will not
pander to it,” he tells her, adding, “I think you’ve let Dawn and her mother
make a doormat of you for years, and I’m going to personally stop it.”</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">But Nina is a clever
lass, smart enough to figure out another way to get Dawn off Dr. Cornwell’s leg—even
if in enacting her plan she risks losing the doctor for good. Complications and
misunderstandings ensue, of course … and in the end we have another fairly
typical Harlequin story, sweet and slow, with an admirable, strong heroine—and
in this instance, we are lucky to have an attractive love interest as well. Some
side characters are well-drawn; Nina’s mother in particular was terrifically
horrid in a subtle sort of way. If overall this book is not especially
sparkling, it’s still well worth an afternoon.</span></span></p>Susannahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12417568186428454938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-864471121777778424.post-87060186012492481992024-01-07T15:05:00.000-05:002024-01-07T15:05:02.875-05:00Nurse in Jeopardy<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b></b></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiJySugRK5wDHASdQVosz5NPrTZS3XtnxCdsOuC29IhD4bSPKFrY7BMBtcx1O6EiiDYMWikHFtpTKXzUNLI4y1Nh4xwoO-YzHBmI1VZDH1b7zlcQkxdWisvwpDS5W6qwTtjQYEVFnuOaElhA6ghKPDd9Xyq2w4Neh1pEhihHMcJqO_222TR3DY1lNvLaxH/s2076/Nurse%20in%20Jeopardy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2076" data-original-width="1241" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiJySugRK5wDHASdQVosz5NPrTZS3XtnxCdsOuC29IhD4bSPKFrY7BMBtcx1O6EiiDYMWikHFtpTKXzUNLI4y1Nh4xwoO-YzHBmI1VZDH1b7zlcQkxdWisvwpDS5W6qwTtjQYEVFnuOaElhA6ghKPDd9Xyq2w4Neh1pEhihHMcJqO_222TR3DY1lNvLaxH/s320/Nurse%20in%20Jeopardy.jpg" width="191" /></a></b></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>By Rose Dana<br /></b><b>(pseud. William E. Daniel Ross), ©1967</b></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i><span style="font-family: verdana;">Beautiful Nurse Mavis
Eaton had come to the quiet seacoast town to develop another talent: painting.
But she was soon deeply enmeshed in a strange and terrifying struggle that involved
a handsome young doctor and a brilliant mysterious stranger.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>GRADE:</b> B-</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>BEST QUOTES:<br /></b>“I declare that half of my practice is tending to summer
incompetents. They come down here and stay out in the sun until they’re boiled
lobster red, work in their gardens until they get heart attacks, overeat and
get every kind of gastrointestinal complication imaginable! I wonder if they
realize how much healthier they’d be if they just stayed at home and took it
easy?” </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“I wouldn’t trust her with an undersize lobster.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“Just because I happen to be neurotic enough for two is no
reason I should be in a hurry to share my neurosis with some unfortunate girl.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“Romance! It louses up everything!”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">REVIEW:|<br /></b>Nurse Mavis Eaton is one wildly lucky nurse—her dying
patient, Mrs. Maltby, bequeaths her a year’s salary and a house on the Maine
seacoast, which she accepts without hesitation, though I think the ethics of
that are just a bit sketchy. Her dream is to work on her painting, hopefully to
develop enough during her time off from nursing to decide whether she has the
talent to pursue painting professionally. Moving into the small town, she meets
local GP Dr. Timothy Ryan, who somehow manages to practice medicine though he
his blind, and the other medico, Dr. Bill Rutherford. “He’s tall and blond and
looks like those men in the shirt ads, a real serious young man,” we learn, and
soon Dr. Rutherford has convinced Mavis that working a few days at the
understaffed hospital in Bristol will help her paint better when she does have
time off. She also is befriended by Stephen Metcalfe, once a lawyer but now a
gadabout, living in an outbuilding and renting his family house to a man from
California. “I am the modern equivalent of one of those misunderstood holy
men—the hermits,” he tells Mavis modestly. He has a propensity to say absurd
things like, “I am the lonely ghoul of the Metcalf estate, abhorred by all and
sundry in the village.” If he talks like that to them, it’s no wonder.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Other locals include German-born John Ulrich, who moved to
Maine before World War II. He is known to have been a Nazi sympathizer and is suspected
by the locals of assisting the Nazis. “You know they caught a lot of spies that
arrived here on the Maine coast from a submarine. But they had to have someone
here to help them; someone they could trust. And I always thought John Ulrich
was that man!” her cleaning woman tells her. Upon meeting Mavis, John says that
prowlers are sneaking around his house and gives her a tin box with photos of
his family and a newspaper in German that he says holds notices of his
brother’s death in World War II, and asks her to keep it for him and mail it to
his sister in Germany if he dies. Sure, she says, because she takes everything
that total strangers give to her. Soon there are footsteps in the snow outside
her house … what else could it be except that someone is coming after Ulrich’s
box! Maybe it’s Hans Heinke, another local expat German, who was a prisoner in
the German concentration camps during the war. Discussing John with Hans, Mavis
thinks “his attitude toward John Ulrich remained very strange,” because it’s difficult
to understand why a Nazi sympathizer might be disliked by someone who was in a
concentration camp. “Hans still has a sort of complex from being in that
concentration camp. It leaves a mark on a man. In his case, he takes a pretty
downbeat view of life,” Steve tells Mavis. Hmmm, I wonder why?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Soon Steve is dropping unpassionate kisses on Mavis, who is
not reported to have much feeling about the matter; she seems to have more
response to a kiss from Dr. Rutherford. All that is essentially parenthetical
to the story, and halfway through the book John Ulrich is bludgeoned to death. Now
the question of who did it takes over the book. Mavis “wouldn’t want to cause
trouble” by pointing out to the police that the dead man’s last word was Hans’
name, but Dr. Rutherford prevails upon her to tell the cops this and the fact
that John had given her a box, which they promptly come to collect. Everyone
falls under Mavis’ suspicion, and for the rest of the book we are either
following her around the hospital or casting nervous glances at the neighbors.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Neither the mystery nor the romance held much interest for
me. Few of the clues that Mavis considers are ever satisfactorily explained
away, and the holes in the story are many and large. Even the mystery about
what Mavis is going to do with her life remains unclear; at one point she decides,
“She wouldn’t become a great artist overnight. It was going to take long months
and perhaps years for her to perfect a technique individual enough to make her
mark in the roughly competitive art world,” a realization that should have been
obvious from Day One, but even with this idea suddenly dawning on her, she never
declares what her ultimate career intentions are. Her final choice for a boyfriend
is not satisfying and frankly doesn’t really even make sense to me, since just
pages earlier she had been convinced the man was involved in the murder. Dan
Ross, here writing as Rose Dana, has never been one of my favorites, and this
book did little to change my opinion.</span></p>Susannahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12417568186428454938noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-864471121777778424.post-87063249141923463232024-01-01T16:35:00.012-05:002024-01-01T16:49:11.973-05:0011th Annual VNRN Awards<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIV1InLC5tf7sq5ley0eZE7dBI7utrlqgvYBZ_-6zikiNgoby54tH9qLOQHdfWh4lN0bBUUP0XeiAUAXXLv2REnswJlWe0tg_nPckw-ghHy63RbBoiZaS9s0vvjJKUcIp1ffF0HX9cDkbTVF5YuGmGXLyVxgLRA9j69xXsjiVGJooJ70-I7uiK9ecJlXxx/s748/Nurse%20on%20Terror%20Island.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="748" data-original-width="440" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIV1InLC5tf7sq5ley0eZE7dBI7utrlqgvYBZ_-6zikiNgoby54tH9qLOQHdfWh4lN0bBUUP0XeiAUAXXLv2REnswJlWe0tg_nPckw-ghHy63RbBoiZaS9s0vvjJKUcIp1ffF0HX9cDkbTVF5YuGmGXLyVxgLRA9j69xXsjiVGJooJ70-I7uiK9ecJlXxx/s320/Nurse%20on%20Terror%20Island.jpg" width="188" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;">Hello again, and welcome back to our annual
roundup of the best vintage nurse novels of the year! The most significant win goes
to <a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/p/william-neubauer_26.html">Bill
Neubauer</a>, whose Best Book award this year gives him the most of anyone in
that category, with an amazing seven! (You can now buy a number of the Best Books
as ebooks republished by my company <a href="https://www.nursenovelspub.com/">Nurse
Novels Publishing</a>, which is just celebrating its first anniversary!) My perennial
nemesis Peggy Gaddis also captured her seventh award—but for Worst Book, so the
distinction is less laudable, but why not pop a champagne cork for her as well?</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">We are greeted by a number of other familiar
names among the Best and Worst Books this year: Dorothy Fletcher claimed two of
the top prizes, bringing her total to five Best Books;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Marjorie Moore, Ida Cook (writing as Mary Burchell)
and Elizabeth Gilzean (writing as Elizabeth Houghton) captured their third Best
Book awards this year, while newbies Violet Finlay Stuart and Betty Neels
joined the Best Book list for the first time.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Worst Books category also yielded little surprise, as perennial losers Peggy O’More Blocklinger (her fourth raspberry),
Suzanne Roberts (<span style="background-color: #e1c5c5; color: #222222;">“</span>win<span style="background-color: #e1c5c5; color: #222222;">”</span> #3), Richard Wilkes-Hunter (writing as Diana Douglas for #2),
Norah Bradley (writing as Sharon Heath for #2) and Adeline McElfresh (#2)
appear again. We don’t look forward to more books by first-timers Doris Knight and
Margaret McCulloch.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">It must
be admitted, however, that terrible books can frequently yield glorious quotes,
as a number of the worst books provided amusing pearls for our Best Quotes of
the year. Why is that, do you wonder?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: black;">Fine
print: </span>Winners are chosen from the 42 VNRNs I read
this past year, which were penned by 31 different authors. The Best and Worst
Publishing Houses categories includes all the VNRNs reviewed for this blog (558 to date). As much as I would have loved to include Nurse Novels Publishing, which would have easily bagged the Best Publishers top slot, it just didn't seem fair ...</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Enjoy!</span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6qZOvvKqTLvCovHA0D6ePM5kE4rS-ZVraaihhmULqYmkN1KmKao2gyr9-3kPIQXbokO-piPKjqBxaiphrT5rfCxtqQzgBl-srxlajxQAuWy0OwP2pTjFrJRPBv39BC9cQ4V-1L7T34SV4evwHvtn3Sy9tc8Dvo0DF5zYUpq0LPgRkqR4MiViCKr8uUXz-/s2114/Visiting%20Nurse%20-%20Brennan.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2114" data-original-width="1243" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6qZOvvKqTLvCovHA0D6ePM5kE4rS-ZVraaihhmULqYmkN1KmKao2gyr9-3kPIQXbokO-piPKjqBxaiphrT5rfCxtqQzgBl-srxlajxQAuWy0OwP2pTjFrJRPBv39BC9cQ4V-1L7T34SV4evwHvtn3Sy9tc8Dvo0DF5zYUpq0LPgRkqR4MiViCKr8uUXz-/s320/Visiting%20Nurse%20-%20Brennan.jpg" width="188" /></a></span></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>Best
Books<br /></b></span><span style="font-family: verdana; text-indent: -0.25in;">1.<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/07/hospital-corridors.html" style="font-family: verdana; text-indent: -0.25in;"><i>Hospital Corridors</i></a><span style="font-family: verdana; text-indent: -0.25in;"> by Mary Burchell (pseud.
Ida Cook)<br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana; text-indent: -0.25in;">2.<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/11/new-yorker-nurse.html" style="font-family: verdana; text-indent: -0.25in;"><i>New Yorker Nurse</i></a><span style="font-family: verdana; text-indent: -0.25in;"> by Dorothy Fletcher<br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana; text-indent: -0.25in;">3.<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-fifth-day-of-christmas.html" style="font-family: verdana; text-indent: -0.25in;"><i>The Fifth Day of Christmas</i></a><span style="font-family: verdana; text-indent: -0.25in;"> by Betty Neels<br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana; text-indent: -0.25in;">4.<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/08/the-dilemma-of-geraldine-addams.html" style="font-family: verdana; text-indent: -0.25in;"><i>The Dilemma of Geraldine
Addams</i></a><span style="font-family: verdana; text-indent: -0.25in;"> by Diane Frazer (pseud. Dorothy Fletcher)<br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana; text-indent: -0.25in;">5.<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/06/prison-nurse.html" style="font-family: verdana; text-indent: -0.25in;"><i>Prison Nurse</i></a><span style="font-family: verdana; text-indent: -0.25in;"> by <a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/p/william-neubauer_26.html">William Neubauer</a><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana; text-indent: -0.25in;">6.<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/03/doctor-sara-comes-home.html" style="font-family: verdana; text-indent: -0.25in;"><i>Doctor Sara Comes Home</i></a><span style="font-family: verdana; text-indent: -0.25in;"> by Elizabeth Houghton
(pseud. Elizabeth Gilzean)<br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana; text-indent: -0.25in;">7.<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/04/doctor-lucy.html" style="font-family: verdana; text-indent: -0.25in;"><i>Doctor Lucy</i></a><span style="font-family: verdana; text-indent: -0.25in;"> by Barbara Allen (pseud.
Violet Finlay Stuart)<br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana; text-indent: -0.25in;">8.<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/06/peter-raynal-surgeon.html" style="font-family: verdana; text-indent: -0.25in;"><i>Peter Raynal, Surgeon</i></a><span style="font-family: verdana; text-indent: -0.25in;"> by Marjorie Moore<br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana; text-indent: -0.25in;">9.<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/07/to-please-doctor.html" style="font-family: verdana; text-indent: -0.25in;"><i>To Please the Doctor</i></a><span style="font-family: verdana; text-indent: -0.25in;"> by Marjorie Moore</span></p><div style="text-indent: 0px;"><br /></div><div style="text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div style="text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>Worst Books</b></span></div><div style="text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">1. <span> </span><span> </span><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/07/seacliff-nurse.html" style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><i>Seacliff Nurse</i></a><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;"> by Peggy O<span style="color: #222222; text-indent: 0px;">’</span>More</span></span></div><div style="text-indent: 0px;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;">2.<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-nurse-and-star.html" style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><i>The Nurse and the Star</i></a><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;"> by Peggy Gaddis<br /></span><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;">3.<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/11/hope-farrell-crusading-nurse.html" style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><i>Hope Farrell Crusading Nurse</i></a><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;"> by Suzanne Roberts<br /></span><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;">4.<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/09/nurse-on-terror-island.html" style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><i>Nurse on Terror Island</i></a><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;"> by Doris Knight<br /></span><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;">5.<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/11/flight-nurse.html" style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><i>Flight Nurse</i></a><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;"> by Adeline McElfresh<br /></span><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;">6.<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/12/nurse-at-shadow-manor.html" style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><i>Nurse
at Shadow Manor</i></a><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;"> by Sharon Heath (pseud. Norah Bradley)<br /></span><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;">7.<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/10/second-year-nurse.html" style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><i>Second Year Nurse</i></a><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;"> by Margaret McCulloch<br /></span><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;">8.<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/02/nurse-crane-emergency.html" style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><i>Nurse Crane … Emergency</i></a><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;"> by Ann Gilmer (pseud. W.E.
Dan Ross)<br /></span><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;">9.<span style="font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal;">
</span></span><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/05/new-orleans-nurse.html" style="text-indent: -0.25in;"><i>New Orleans Nurse</i></a><span style="text-indent: -0.25in;"> by Diana Douglas (pseud.
Richard Wilkes-Hunter)</span></span></div><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b></b></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja2x0Oo7ei6MNoLqC8pRwkJHrByJ2G2Yv094IX8NO4t8Wsm9x15a9EsH8O1vKdK-L__AlexSBS9BQT6A8tF32-a0t8dXm04TvP8ojjUYxErdECXXmF6mq2PqjEOhgrl-FUJvIXiHXajFde5f8tShbFgv4EpagunP984ekuZbKHh0faWEXfieVSQOPp_w5I/s1893/Dilemma%20of%20Geraldine%20Addams.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1893" data-original-width="1253" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEja2x0Oo7ei6MNoLqC8pRwkJHrByJ2G2Yv094IX8NO4t8Wsm9x15a9EsH8O1vKdK-L__AlexSBS9BQT6A8tF32-a0t8dXm04TvP8ojjUYxErdECXXmF6mq2PqjEOhgrl-FUJvIXiHXajFde5f8tShbFgv4EpagunP984ekuZbKHh0faWEXfieVSQOPp_w5I/s320/Dilemma%20of%20Geraldine%20Addams.jpg" width="212" /></a></b></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><div><b>Best Quotes</b></div></b></span><span style="background-color: #e1c5c5; font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #222222;">“I
never supposed he thought of anything but cutting people up in the neatest and
most miraculous way possible.”<br /></span></span><span style="background-color: #e1c5c5; font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/07/hospital-corridors.html"><i>Hospital
Corridors</i></a></span><i style="background-color: #e1c5c5; font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #222222;"> </span></i><span style="background-color: #e1c5c5; color: #222222; font-family: verdana;">by Mary Burchell (pseud.
Ida Cook)</span><p></p>
<span style="background-color: #e1c5c5; color: #222222; font-family: verdana;">“How can he tell me how pretty my eyes are in one breath and then start talking about thrombophlebitis?” <br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/11/hope-farrell-crusading-nurse.html"><i>Hope Farrell Crusading Nurse</i></a></span><i style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #222222;"> </span></i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: verdana;">by Suzanne Roberts</span><div><span style="color: #222222; font-family: verdana;"><br /></span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #222222;"><span style="background-color: #e1c5c5;">“The trouble with you, Gail, is that essentially you’re too honest. You always level with people. I don’t, and life is far more exciting.”<br /></span></span></span></span><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/10/nurse-in-doubt.html" style="font-family: verdana;"><i><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">Nurse in Doubt</span></i></a><i style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #222222;"> </span></i><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #222222; font-family: verdana;">by <a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/p/isabel-capeto.html">Isabel Capeto</a></span><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #222222;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #222222;">“The
only time I went to the Wayside Inn was with a freshman from the University.
Emphasis on fresh. It’s one of those places where you get so mixed up under the
table because of lack of space that when you want to go to the john you have to
say, ‘Excuse me, may I have my legs back?’<span style="background-color: #e1c5c5;">”</span><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/03/nurse-turner-runs-away.html"><i>Nurse
Turner Runs Away</i></a></span><i style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #222222;"> </span></i><span style="color: #222222; font-family: verdana;">by Diane Frazer (pseud.
Dorothy Fletcher)</span><p class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(225, 197, 197); mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #222222;">“Are you
still shaky from the shark episode?” <br /></span></span><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/09/nurse-on-terror-island.html" style="background-color: transparent; font-family: verdana;"><i><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial;">Nurse on
Terror Island</span></i></a><i style="background-color: transparent; font-family: verdana;"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #222222;"> </span></i><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; color: #222222; font-family: verdana;">by Doris Knight</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(225, 197, 197); mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #222222;">“A
man of such romantic temperament that he can make love among the white enamel
fittings of a hospital kitchen is not to be lightly dismissed.”<br />
</span><span style="color: black;"><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/07/hospital-corridors.html"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Hospital
Corridors</span></i></a></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #222222;"> </span></i><span style="color: #222222;">by Mary Burchell (pseud.
Ida Cook)<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(225, 197, 197); mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #222222;"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNy_-2pAK5DmFnMeVDAwUB4OiC6gu9hJqaUfb5oKrKNeQ1fJjw4s0OrYPSsoSus_Rfz2x-g1NRHVPKjDqjSbIl1AIDYUiojIX6vRLhSWw1iWSlHbV_jNmd0_Zt_8UX-rRbipmT1-pPvJTt1Lz_YbuNOg0K_uUFB3lsnTWI0gIg1d0jzRwNccM4EUF83Z-R/s2096/Nurse%20Craig%20-%20Ford.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2096" data-original-width="1237" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgNy_-2pAK5DmFnMeVDAwUB4OiC6gu9hJqaUfb5oKrKNeQ1fJjw4s0OrYPSsoSus_Rfz2x-g1NRHVPKjDqjSbIl1AIDYUiojIX6vRLhSWw1iWSlHbV_jNmd0_Zt_8UX-rRbipmT1-pPvJTt1Lz_YbuNOg0K_uUFB3lsnTWI0gIg1d0jzRwNccM4EUF83Z-R/s320/Nurse%20Craig%20-%20Ford.jpg" width="189" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;">“Rosemary’s
been coming to the beach for the past two weeks. Upton and I were immediately
drawn to her superior mind.”<br />
<span style="color: black;"><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/07/nurse-audreys-mission.html"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Nurse
Audrey’s Mission</span></i></a></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #222222;"> </span></i><span style="color: #222222;">by Isabel Cabot (pseud.
<a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/p/isabel-capeto.html">Isabel Capeto</a>)<o:p></o:p></span></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(225, 197, 197); mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="background: rgb(225, 197, 197); color: #222222;">“You carry a
gun, don’t you? Couldn’t you arrange to have it go off sort of by accident, you
know?” <br />
</span><span style="color: black;"><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/04/highway-nurse.html"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="background: rgb(225, 197, 197);">Highway
Nurse</span></i></a></span><span style="background: rgb(225, 197, 197); color: #222222;"> by
Florence Stuart (pseud. <a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/p/florence-stonebraker.html">Florence Stonebraker</a>)<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="background: rgb(225, 197, 197);"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #222222;">“This is why
nursing is not an overcrowded profession. Word has gotten around that it isn’t
all handsome doctors and gay pulse-taking.”<br /></span></span></span><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/02/nurse-crane-emergency.html" style="font-family: verdana;"><i><span style="background: rgb(225, 197, 197);">Nurse Crane
… Emergency</span></i></a><i style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="background: rgb(225, 197, 197); color: #222222;"> </span></i><span style="background: rgb(225, 197, 197); color: #222222; font-family: verdana;">by Ann Gilmer (pseud. W.E. Dan Ross)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="background: rgb(225, 197, 197); mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="color: #222222;">“A
lot of clear thoughts can come to a man while he’s eating squirrel stew.”<br />
</span><span style="color: black;"><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/11/hope-farrell-crusading-nurse.html"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Hope
Farrell Crusading Nurse</span></i></a></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #222222;"> </span></i><span style="color: #222222;">by Suzanne Roberts<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b></b></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy59OLQEm8ILp9XG4ZNo6LKIxA1_vVwzxmaxhh1EgsSMEWpWpQlTpd1pg74olnwAnhITxCHEuMctzRh2IX49i_iS8th54bN9ydnUCIrvWbw5v7-GfNa0oNTHNWR8VCh7VWvKf8lbCmxB6fue3If7cJ4uBgpHstkp5fLZ9xKJ4Thug6SkbkeflDnYqbv_n6/s1890/Prison%20Nurse%20-%20Neubauer.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1890" data-original-width="1250" height="370" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjy59OLQEm8ILp9XG4ZNo6LKIxA1_vVwzxmaxhh1EgsSMEWpWpQlTpd1pg74olnwAnhITxCHEuMctzRh2IX49i_iS8th54bN9ydnUCIrvWbw5v7-GfNa0oNTHNWR8VCh7VWvKf8lbCmxB6fue3If7cJ4uBgpHstkp5fLZ9xKJ4Thug6SkbkeflDnYqbv_n6/w245-h370/Prison%20Nurse%20-%20Neubauer.jpg" width="245" /></a></b></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>Best Covers<br /></b></span><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/09/nurse-on-terror-island.html" style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Nurse
on Terror Island</i></a><br /><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/08/the-dilemma-of-geraldine-addams.html" style="font-family: verdana;"><i>The Dilemma of Geraldine Addams</i></a><span style="font-family: verdana;">, illustration by Harry Bennett</span><br /><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/06/visiting-nurse.html" style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Visiting Nurse</i></a><br /><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/06/prison-nurse.html" style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Prison Nurse</i></a><span style="font-family: verdana;">, illustration by Robert Maguire</span><span style="font-size: 13.3333px;"><br /></span><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2023/05/nurse-craig.html" style="font-family: verdana;"><i>Nurse Craig</i></a><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>Best Publishing Houses<br /></b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Harlequin<br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Monarch<br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Perma Books<br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Pocket Books</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>Worst Publishing Houses<br /></b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Airmont <br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Popular Library<br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Dell Candlelight<br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Belmont<br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Valentine</span></p></div></div>Susannahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12417568186428454938noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-864471121777778424.post-70981217513424204572023-12-30T15:27:00.001-05:002023-12-30T15:27:11.866-05:00The Fifth Day of Christmas<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b></b></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwDwhLopKzikTyDjkdZ8yz4skdGkaulbD1pHEVADjo_ErzmywAgKfzfTddNDvasOjcAmj9yXUdsXqJhOeMiwzLDFjxA376N4U5mBzH6vXvng4JpMaDN1TuM8gTgKxjSvyYTmXHzglHJwnz5LVSIKWtIgzSEXZ-B1h_RtqJUqPj_jBTIjpV-6P0tUPnL-kX/s2033/Fifth%20Day%20of%20Christmas.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2033" data-original-width="1259" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwDwhLopKzikTyDjkdZ8yz4skdGkaulbD1pHEVADjo_ErzmywAgKfzfTddNDvasOjcAmj9yXUdsXqJhOeMiwzLDFjxA376N4U5mBzH6vXvng4JpMaDN1TuM8gTgKxjSvyYTmXHzglHJwnz5LVSIKWtIgzSEXZ-B1h_RtqJUqPj_jBTIjpV-6P0tUPnL-kX/s320/Fifth%20Day%20of%20Christmas.jpg" width="198" /></a></b></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>By Betty Neels, </b><b> ©1971</b></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">It hadn’t taken Julia
long to fall in love with Ivo van den Werff—but she had better fall out of love
equally quickly, she decided, when she met Marcia Jason and realized just how
much stronger a claim the other girl had on Ivo’s affection.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">GRADE:</b> A-</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>BEST QUOTES:<br /></b>“That’s what you’re for—to see that I don’t die in a coma.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“I, being a man of leisure, am the obvious one to sacrifice
on the altar of frostbite and exposure.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>REVIEW:<br /></b>This is the first book I have read written by romance queen
Betty Neels, who published more than 130 romance novels starting in 1969 when
she was 60 and chugged along into her 90s (you go, girl!). Ms. Neels worked as
a nurse most of her life and served in France during World War II, writing
quite a few nurse novels on the way. The problem with her oeuvre is that it largely
lies beyond the scope of my “vintage” lens, which I feel limits me to about
1975—certainly not outside the 1970s (and my regular readers well know how
painful I have found the quality of books in that decade, which makes me
reconsider the wisdom of including the 1970s in my circle for reasons other
than timing). So though I was very pleased with this introduction to the
prolific Ms. Neels, I also have mixed feelings about whether I should regret or
not the fact that I will not be reading many of her books—we’ll let the caliber
of her work that we encounter in the future help tip the balance of my regret
or relief.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">And with that editorial over with, let’s move on to a
discussion of this really sweet and delightful book. Julia Pennyfeather is a
22-year-old nurse accompanying a brat of a patient to her home in England just
before Christmas, arriving at that remote manor house in the gales of a severe
snowstorm that strands her there with only a few members of the staff—and Dr.
Ivo van den Werff, who is blown to the door entirely by chance shortly after
her own arrival, as he is seeking shelter from the blizzard. She flings open
the door to him in the middle of the night, and he chides her for letting in a
stranger—but helps care for her patient who has come down with pneumonia. They
spend a few days walking in the snow and cooking bread and soup out of the
scraps in the cupboards until the roads are cleared, and then Ivo invites her
to Holland to care for Marcia Jason, who is living at his fancy family home
while that young lady recovers from polio.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Marcia has been “recovering” for about nine months, and
Julia—who dislikes the condescending and self-absorbed woman at first
site—suspects that the woman is actually much better than she pretends, that
her inability to walk is a pretense to allow her to stay on at the house and
trap Ivo into a pity-based marriage. So Julia forcefully hauls the young woman
up and down stairs—noting that how much help Marcia requires depends on who is
watching—and endures comments about how “robust” and “sturdy” she is (Marcia
sees her emaciated frame as the height of sophistication). Julia also puts up
with a lot of intellectual snobbery, as Marcia is always reading dense tomes by
authors we likely have not read (Bacon) much less heard of (Vondel, anyone?)
and making snotty comments about what she is convinced is a plebian sensibility,
remarking, “You are, I imagine, an impetuous young woman, lacking intellectual
powers.” In fact, Julia fabulously turns out to be a quiet brain, and only when
she is on a tour of a museum with Ivo, completely flustered by his nearness,
does she deliver “quite a dissertation on Rembrandt, rivalling her patient in
both length and dullness.” She also often offers thoughtful solutions to actual
problems in daily life and in medicine that cause Ivo and me to look at her
admiringly. I was also impressed by her limitless ability to bite her tongue
when Marcia makes yet another rude remark, instead offering with “a politeness
which was quite awe-inspiring” enthusiastic exhortations for Marcia to continue
working on her exercises or have another go at the staircase for practice that
they both know she doesn’t need: “Why not come into the garden with me tomorrow
morning? We needn’t go far and the worst that can happen is for you to fall
over, when I shall pick you up again.”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Julia has a young man back at home “who was waiting with the
smug certainty of a man with no imagination for her to say Yes.” She’s not
going to marry him because he’s an ass, which puts her way ahead of a sadly
large number of VNRN heroines, but that gives Ivo something to tease her about
from time to time. But since Julia is convinced that Ivo is promised to
Marcia—if not definitely, then doomed to be so because of his guilt about her
illness—she can only drink him in when he is near and cry in secret.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The humor in this book is constant and reliable, such as
when Julia hears a hoarse croak coming from the room of her patient. “She was
out of bed, thrusting her feet into slippers as the list of postoperative
complications liable to follow an appendicectomy on a diabetic patient unfolded
itself in her still tired mind. Carbuncles, gangrene, bronchopneumonia … the
croak came again which effectively ruled out the first two.” The characters in
the book are delightfully drawn, including Ivo’s lovely father, and the villain
Marcia is terrifically awful. Even the love interest, frequently a dull
individual with no inspiring qualities in many nurse novels, here has humor, steadiness
and appreciation for the gem that Julia is. The book’s only real drawback is
that once the party arrives in Holland about halfway through the book, there’s
not much to do except watch varieties of the same scenes play out again and
again—Ivo and Julia on a pleasant outing, Marcia being nasty, Julia pining for
Ivo and planning her departure for England as soon as she can reasonably get
away from what she is stubbornly convinced is her impending heartbreak; even if
the scenes are well-written and enjoyable, they still become a bit repetitious
as the plot spins its wheels for another 80 pages. But even the fact that Ms.
Neels can crank out multiple versions of the same scene, all laden with emotion
and wit, demonstrates her powers. I look forward to more of her works—it just
remains to be seen how far into the 1970s I’m willing to be drawn into, even with
as prodigious a talent as Ms. Neels’.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>Susannahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12417568186428454938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-864471121777778424.post-12949184313815895032023-12-23T17:30:00.003-05:002023-12-23T17:30:27.157-05:00Nurse Atholl Returns<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b></b></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0JRlIQb8pjg4dz3OEMTWvWaFx-f6QHTjWCDUcMLdN5m8HnnYoc4tBjeYhrZuAilADrePgo1yZyp2kBec99k46nt-3MWMxVRQLtOvbipXiAefyXehKh96iF2kWQcH_Ckwd1-T9TaHf2KwN8bZ-me0ViI5cWMA9fVpsj9ylzHuEcrjZ_AK8RGnbK2CUV5cx/s1503/Nurse%20Atholl%20Returns.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1503" data-original-width="941" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0JRlIQb8pjg4dz3OEMTWvWaFx-f6QHTjWCDUcMLdN5m8HnnYoc4tBjeYhrZuAilADrePgo1yZyp2kBec99k46nt-3MWMxVRQLtOvbipXiAefyXehKh96iF2kWQcH_Ckwd1-T9TaHf2KwN8bZ-me0ViI5cWMA9fVpsj9ylzHuEcrjZ_AK8RGnbK2CUV5cx/s320/Nurse%20Atholl%20Returns.jpg" width="200" /></a></b></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>By Jane Arbor, ©1952</b> </span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">When Lyn Atholl’s
fiancé abruptly broke their engagement only a month before the day fixed for
their wedding, she felt that the shock had disrupted her whole life. She could
not bear the thought of resuming her dearly loved profession of nursing—still
less going back to Broadfields Hospital, which she had so recently left in
happy expectancy among the good wishes of all her friends. A chance meeting
with the famous surgeon, Mr. Warner Belmont, convinced her that she was wrong,
and she decided to return to Broadfields. But—would she be able to go through
with it?</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">GRADE: </b>B-</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>BEST QUOTES:<br /></b>“Lyn thought wryly that to dance with a battleship could not
give a girl more confidence than to dance with Tom in a crowd, where it was
always the other couples who got out of his way.” </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>REVIEW:<br /></b>Lyn Atholl is leaving her beloved job to get married to a
man she hasn’t seen in over a year. And that works out about as well as you
expect it will. Turns out her beloved, Capt. Perry Garston, found himself a
wife when he was stationed in Austria—and told her as much about Lyn as he told
Lyn about Gerda, so you see what a narrow escape Lyn has had. She’s horribly
embarrassed about her turn of fortune—much more than anyone in the current age
would be, so it’s a little difficult to follow why she’s ready to chuck nursing
altogether, not only the hospital she has just left—but soon imperious surgeon
Dr. Warner Belmont is wagging a finger in her face, asking her, “Do you mean
that your efficiency in your work depends solely upon the smooth running of
your personal affairs? Isn’t that taking the importance of the individual and
of self-pity too far?” </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Ultimately she decides that he’s right and goes back to
Broadfields, but soon she’s “wondering about him as a man—the books he read,
the games he played, the people he liked,” but of course that last question is
easy: He doesn’t like anyone. Well, except Eve Adler, a petulant, beautiful,
very talented singer whom he squires about town. We are frequently reminded
that “he needs neither advice nor help, nor companionship nor anything at all
from any other human being,” and that “he gets on splendidly with other men and
he’s a kind of hero to boys. Yet when it comes to women—to you nurses
particularly—he treats you as if he had only to put a penny in the slot to make
you tick over like machines. No wonder you resent it.” But Lyn, inexplicably,
does not resent it at all, and soon decides “her feeling for the man at her
side transcended anything she had ever known before. And she had thought that,
after Perry, she would never love again!” Now we only have to wade through 130
more pages of misunderstandings, scenes of Werner being cold and snippy and Lyn
being dignified and admirable. Ultimately there’s a train crash and a flu
epidemic, and suddenly he’s declaring his undying love for her.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">It's not a dull book, though not outstanding, and the plot
device of having the heroine fall for an ass who remains one until the final
three pages is particularly maddening. Some of the characters are fun to
watch—the rotten women especially, it must be confessed—and Lyn is a quiet,
competent type, even if she is ready at the drop of a ring to walk away from
her profession, though she admits that “all she had learnt in nursing would be
wasted” after she marries. Overall you might do worse than to see Nurse Atholl
return—even if she’s just going away again at the end.</span><o:p></o:p></p>Susannahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12417568186428454938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-864471121777778424.post-25788786346776178812023-12-16T16:17:00.002-05:002023-12-30T15:36:57.069-05:00Alex Rayner, Dental Nurse<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b></b></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVLhZ9K1LbCEglx25LbJvn4wdsitD3lSNvvn3gew2pFqBuq7otzxrui-wlRGspJERAwR67AuIHKiJGNlkRsQisXBoBvNI798IHLuHgkmDzd8SjeqTv5NChFjEmHddrhjiBqVJCc3bOw8okVQvJyIJ_3gssAT-RfcNaO1UpFR5oDGUhB9DOSGSeVGOliYs3/s1003/Alex%20Raynor,%20Dental%20Nurse.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1003" data-original-width="623" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVLhZ9K1LbCEglx25LbJvn4wdsitD3lSNvvn3gew2pFqBuq7otzxrui-wlRGspJERAwR67AuIHKiJGNlkRsQisXBoBvNI798IHLuHgkmDzd8SjeqTv5NChFjEmHddrhjiBqVJCc3bOw8okVQvJyIJ_3gssAT-RfcNaO1UpFR5oDGUhB9DOSGSeVGOliYs3/s320/Alex%20Raynor,%20Dental%20Nurse.jpg" width="199" /></a></b></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>By Marjorie Lewty,
©1965</b> </span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">When Alex first
started working for Dr. Gerard Trent she wasn’t at all sure that she approved
of him; then, as she got to know him better, she began to like him very much
indeed. But what was the use of that, when he was so firmly engaged to the
glamorous Marilyn Lattimer?</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">GRADE:</b> B+</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>BEST QUOTES:<br /></b>“Jobs can be important to girls, too, you know. We’re not
all just hanging about waiting until some man comes along to marry us.” </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“She wouldn’t again be so ready to rely on masculine
promises made in the moonlight. They would be more convincing, she thought, if
made in the broad light of day—preferably when the girl concerned was drying
her hair in curlers or had a bad cold in her head.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“It’s always better to admit you don’t know than to make a
mess of it.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“I remember reading somewhere once that everybody has some
special lesson to learn in life and that it’s presented over and over again, in
different circumstances, until we learn it or are beaten by it.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“For the first time she felt she understood one of the basic
differences in outlook between men and women: women could bring babies into the
world. They had that fulfillment that a man could never have. Was that why men
so badly needed ambition, a self-justification that they were important and
successful?”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>REVIEW:<br /></b>I have to declare at the outset that this book does not
really qualify as a nurse novel. Heroine Alex Rayner works in a dentist’s
office—not that there’s anything wrong with that; the other two Marjorie Lewty
books I’ve read had similar settings—but Alex has not had any formal training, so
I can’t by any stretch call her a nurse. But she is a smart, charming and
enterprising woman of 22 who has been working for six months in Birmingham,
England, chiefly alongside dentist Douglas Crenshaw, a decent but nervous sort;
her best friend Jean’s husband Brian Ferguson is another of the office
dentists. As we open Chapter 1, we find that the senior dentist, Mr. Trent (we
are never given his first name), has had a heart attack, and his son Gerald has
come back from Toronto to step in while Mr. Trent is recovering. “Dr. Gerard
was the most brilliant dental surgeon ever released from the Eastman Hospital
to a grateful world,” according the office battle-axe spinster, Clarice, who
has always worked with Dr. Trent, and now hopes to butter up the younger man at
the expense of her colleagues.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">When Gerard shows up, though, he feels the office is not
operating at its most efficient. He immediately moves Clarice to the position
of front-desk secretary, which he attempts to sell as a linchpin-type position
to preserve her starched dignity—though he actually feels she is not capable of
more taxing work in oral surgery—and moves Alex out of Douglas’s office to work
alongside him. This makes her a target for Clarice’s venom, though she tries
her best to be civil, as difficult as that might be at times, and she is known
to imagine “how wonderfully satisfying it would be to push Clarice over
backwards.” Even at her worst, Alex is not all that mean. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">From the beginning Alex is a bit swoony over the confident,
handsome young man: “For a second everything rocked and then steadied and took
on the clarity and vividness of a dream” when she meets him for the first time.
He is tough on the outside but easy to work with, not expecting much of Alex
but challenging her to watch what he does, ask lots of questions and try to
learn what he would need next for a certain procedure and offer the appropriate
instrument before she is asked for it.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Of course, there is office drama: Douglas is falling for
Alex and asking her out on dates that she enjoys, but then worries that she’s
getting herself into a sticky situation with an office romance. Brian now has a
foxy new assistant, since the staff has been shifted around, and is now
spending late nights out while his wife and young daughter wait at home for him.
Alex, who is best friends with Brian’s wife, is put into the awkward position
of covering for Brian’s absence with a lie he has included her in. This lands
her in more hot water, as she has told Gerard another story about her
whereabouts for the night in question, so he is aware that she is lying and
suspects that it is she who is seeing Brian on the side. How is she going to
win him now??</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">In her efforts to straighten out all the misunderstandings
and eventually set the various male characters on the right paths, Alex
demonstrates intelligence, strength and honesty—and it’s that last <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>characteristic combined with a spot of luck
that in the end sets her straight with Mr. Right. In the interim we have the
pleasure of watching Alex maneuver through her various difficulties with sense
and humor; when she hears while she is down with a cold that Gerard is engaged
to another woman, she wonders “if perhaps if she had pneumonia after all and
would have a reasonable chance of dying quietly.” If this book doesn’t carry
the same heft as Lewty’s legitimate nurse novels (<a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2020/07/dental-nurse-at-denleys.html"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dental Nurse at Denley’s</i></a> and <a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2013/04/town-nursecountry-nurse.html"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Town Country—Country Nurse</i></a>) or even
as much witty humor, Lewty’s “worst” of the trio is still substantially better
than most. So even if it’s not an actual nurse novel, you have my permission to
make room on your reading list for this easy beauty.</span></p>Susannahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12417568186428454938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-864471121777778424.post-74952985621399481262023-12-07T12:40:00.006-05:002023-12-16T16:03:44.814-05:00Nurse at Shadow Manor<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b></b></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjL5K8P04Bi5naVE2stiGV996kVghd15Xehf8YdRR1SO0KGbkhhu5xiCRFt3cf2rDFkcPr-GQMJJTCcKJwywTH0yk35INlxFK2JDVF03JeC9hPxbDJMsJXaLJDwBBWKaDAE5xNxnjlSxC3zcG5qXCLBfX6VkxG8mcMifMMMduQXwUuzatyGeas2lFPcjxRJ/s2079/Nurse%20at%20Shadow%20Manor.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2079" data-original-width="1238" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjL5K8P04Bi5naVE2stiGV996kVghd15Xehf8YdRR1SO0KGbkhhu5xiCRFt3cf2rDFkcPr-GQMJJTCcKJwywTH0yk35INlxFK2JDVF03JeC9hPxbDJMsJXaLJDwBBWKaDAE5xNxnjlSxC3zcG5qXCLBfX6VkxG8mcMifMMMduQXwUuzatyGeas2lFPcjxRJ/s320/Nurse%20at%20Shadow%20Manor.jpg" width="191" /></a></b></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>By Sharon Heath<br />(pseud. Norah Mary Bradley),
©1966</b> </span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">To forget the pain of
a tragic romance, Nurse Frances Kimpton journeyed to Shadow Manor to act as
companion to its elderly mistress. In that quiet countryside she would try to
achieve peace of mind. But the peace she sought turned out to be a will-o’-the-wisp
as Frances found when she learned the secret of the manor’s other woman—the
young and willful niece of her employer. That secret meant danger and trouble.
Frances turned to the attractive Dr. Ralph Grant for help. It was well that she
did so. For, together, they were able to thwart a plot that could have ended in
murder.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">GRADE:</b> C</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>BEST QUOTES:<br /></b>“I was expecting a she-dragon in a starched uniform who
would glare at me. But this one’s well disguised, apparently!” </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>REVIEW:<br /></b>To have a bad heart fifty years ago seems to have meant to
be confined to a virtual prison. Poor Miss Caroline Eldridge, wealthy and only
in her 70s, isn’t allowed to do much for herself and spends most of the day
knitting, and everyone sneaks their life around behind her back, because “any
sudden shock—mental, not physical—could be fatal.” Unfortunately, there’s a
very elaborate network of lies and scheming occurring all around her, and it’s
up to Nurse Frances Kimpton to protect the poor woman, even as she participates
in and even furthers the intrigue.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The story starts implausibly enough when Frances is dragged
in off the street to witness a wedding between a pretty, spoiled-looking woman
and a weaselly looking man with a thin moustache. She’s en route to her job at
an isolated mansion called Shadow Manor to look after Miss Eldridge, a sweet
lady who has taken in an ungrateful niece, Eve Garner. You will not be at all
surprised to learn that the mystery bride turns out to be none other than Eve,
who has left her honeymoon and groom to return to Miss Eldridge’s mansion with
nary a word of her recent nuptials. Eve is mean to everyone and seldom home,
never saying where she’s going or when she’ll be back, but Miss Eldridge
obtains sweet revenge when she decides to rewrite her will, saying that Eve
will not get any inheritance until she turns 30 if she marries a man of whom
Miss Eldridge does not approve. Fireworks ensue when Eve hears the news!</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">For her part, Frances, recovering from a heart broken after her
fiancé was killed, is clearly over that lad and now has her wily eye on Miss
Eldridge’s doctor, Ralph Grant, who is casually friendly. Then Frances happens
to be on hand when Eve meets up with her new husband, Leon Josephs, in a
whispered but brief sidewalk conversation—super secret! That night, when
Frances offers to set out in the dark rainy night to search for the cat, she stumbles
and scrapes her hands. She takes the opportunity of her minor mishap to invite
herself to Ralph’s cozy cottage to tell him of her suspicions: that she had
tripped over a wire slung across the walk put there intentionally to frighten
her, and bless his heart, Ralph takes this statement entirely seriously. And
now “the memory of this intimate, tranquil time was something she knew she
would always treasure,” the little vixen. Wouldn’t it be fabulous if Frances
turned out to be a psychotic manufacturing drama to lure in a man she has a yen
for? When “no trace of string or wire had been found on or near the drive,” my
hopes leapt!</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">I hate to disappoint you, dear reader, but alas, it was not
the case, as author Sharon Heath has chucked that delicious opportunity for something
much more implausible: that Leon for some insane reason is out to murder
Frances by the most bizarre methods that turn out to be remarkably deadly. For Leon’s
next act, he walks brazenly into the house, identifying himself to Miss
Eldridge as a window cleaner, and cuts almost through the cord on the sash of a
window in Frances’ bedroom. The very next day, Frances opens the window and
decides to stick her arm out of it just as the cord breaks and the window comes
slamming down! “Which might have been fatal, she thought, had she been leaning
out the window!” Leon must be psychic as well as homicidal!</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Next Mike Dering, an old boyfriend of Eve’s who had been too
poor at the time to propose, turns up, now gainfully employed, and after
spending an hour with the young man, Miss Eldrige invites him to stay at the
house and tells Frances she hopes Eve will marry him. Ooops! Even if Eve were
single she might not have the chance, because the brakes on her car fail and
she drives straight into the river, saved by Mike, who happens to be loitering
at the bottom of the hill (is Mike psychic too?). Suddenly Eve is a new person,
confessing that she’s been changed all along, that she’d “got really fond” of
Miss Eldridge, though she’d never bothered to show her anything of the sort.
Furthermore, with just one word from Mike, “headstrong, self-willed Eve
subsided at once.” Oy.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Frances, seeing another opportunity to flirt with Ralph,
tells him he must come to the house that night but that Miss Eldridge must not
know it, and Ralph again proves to be either the greatest sport ever or
completely daft. After he sneaks into the house; frantic antics unfold! “I just
told Miss Eldrige it was a friend of Mike’s who wanted to see him urgently. Miss
Eldridge suggested you should have your talk in the morning room, but, if I
leave you there and go to fetch Mike, she may take it into her head to come and
have a look at this ‘friend.’ Perhaps you’d better come out with me, instead.
Only I hope she won’t look out of the drawing room window just as we pass!” How
complicated can these shenanigans get!</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">While they are tiptoeing through the shrubbery, Ralph tells
Frances that he is going to hire a private detective to look into Leon’s past. A
week later the detective turns up a game-changing fact, but when Frances races
to tell Ralph, who is arriving at the manor, he chastens her: “‘I came here to
see my patient,’ he reminded her, and she had to admit he was right.” It turns
out that Leon was already married, and his wife is as psychic as she is, having
determined Leon’s plans for Eve, found him in England, learned he was
blackmailing Eve (though nobody knew except Eve), and gotten a job at the
garage where Eve was dropping her car for repairs. She’s also an excellent (if
nefarious) mechanic! And the pair is lucky too—ultimately Ralph and Frances
decide that if they go to the police with this amazing story, the shock (of
finding out her healthcare team is bonkers?) would kill Miss Eldridge.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Author Sharon Heath
has given us several other gentle, sweet if not stellar books with </span><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2016/12/a-vacation-for-nurse-dean.html"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">A
Vacation for Nurse Dean</span></i></a><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">
and </span><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2010/12/sunshine-nurse.html"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">The
Sunshine Nurse</span></i></a><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">, but this
book is more of an unwitting and dopey comedy. The characters and their
motivations are inexplicable: Ralph is not especially attractive, Frances comes
across as a loopy dingbat, and why would Leon want to injure, of all people,
the nurse? Wouldn’t it be better to off the wealthy matriarch first, and then
his second wife to win the fortune, since murdering Eve first would put him out
of the running permanently? But it doesn’t pay to examine stupidity closely, so
all I can suggest is that you leave <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nurse
at Shadow Manor</i> on the shelf and move onto something—anything—else. </span></span><o:p></o:p></p>Susannahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12417568186428454938noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-864471121777778424.post-85638520628948234282023-11-30T12:41:00.002-05:002023-11-30T12:41:19.840-05:00The Love Gift<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b></b></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcwScXRpQ6XTJXxhrA1Fpv5_Apg7L36G_7ujzJXZbysdoVM6HeNUNh57t0ZLeCAIMskMmek1W8SpVKASz5EClH7OeGehTZVnglle6JV0LEHmvFTBfNr0itI6J8uxs_aAK0PsPz4oFbkz0KUtQ_7KGNJtABsv-eaa6X1AkdVSScLpjl7surccM3DMP0Gomx/s1576/Love%20Gift.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1576" data-original-width="920" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcwScXRpQ6XTJXxhrA1Fpv5_Apg7L36G_7ujzJXZbysdoVM6HeNUNh57t0ZLeCAIMskMmek1W8SpVKASz5EClH7OeGehTZVnglle6JV0LEHmvFTBfNr0itI6J8uxs_aAK0PsPz4oFbkz0KUtQ_7KGNJtABsv-eaa6X1AkdVSScLpjl7surccM3DMP0Gomx/s320/Love%20Gift.jpg" width="187" /></a></b></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>By Frances J.S. Eden
(pseud. Frances Chimenti), ©1970</b> </span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">So young to be
widowed, pretty Andrea Courbet sought refuge and solace as the nurse to Peter
Moffatt’s motherless children. But in that strained home, the shadow of Peter’s
lost wife seemed always present, so that after a while even Andrea came to
question her own identity. Thus when Dr. Matt Anderson entered the scene as
family pediatrician and contested her hand against Peter’s romantic pleas, he
offered her a new out. But was his love gift just a trap into exactly the sort
of romantic dilemma she had hoped to avoid?</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">GRADE:</b> B</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>BEST QUOTES:<br /></b>“They come home from bossin’ and think they have t’keep on
bossin’!” </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“Men should be marinated like meat: to make them tender!”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“The only way I can get you to hold hands is to have you
take my pulse.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>REVIEW:<br /></b>Nurse Andrea Courbet
is a “baby nurse,” accompanying new mothers home for a few weeks or months
until they settle into the routine. But this time, the mother of the new baby
has died in childbirth, and Andrea’s coming home with father Peter Moffett to
care for baby Donel as well as the three older children, Lanier, Geordie, and
Joyce. She and the children take to each other immediately, they soon calling
her “Courbie” and she becoming a major rock in the house, giving helpful advice
to Peter about how to be a better father. She is worried about staying too
long, though, because she doesn’t want everyone to become too emotionally
involved, making her inevitable departure unbearable. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Moffett family
pediatrician, Dr. Matt Anderson, has always been a frequent guest at the house,
and now that Andrea is there he sees no reason to stop, though she is not
impressed with his overly informal ways; he patronizes her during the baby’s
first appointment with him and telling her, “Didey on, Nursie,” and asking her
to come sit next to him. “I’m dideying the baby, Dockie,” she quips in response,
and when he admires her hair, she says, “I came to have Donny examined, not
me.” But as usual, the initially irritating doctor grows on the nurse, and soon
they’re dating. The rub is that two years ago her husband—she was married at
age 20—was killed in a car crash and the baby she was carrying was stillborn. So
she’s just not ready to love again.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Except the children,
whom she does whole-heartedly—and when Peter suggests that they get married because
they “are fond of each other and we certainly are equally concerned for the
children. It would settle all this anxiety about your having to leave. It would
be the best thing for the children if you stayed on as my wife.” The incurable
romantic! Andrea, not sure she can ever love again—which is the same way Peter
feels after his wife’s death—agrees, and tries to find affection in their
mostly platonic relationship.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Matt, of course, is
heartbroken, and takes no pains to hide it, “his tone was always light and
friendly with Peter and Andrea, but his eyes were bleak with unhappiness.” Then
Andrea overhears Peter confirming to his sister that his wife “can never be
replaced in my heart,” and she finally realizes that though the attraction of
remaining with the children is enormous, she asks herself, “was she willing to
settle for less to have all these things?” She tells Peter, “I want more—I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">need</i> more than you can give me,” and
declines his ring. But now Matt is devoting himself to Peter’s sister …</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The worst thing
about this book is the title, which makes it embarrassing when a man you don’t
know well asks what you are reading. Nothing impressive, that’s for damn sure!
And though the plot of this book is obvious and without bumps, I have to say
that the family in this book is incredibly warm and appealing. I really
understood the draw for Andrea to want to remain a part of a world that
included these children and their grandmother—I wouldn’t mind it myself. This
is the first book I have read by author Frances Eden, but if her other books
are as gentle and sweet—even if they are not stellar—honestly, you could do a
lot worse.</span></span></p>Susannahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12417568186428454938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-864471121777778424.post-48392764274310249932023-11-23T14:01:00.001-05:002023-11-23T14:01:25.289-05:00Hope Farrell Crusading Nurse<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b></b></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjshJogliHn-bCqhlQ_CUYG_BDuk4R9GdcMl9LcXvTtGripAbhIj74Bu0idc8eIqNhyphenhyphenVu9v1Q6cFsTwxYh4AtgsAbGebTbrxqax9ZQ1O-pCgV4yn4Ip0vsb9rAn_qbh-a0fISmWJkdX6I0RjCH3zZZlHJ57gZEBl2JpBciG438XBgFKdWdG1_EqsO4HxUdK/s2044/Hope%20Farrell%20Crusading%20Nurse.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2044" data-original-width="1231" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjshJogliHn-bCqhlQ_CUYG_BDuk4R9GdcMl9LcXvTtGripAbhIj74Bu0idc8eIqNhyphenhyphenVu9v1Q6cFsTwxYh4AtgsAbGebTbrxqax9ZQ1O-pCgV4yn4Ip0vsb9rAn_qbh-a0fISmWJkdX6I0RjCH3zZZlHJ57gZEBl2JpBciG438XBgFKdWdG1_EqsO4HxUdK/s320/Hope%20Farrell%20Crusading%20Nurse.jpg" width="193" /></a></b></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>By Suzanne Roberts,
©1968</b> </span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Two nurses had quit
the job at Doc Brady’s Appalachian clinic the year before, quit in what Hope’s
supervisor back at Community Hospital described as “anger, disgust, and plain
sorrow.” Hope didn’t understand … then. She was beginning to understand now.
There was so much to be done … and so much that could be done … a new clinic, a
library, a school … to fight the misery on the mountain. And Hope was ready to
lead that fight, but she was blocked first by the mountain people who seemed to
have no desire to change anything; then by Doc Brady who long ago gave up
trying to make them change; and finally by his sone, young Dr. Steve, whom she
loved but who gave her a cruel choice: stay on the mountain and break her heart
trying to help those who wouldn’t help themselves, or give up and come away
with him …</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">GRADE:</b> C-</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>BEST QUOTES:<br /></b>“How can he tell me how pretty my eyes are in one breath and
then start talking about thrombophlebitis?” </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“A lot of clear thoughts can come to a man while he’s eating
squirrel stew.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>REVIEW:<br /></b>Nurse Hope Farrell
has just graduated from nursing school, and look out, world! “She came from a
family of crusaders, and all that remained was to choose a geographical area
where a nurse was needed, and where changes and progress could be made through
hard work and dedication.” She’s really
looking forward to making her mark on the simple folk of rural Kentucky, but in
the usual trend, when she is waiting in the tiny town café with a kindly
proprietor who has bad teeth, a man shows up late and treats Hope with rudeness
and scorn, not even helping her with her bags! He drives dangerously, and he
needs a shave. “What if he’s feeble-minded or dangerous?” Hope worries, but
guess who he turns out to be? Her new boss, Dr. Dan Brady, who has no interest
in being welcoming or even kind to his idealistic, unrealistic nurse. “What’d
you expect, some white-coated M.D. with Hero written all over him?” Well, he’s
certainly not that: He exhorts Hope not to waste her time trying to improve
everyone, telling her, “you can’t get that big, beautiful dream of something
better by giving them free vitamins.” </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Well, Hope doesn’t
agree, and on her first day, assisting at the birth of a woman’s 11<sup>th</sup>
baby in one of the mountain shacks, she tells the gathered crowd that the
mother and baby should be in a hospital, not in their home, because “the baby
could still get sick in there in that cabin. If we had a new hospital, when our
women had babies things would be 50 percent safer!” She doesn’t understand why
everyone gives her the cold shoulder after that. No doubt it’s because they are
skeptical about how she arrived at her statistics.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Nonetheless, “Each
morning she was filled with lovely ideas about how to stimulate people into
wanting to do something about a new clinic, a library, more jobs, better food,
better living conditions—” but that mean old Dr. Brady is “the biggest
stumbling block” to her dreams. She won’t give up, though! When the illiteracy
rate indeed turns out to be quite high, she decides to build a library, and once
she’s done with that, she’s going to build a new clinic—though it’s not clear
what’s wrong with the old one, apart from the fact that Hope decries its
peeling paint and old curtains. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Dan’s son Steve, a
doctor on summer break from a fancy Boston hospital, shows up, and Hope is
immediately convinced that Dr. Steve is going to “spark them to get going and
change their whole way of living and thinking!” But he’s a chip off the old
block, telling Hope, “Don’t try to sit in some ivory tower and dream up foolish
dreams about a beautiful new clinic and a library and all these people suddenly
wanting polio shots for their kids and lots of good books to read, because it
isn’t going to work out that way.” Steve grumbles that “nobody wants to learn;
nobody gives a darn about what’s happening in the outside world. They don’t
even bother to take a newspaper so they can find out!” If they can’t afford
food and can’t read, why should they buy a newspaper? Though she fights
endlessly with Drs. Dan and Steve, getting exactly nowhere, she suddenly
decides “she had fallen hopelessly in love with this angry, arrogant young man,”
as you knew she would.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Then she enlists the
help of some local teens to start building a library—though how a room full of
books is going to improve the illiteracy rate remains unclear; wouldn’t a local
teacher be more helpful?—and the kids show up at her house with scavenged
bricks and lumber, and spend hours discussing the plan. But then the ringleader
of the kids, Darrell, tells Hope that the kids aren’t going to help her anymore
because their parents think it’s weird that they’re hanging out at the house of
this single woman who goes driving alone. “No girl ever goes out by herself on
this mountain,” he tells her—and that’s not all. “You’re tellin’ them that
everything they’ve done for over a hundred years is all wrong. It’s like—well,
like folks have lived and died and raised families and got by all right, and
then somebody like you—a young girl from somewhere else, comes up here and
stays a few weeks and tells them they’re nothin’.” He has a point.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Hope, finally giving
up, decides to quit her job—but on her way out of town, the alarm goes out that
a young girl has gotten trapped in the old abandoned mine and that Dr. Dan has
gone in after her—and Steve follows after both of them, because doctors are
super expendable, and all these out-of-work miners couldn’t possibly be of
assistance. Standing outside and nibbling her nails, Hope decides that “even if
this mountain and its people were going to give her a hard time, try to force
her out, try to ridicule and hurt her, still—she belonged there and she was
staying.” It’s not hard to figure out that Dr. Dan is not coming out, and Hope
decides he went into the mine because “he felt so guilty at not having changed
things.” She decrees, “Doctor Brady had died in a desperate attempt to make up
to these people for what he had stopped trying to give them, hope and courage
and a kind of inner strength to forge ahead and make their lives better and
more meaningful. He had known he had failed them, and in that last moment he
had wanted to do something good for them. That was why he had crawled into the
mine to save little Candy.” Furthermore, she suddenly decides that “she’d come
to love” and “given all of herself to Appalachia and its people.” Hope has
seriously lost all touch with reality.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">And now, suddenly,
the people are forcing milk on their children and buying ice for the ice box
even if it’s expensive and they don’t have any money and half of the ice has
melted by the time they get it home and most of them don’t have cars to get to
town to buy it. But “that’s what Doc Brady always wanted us to do,” And now they’ve
decided to do everything he wanted! Hooray!</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">This book is
simplistic and stupid, basically declaring that no one need be poor if they
don’t want to be, “if we only had the gumption.” Where the jobs and money—much
less the teachers—are going to come from is breezily ignored. None of the
characters are admirable; the two doctors’ angry relentless pessimism is no
more believable than Hope’s angry relentless optimism. The worst stubborn
ignorance in the book is Hope’s, and it’s difficult to watch her win in the end
when she does not deserve it; she has not grown or adapted or attempted to
understand or even befriend anyone on the mountain. The Crusades were religious
wars in which Christians invaded and conquered other countries that didn’t
agree with their beliefs, and Hope has the same take-no-prisoners attitude in
her own crusade. It wasn’t pretty then, and it’s not pretty now.</span></span></p>Susannahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12417568186428454938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-864471121777778424.post-7026965442898693542023-11-15T14:17:00.002-05:002023-11-15T14:17:33.157-05:00New Yorker Nurse<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b></b></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAAMESHNvB_hJXcQPMHsP3Qyx9QGkKj_zhsiMbJiEsVjM7RAspLWCMRWg7o4CRaZo0g0ki0h7CM6PvLhmSRkZnn8Mp7UepVqdo88D-HoRG0JHqfFtXMCxeZ0SSqiTsbUB4Lw6Ufzd-02fLJ150BbZYkItN0xNnhj7o_B8Xca38iukkpLvI-yJDXbJs9aWC/s2082/New%20Yorker%20Nurse.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2082" data-original-width="1223" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiAAMESHNvB_hJXcQPMHsP3Qyx9QGkKj_zhsiMbJiEsVjM7RAspLWCMRWg7o4CRaZo0g0ki0h7CM6PvLhmSRkZnn8Mp7UepVqdo88D-HoRG0JHqfFtXMCxeZ0SSqiTsbUB4Lw6Ufzd-02fLJ150BbZYkItN0xNnhj7o_B8Xca38iukkpLvI-yJDXbJs9aWC/s320/New%20Yorker%20Nurse.jpg" width="188" /></a></b></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>By Dorothy Fletcher, ©1969</b><b><o:p> </o:p></b></span><p></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">When a pretty, single girl is taken to a
bachelor’s luxurious, isolated seashore house, wined and dined by the charming
young man she believes is the “Mr. Right” she’s been waiting for, what does she
do when he becomes amorous? If the girl is Dinah Mason, a tawny-eyed nurse,
vivacious and sophisticated at 25, and if </i>her <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mr. Right is Dick Claiborne, a serious lawyer by day and a jet-setter
by night … there’s bound to be some swinging surprises in the age-old art of
loving.<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><br />
</i><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">GRADE: </b>A-<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><strong>BEST
QUOTES:</strong> <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“He eyed her
long and shapely legs and winced when he came to the stout, serviceable nurse’s
shoes. A girl with legs like that shouldn’t have to wear those clumpy shoes,
damn it. When were they going to do something about the shoes? Pucci was
dolling up the airline hostesses. Why didn’t some designer give the nurses a
break?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“You look like a
strawberry. Good enough to eat.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“It seems to me
that people are getting more and more inarticulate with each succeeding
generation.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“On a day like
this it was difficult to believe that the air was poisoned with monoxides.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“Home is really
someone you love more than anything else in the world.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“Nurses always
have thick ankles and things like that. They have severe expressions. And
almost invariably, a suggestion of moustache on their upper lips.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><strong><span style="font-family: verdana;">REVIEW: <o:p></o:p></span></strong></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Dinah Mason is
our eponymous New York City-based visiting nurse who is between jobs when the
book opens, and is spending an afternoon visiting her former patient Victoria
Blanding, a charming and tough old gal whom Dinah had nursed through a broken
hip. Victoria remarks to Dinah that had she come later she could have met her
lovely nephew, who is engaged to be married to “a quite dreary girl. Jet-set
type of young woman, the kind I can’t stand. Pity you couldn’t have met him
first.” It is a pity, because she’s going to be 26, which means she’s about
doomed to a long, lonely, spinster existence, since she just can’t bring
herself to marry her longtime beau, Mike Corby. “The hoped-for spark was
missing; she didn’t tingle, not the way she should,” she thinks. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">After leaving
Miss Blanding’s Park Avenue apartment, she heads to 57th Street, then to York,
winding up in a park off Sutton Place near the Queensboro Bridge. There she
meets a shabby older gentleman reading Baudelaire in the original French. Down
on his luck, she assumes from his ratty clothes, and so chats him up to lift
his spirits for a bit; “People like that make my heart ache. Isn’t it terrible
what happens to some people?” Then she’s off for a date with Mike, during which
she again says no to his proposals for marriage and sex; this book is one of
the most open about the possibility of the heroine having sex with her
boyfriends. She doesn’t, though, of course: “It was always a good way to work
up a head of steam, pondering the role of the single girl in society. If she
heard a man say just once more, <em>What’s the matter with you … you frigid or
something? </em>she would scream. Didn’t they ever wonder if there was
something wrong with their own appeal? The male ego, she told herself, was
stupendous.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Dinah’s next job
is caring for Margaret Paley, a lonely 51-year-old widow who attempts suicide
with a bottle of sleeping pills. “I have no shame about what I did, Dinah. Only
despair that it was abortive. A person has a right to do with her own life what
she wants to,” Mrs. Paley says—a vastly different attitude about suicide than
what the typical VNRN offers, which is deep shame for the patient and a hasty
sweep under the rug of the offensive action. Once Mrs. Paley is out of the
hospital, Dinah accompanies her to her apartment on 56th Street, coincidentally
at York Street and Sutton Place. She sees the old man in the park and dashes in
to say hello to him before dashing off again—but leaves Mrs. Paley’s suitcase
behind. Fortunately, the old man’s son, Dick Claiborne, is also loitering in
the park nearby, and has been scoping out the lovely nurse, and he rushes after
her with the case, and then offers to drive her to collect Mrs. Paley and
chauffer her home. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Dinah,
attempting to jolly Mrs. Paley out of her deep depression, drags her out on
walks in the city, finally taking her to the Sutton Place park. Sadly, the park
only reminds Mrs. Paley of her deceased husband, which makes Dinah sigh, “You
can’t win. Everything in the world must remind you of the person you had loved
and lost.” Then she spots the older gentleman and brings Mrs. Paley over to
share the bench and a little conversation. Soon he is describing the boats and
canals of Venice—and then Mrs. Paley suddenly chimes in with her own rhapsody
for that beautiful city, as well as Paris, Provence and the travels each of
them had done with their now-departed spouses. After the ladies have headed for
home, Mrs. Paley enlightens Dinah that the gentleman is wearing fine tailored
clothes, even if they are well-worn, and is clearly quite wealthy. “Rich people
never <em>look </em>rich,” she says. “Rich people have holes in the soles of
their shoes. It’s because they don’t care. They don’t have to care.” Feeling
better now, Mrs. Paley dismisses Dinah, who next moves in with the Wallace
family, the mother of which is recovering from knee surgery, at 920 Park
Avenue—nothing but the finest addresses for our Dinah! There we enjoy the
younger Wallaces, Joanie (age 8) and Wendy (age 4), who track gooey finger
paint all over the apartment. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Dick, meanwhile,
after dropping off Dinah and Mrs. Paley, has been unable to get Dinah out of
his mind, so he phones all over town to track her down, finally reaching the
Wallace’s house on his fifth try but being subjected to a long conversation
with the four-year-old before Dinah intervenes. Dick asks her out, and Dinah
eagerly accepts. “I’ve always wanted something like this to happen to me, Dinah
thought. Someone coming unexpectedly into my life … remembering me. Not
forgetting. Calling me up …” Their date takes them throughout New York, and
Dinah is completely won over: “She was brimming with contentment, happier than
she ever remembered being, so much at peace that she would almost have settled
for this perfect day being the last one of her life.” <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">For her part,
Mrs. Paley wanders back to the Sutton Place park and runs into the older
gentleman—now we learn he is Gordon Claiborne—who is reading a book that he
offers her along with an invitation to dinner in a painful, tender and truly
touching scene in which they discuss loneliness before deciding to dine
together at a bistro on 51st Street on scallops and trout with French pastries
and vintage brandy afterward. “I don’t remember ever having been so hungry,”
Mrs. Paley thinks. “It was simply the incontestable fact of a woman on the arm
of a distinguished man that made all the difference. It was a social thing, a
human thing.” They make another date as they say goodnight, and she falls
asleep without effort, for the first time since her husband died.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">There are the
inevitable hurdles for the younger lovers to overcome, such as Mike Corby, and
Dick’s fiancée, and a beautiful day sailing that ends disastrously when Dinah
realizes that Dick is trying to seduce her: “I refuse to be someone’s prey,”
she fumes and is about to walk home when he offers to drive her, but asks her
to stop for coffee on the way to clear the air. “If he was just going to take
her home and ditch her, write her off as a bad try and a poor guess, why would
he suggest stopping off for coffee?” She thinks hopefully, realizing he wanted
her because he loves her, not just to use her. Over coffee he invites her to
meet his aunt, and a series of startling coincidences unfolds, ultimately
leading to what would be a truly fabulous ending, except for the last sentence.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">This book is as
much an homage to the city of New York as it is a double romance—not
surprising, given the title. We traipse all over the city on various dates,
take in the view on Wall Street and Trinity Church, commune with the animals at
the Central Park Zoo, dine out on Bank and MacDougal Streets in Greenwich
Village, and sip cocktails at the Drake Hotel. I also especially appreciated
the double romance that included an older couple, which was so unexpected and
sweet that it actually left me weeping in a public lobby. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="styledelementstyleddiv-sc-2e063k-0" style="margin: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">As usual,
Fletcher tucks in many cultured references such as Elsa and Siegfried,
Balenciaga, Fleurs de Rocaille perfume, Emma Bovary, Steiff toys, Schubert,
Genêt, Jane and Paul Bowles, <em>tempus fugit</em>, and the Perls art gallery,
among others. The humor is sprinkled liberally throughout, with lines like
“‘Did it cost an arm and a leg?’ ‘Just an arm,’ Dinah said.” and “It was
sentimentality, born of the gratuitous effects of a sleeping pill, but it was
nice to hear.” The only thing I didn’t love about Dinah is that she is willing
to chuck her career when she gets married, which she thinks won’t be a problem
if she’s “crazy in love.” “Now her nursing days were almost over. Was she sorry
about it? Yes, a little. When you married, you gave up your own life. Women
did, at any rate. Would she ever regret it?” But in general, this is a
top-notch book, Fletcher—who continues as one of my very favorite authors—in
fine form. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></o:p></p>Susannahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12417568186428454938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-864471121777778424.post-9122373985507344372023-11-05T12:39:00.002-05:002023-11-05T12:39:39.840-05:00Flight Nurse<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b></b></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaJJzdppUep1JzxWoFFNyAyU5tsOhj7jksArDyaCjzst8RdH22WM-gqj1JVcGVtB0KO9XR1A31cAqlLP45Di-14ylFgBRVv5He8ZIb_wSShRVb0I221mFnEGYBfQSEX-lM1K-YqiJloKf56wAbDmGtKFBY4IEsBvYxNRffp1kDOR30dvQjvo1SyhWBwh7H/s2066/Flight%20Nurse.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2066" data-original-width="1229" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgaJJzdppUep1JzxWoFFNyAyU5tsOhj7jksArDyaCjzst8RdH22WM-gqj1JVcGVtB0KO9XR1A31cAqlLP45Di-14ylFgBRVv5He8ZIb_wSShRVb0I221mFnEGYBfQSEX-lM1K-YqiJloKf56wAbDmGtKFBY4IEsBvYxNRffp1kDOR30dvQjvo1SyhWBwh7H/s320/Flight%20Nurse.jpg" width="190" /></a></b></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>By Adeline McElfresh,
©1971</b><i><o:p> </o:p></i></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">When beautiful young
Pat Romain became a U.S. Air Force nurse, she was fleeing the memory of a
disastrous love. But soon her personal hurt was forgotten amid the larger pain
of the wounded soldiers she tended. Intense, breath-catching drama was part of
Pat’s daily routine on the Med Evac plane shuttling between embattled jungle
airfields and hospitals in the Philippines and Hawaii. Another kind of drama
raged within her heart as two men—a brilliant doctor and a gallant
pilot—competed for her affections. It took a searing confrontation with
tragedy, and a desperate crisis aboard a crippled plane, for Pat to discover
her full worth as a nurse, and her wisdom as a woman in love.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">GRADE:</b> C</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>BEST QUOTES:<br /></b>“Well, at least, fellows, we’re plane-wrecked with the
prettiest nurse in the whole Air Force!”</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>REVIEW:<br /></b>Pat Romain is an Air Force lieutenant and nurse who has
enlisted in an 18-month tour shuttling wounded soldiers back from southeast
Asia to safer hospitals, and recovered soldiers back into battle, a stint she has
chosen in part because of, yes, a broken heart, after her beau “rushed her
almost to the altar before he had eloped with the daughter of the physician who
headed the Physical Medicine Department. To escape seeing him every day,
another woman’s happy husband, she enlisted in the Air Force.” But right away
she is being rushed again, this time by Kev Moriarty, medical school dropout
and pilot, who is described in glowing terms such as “blithe, brash,
irreverent” and “rakish,” all properties any woman would hope for in a serious
boyfriend. But two pages after meeting the shallow, wolfish cad, Pat “was
falling precipitately in love with him,” for some inexplicable reason, because
he is not a likable fellow, we discover, as Pat goes on a date in San Francisco
with him and her new roommate and he spouts lines like, “You’ll miss me when I’m gone.” Actually, no, we
won’t.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Not to worry, though, because even though “her heart lurched
crazily” when she thinks of him, she proves herself to be as fickle as Kev is,
instantly falling for a talented, alarmingly dedicated and possibly unhinged frontline surgeon, Dr.
Paul Anders, the stuff of most of the flight nurses’ dreams but who inexplicably
takes Pat in his arms and tells her he loves her at the end of a flight in
which they both had been extremely busy tending to the wounded soldiers in
their care. Now she’s planning her wedding to Paul barely six months into her
Air Force service while Kev, whom she runs into now and then, gives her sad-dog
eyes. She really doesn’t spend much more time with Paul than she did on their
initial flight, because he’s on the front lines and she’s on planes all the
time, setting down for literally only 20 minutes at a time in Vietnam before
taking off again. They’re all set to tie the knot when the inevitable happens,
and Pat is alone again—but she has her good friend Kev to help shore her up. What will happen next?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">One of a few nurse novels I’ve read that are set amidst the
Vietnam War (see <a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2014/07/vietnam-nurse.html"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vietnam Nurse</i></a> and <a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2012/08/vietnam-nurse_11.html"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vietnam Nurse</i></a>), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Flight Nurse</i> literally only briefly touches down on that conflict,
and honestly the book has little to say about the war except fairly regular
remarks about wounded soldiers who have vacant looks in their eyes or who “were
resigned to never being men again,” whatever that</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">’</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">s supposed to mean. One
interesting point about this book is that it never takes back Pat’s first two
boyfriends, pretending after the fact that she never loved them. The other is
that her roommate, Miriam, is a Black woman, a rarity in VNRNs, though this is
really not discussed except when Miriam notes that their new roommate is
awfully rude to Miriam: “To her, Patricia, I’m black before I am either a flight
nurse or a human being, I’m not sure in which order. I feel sorry for her.” Pat
replies she does too, though she’s angry as well—and that’s the end of the
subject. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The book has little in the way of plot or medical interest (except for
the time Dr. Anders recommends a rectal tube as a means of decompressing a
soldier who is inexplicably eviscerating), and though its admiration for the
Air Force is clear, as a civilian I found it occasionally difficult to navigate
the military abbreviations and jargon, not to mention literally navigate where
Pat was or where she was headed, as she might be visiting several countries in
a single day, and I wasn</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">’t immediately aware of where all the bases she lands at are located</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">. So unless you are an especially devoted fan of Vietnam War
literature or the Air Force, you’d be better off missing this flight.</span></p>Susannahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12417568186428454938noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-864471121777778424.post-19333392059857071992023-10-29T12:23:00.002-04:002023-10-29T12:23:48.107-04:00Volunteer Nurse<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b></b></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw4-xJh501jgKHCXrl8EKOgA-SDFb9DRmENAkDBF_SoU5uY7bdGfvoIvT4Pz_GZT1AU8Gx6MM_OYeeuEJNgQjiszSFVArFzh2XEjmfwEkOBG2k8vJxMFlogHYlYCuPDMOnYfMuo06bi0VoaZUMsG5f9ImlskD7CbECwiAKxODowb5ucBX1bpZPm7vHiNGT/s2091/Volunteer%20Nurse.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2091" data-original-width="1269" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjw4-xJh501jgKHCXrl8EKOgA-SDFb9DRmENAkDBF_SoU5uY7bdGfvoIvT4Pz_GZT1AU8Gx6MM_OYeeuEJNgQjiszSFVArFzh2XEjmfwEkOBG2k8vJxMFlogHYlYCuPDMOnYfMuo06bi0VoaZUMsG5f9ImlskD7CbECwiAKxODowb5ucBX1bpZPm7vHiNGT/s320/Volunteer%20Nurse.jpg" width="194" /></a></b></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>By Arlene Fitzgerald,
©1967<br /></b><b>Cover illustration by
Mort Rosenfeld</b> </span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Why had she really
come to Silver Creek? She knew she wanted to help people in distress. Was being
a nurse the best way? Was it the way to escape Ron? Now she would have to find
the answers for two other people: the man who had stolen her heart and the one
who had claimed it.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">GRADE: </b>B+</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">REVIEW:<br />
</b>This book was not bad, but reading a decent novel has seldom left me more
disappointed. Author Arlene Fitzgerald has delivered the awesomely dreadful <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2020/04/harbor-nurse.html">Harbor
Nurse</a></i>, so I had high hopes that I would encounter more fabulously
bizarre plot twists like the nurse ziplining out to a fishing boat during a
hurricane to help amputate the leg of a fisherman who was attacked by a shark.
Alas, no such excitement befalls Nurse Glee Barlow, who has volunteered to
spend a few weeks at the JCAHO-certified Silver Creek Clinic in Arizona in a
town with a population of 525. Like many VNRN heroines, she has a fiancé she doesn’t
think much of, yet cannot bring herself to decide she shouldn</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">’</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">t marry. Ron Snider
is a “terribly spoiled” mama’s boy, the apron strings
strengthened by the fact that mother is very rich. “Ron had been
proposing regularly, and he felt that she would be willing to settle down to a husband
and babies.” She, on the other hand, worked hard to become a nurse, and “wanted to
be free to do as she pleased as a full-fledged R.N. and as a woman at least,
for a while.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">En route to her clinic, Glee’s car is nearly hit by a
horse-drawn carriage caroming out of a dude ranch. Slamming on the brakes and
not wearing a seatbelt, she takes a blow to her sternum—or rather, “the
steering wheel crushed the soft roundness of her breasts,” in typical Fitzgerald
fondness for inserting sexual references into irrelevant descriptions. The carriage
driver immediately pulls her from her car and starts fumbling with the buttons
of her dress, insisting, “I’m not being fresh. I’m a qualified M.D.” Phew! Her
relief is enhanced by the fact that Dr. Kirk Tesdal is one of those homely men
who is nevertheless “unnervingly handsome,” and she drives off thinking she
would like to see him again.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">And she does! Because i</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">t turns out that he’s in town to interview for a job at the clinic, and though he’s superlatively qualified (his ineptness at unbuttoning blouses notwithstanding), he’s turned down for the job because he’s not married. Hmmm. When Glee </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">arrives at the clinic, she
finds that it’s holding a few cases of anthrax. You’ll be intrigued to know that Glee has a photographic memory, and recalls several pages of her medical textbook verbatim, even obligingly turning
pages now and then for us, so we can appreciate the intricacies of the disease,
which is treated with a lot of scrubbing up and incinerating clothes and bed
linens, and injecting Dr. Tesdal with penicillin “into the firmness of his
buttocks,” which Glee accomplishes while admiring his tan line and lean waist. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The medical staff manages several crises including another horse-drawn
carriage crash that results in one victim requiring a splenectomy, a car crash
in which the driver’s arm is nearly severed and handily sewn back on, and a heart attack. We are treated
to some of Fitzgerald’s usual tricks, such as her fondness for “slashing” with
a “firm mental scalpel” at any inconvenient thought, and her reliance on “firm
nurse’s discipline” to get through difficult tasks like crossing a raging creek
(of which there are many in the Arizona desert) on a fallen log. But overall
the author</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">’</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">s idiosyncrasies, which have driven me practically insane in some books (see </span><i style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2012/05/young-nurse-rayburn.html">Young
Nurse Rayburn</a></i><span style="font-family: verdana;">), are infrequent here, and the worst sin she commits is
the idiotic but unfortunately common trope of giving the heroine an unlikable fiancé yet rendering her completely shocked to discover in the final pages that she doesn’t
really love the jerk after all. But there are some plusses as well, such as the fact that the medicine and surgery described in the book is detailed, interesting, and fairly accurate. Arlene Fitzgerald has given us one other B-grade
book in </span><i style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2017/02/daredevil-nurse.html">Daredevil
Nurse</a></i><span style="font-family: verdana;">, so this completely readable and even entertaining book is not a
total anomaly for her. But, paradoxically, I might have enjoyed a worse book
more.</span></p>Susannahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12417568186428454938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-864471121777778424.post-70106446841561244862023-10-24T17:36:00.001-04:002023-10-31T14:18:39.500-04:00Nurse Lucie<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b></b></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigN0aICk8JpUThvy4XH_1n8eCbeBmzLZd97PrI_R4DUN0NkpsRKG7aHRFS8fpqlK6L6LxL6pRI4KNww0L1iknW2UnFq4eeS775lajYARzbf2OELYzpwwVucWffpF1q-9qgf4843eBwgcH9TCzfoMqgbyqFA3IgC8AsgzCX_X1B97qI_5V67r1Zrl_sr1Ak/s2089/Nurse%20Lucie.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2089" data-original-width="1232" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigN0aICk8JpUThvy4XH_1n8eCbeBmzLZd97PrI_R4DUN0NkpsRKG7aHRFS8fpqlK6L6LxL6pRI4KNww0L1iknW2UnFq4eeS775lajYARzbf2OELYzpwwVucWffpF1q-9qgf4843eBwgcH9TCzfoMqgbyqFA3IgC8AsgzCX_X1B97qI_5V67r1Zrl_sr1Ak/s320/Nurse%20Lucie.jpg" width="189" /></a></b></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>By Georgia Craig
(pseud. Peggy Gaddis), ©1964<br /></b></span><b><span style="font-family: verdana; font-size: x-small;">Also published as <i>Nurse at Guale Farms</i></span></b><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Nurse Lucie Hatcher
walked headlong into another world when she arrived at the small Georgia clinic
at Guale Farms, eager to work with the skilled Dr. Wesley Warren. Lucie didn’t
plan to get involved with the handsome young doctor, nor with the rich owner of
the experimental farms, Perry Latham. But she did … with both. Then suddenly,
women from Wesley’s and Perry’s lives appeared and disrupted Lucie’s paradise.
Could she give Wesley up to the mysterious woman from his past? Could she fight
the powerful and jealous Latham family for Perry’s love? Lucie’s paradise soon
turned into a nightmare …</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">GRADE: </b><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">B+</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>BEST QUOTES:<br /></b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">“You’re much too pretty to be working at a grim job like
this.”</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“A job? My dear girl! That’s a nasty word. Go immediately
and wash your mouth out with soap and water.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“The one end and aim of every woman is marriage and a home
of her own.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“She’s really a looker, isn’t she, now that we’ve got her
dried out and all?”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>REVIEW:<br /></b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Lucie Hatcher has left Atlanta to come work in a small rural
town, and a good number of the local folks are bewildered as to why she—or
he—is willing to “bury herself in a place like Lathamtown. It’s just about the
most lonesome place anybody ever heard tell of.” But it’s well paying, and
she’s always wanted to experience life in the country, as she’s been a city gal
her whole life, and now that she’s arrived in her “silly scrap of a yellow
pillbox hat” she’s here to stay, dammit!</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">She’s offered a ride from the bus station to the clinic by
the pathologically angry schoolteacher Jane Berner, who warns Lucie that she’s to keep her mitts off Gareth Latham, who has just
returned home after getting kicked out of college yet again. He’s the
stepbrother of Perry Latham, who runs a large experimental farm in nearby
Lathamtown and “doesn’t want anything that would bring tourists this way. He
doesn’t want Graysville to install drive-in movie theatres, or taverns, or beer-and-wine
package stores, or pin-ball machines; anything that might lure the young of
Lathamtown astray. He’s not going to allow such devices within easy reach of
his people.” Lucie lets this description of an oppressive local dictator pass
with little comment or musing about how one person could possibly prevent the
development of a whole town, and when she actually meets the tall, very
good-looking man with a lean, sun-bronzed face, any further reference to this alarming
aspect of Perry’s character drops away and is never mentioned again. As long as
he’s cute, who cares if he’s fascist? It’s not long, of course, before he’s kissing her
goodnight.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Perry has a stepmother, Belle, and she and Gareth “will
never let Perry marry any woman.” When Lucie rightly expresses her incredulity
that a grown man, especially a fascist, will be led around by his stepmother, she is told that Belle
will “go after the girl. Once Belle gets the idea that Perry is seriously
interested in any girl, she’ll sharpen up her knives until they’ll make every
scalpel in the clinic seem dull.” Lucie also starts to question, when Jane puts
the idea in her head, why “a doctor as young as Dr. Warren is and as skilled would be
working in a small rural clinic instead of setting up a fine city practice
somewhere or specializing in doing research.” But Dr. Warren is described as a
local authority to whom other area doctors regularly consult, so his practice
does not seem unsatisfying, if one is interested in primary care for an
underserved community—and it’s curious that such a practice, today considered
noble, would be scorned.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">But Dr. Warren’s practice takes a considerable hit when
Leonore Arnold, his fiancée, shows up in a rainstorm. It turns out the woman
has gone insane after seeing her mother murdered by home invaders and has been
committed to an institution—but has improved enough from her previously
catatonic state to learn where Dr. Warren is, escape and find her way 20 miles to
his door. Dr. Warren immediately tries to resign because when the town hears
that “there’s a mental case here, the story will be built up that she’s a
lunatic and her presence here makes everybody unsafe.” Perry insists
that he stay, and that Leonore is sure to get well, even if she must never,
ever remember that horrible incident again, because “her love will restore her
to complete sanity.” Sure it will! Also, remember that since only the clinic
personnel know she’s there, the secret won’t get out, “because nurses aren’t
allowed to discuss their patients with outsiders.” Lucie, however, immediately
lets drop in a packed waiting room that the doctor in charge of the sanitorium
has arrived in the clinic to see a patient, and tells Belle that the patient
“is no maniac,” just “a girl who is mildly ill mentally.” (And, it must be
pointed out, she repeatedly tells anyone who asks about numerous other patients
under her care.) So much for keeping a secret. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Soon patients stop coming to clinic or calling for Dr.
Warren’s services, and everyone, including Lucie, is perplexed as to how word got out, interestingly enough. Unfortunately, Leonore herself is one of those classic Peggy Gaddis
characters, a beautiful, “bright-eyed, inquisitive child” who has no
personality or brain whatsoever, and flings herself at poor Dr. Warren whenever
he’s near, pleading, “Please, please, darling, let me stay here with you! I’ll
die if I have to be taken away from you!” Not
surprisingly, Dr. Warren at one point admits to Lucie that he no longer loves
Leonore, but since the nutty shrinking violet is utterly helpless, he is soon
declaring his love to her face and insisting they be married immediately.
Another thorny issue raised and then perplexingly dropped completely.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Then Belle pops in to threaten Lucie, as promised, that she
must not marry Perry, though she has absolutely no weapon to use against Lucie.
Perplexingly, Lucie—who is now in love with Perry—tells Belle that she has no
interest in Perry but plans to marry Gareth, which sets Belle back on her heels
a bit, but then Lucie reverses course and says, “I wouldn’t marry either of the
Latham men, even if they were the last men in the world!” Guess who has just
come in the door behind her? The only possible way the pair could be reconciled
is if Leonore, whose mental illness has mysteriously rendered her unable to walk, takes off
into the swamp in her wheelchair and the rest of the gang is somehow unable to
find her, and the overwhelming stress of the situation sends Lucie straight
into Perry’s arms. The good news is that Leonore is found in a coma suffering
from concussion, and the prognosis of her mental illness improves enormously
because “a mild concussion might be helpful in restoring her mind. Perhaps when
the concussion heals, she may be able to recall the past.” A couple of x-rays—a
highly sensitive test for diagnosing mild brain injury (not)—“had been most
satisfactory,” whatever that means, and a week later Leonore wakes from her
coma!</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The overwhelmingly bad medicine in this book is actually
comical if you have any actual medical training or ever watched a few episodes of “Grey’s
Anatomy,” and it’s hard to understand why Peggy Gaddis, who wrote what feels
like thousands of nurse novels, never bothered to learn anything about
the subject. Her penchant for raising difficult problems—like a man whose leg is
amputated after he is attacked by an alligator and whose wife leaves him
because he’s “a cripple,” though Lucie indignantly protests that the young
woman is only in shock and will come to her senses and return (she doesn’t)—and
then utterly abandoning them unresolved is also infuriating. But overall this is
far from the worst Peggy Gaddis novel I’ve met (that would be <a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2010/08/dr-merrys-husband.html"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dr. Merry’s Husband</i></a>, which rated a
D-), ranking in the top third of the 34 novels of hers I’ve reviewed to date
(God help me, I’ve at least that many more to read before I can rid myself of
Peggy Gaddis forever). So if you enjoy the occasional novel that you can
chuckle at (not with) without suffering overmuch from aggravating writing and
characters, this may be a good bet for you.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIl9Wr_5xFvpP0p2JYXdIR2A3WaVpy7yo2h4zb6M-sPPSZsKEMb383tY4smwGj7SYiMSWVc3E8PpwOpqeRXpcUluC4MITQzmMUkhLWsiKelB8AdUBc0kB3SBUDqySzLNP4lo9LvMqQA_WgFFM7Koel6vvZ7u69f61GkVk7MDIgytvWZLRZbW7j0XjyYLZH/s2040/Nurse%20at%20Guale%20Farms.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2040" data-original-width="1224" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjIl9Wr_5xFvpP0p2JYXdIR2A3WaVpy7yo2h4zb6M-sPPSZsKEMb383tY4smwGj7SYiMSWVc3E8PpwOpqeRXpcUluC4MITQzmMUkhLWsiKelB8AdUBc0kB3SBUDqySzLNP4lo9LvMqQA_WgFFM7Koel6vvZ7u69f61GkVk7MDIgytvWZLRZbW7j0XjyYLZH/s320/Nurse%20at%20Guale%20Farms.jpg" width="192" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">We can always count on Valentine<br />for a hideous cover illustration.</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></p>Susannahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12417568186428454938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-864471121777778424.post-25820942995456387282023-10-15T16:37:00.004-04:002023-10-15T16:37:49.142-04:00Second Year Nurse<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b></b></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOQf-e86wiW2Fi0Tdd7iMDg1o5lo_Vw6VZ4qvFbLFiBbhAfKuMC-cS4G8jrcCFXsbhR-rPbpHDZbL9fmZwkMCyWVKqBAegbuFefXe-NR1V-7iy4gPp_aVlghx6pgXn8ncyx2atgHqS470rz8uAiK05X4K5wb0WFLuvWF7p67-gbMw-9WEojcjMGIGFM3Qp/s1884/Second%20Year%20Nurse.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1884" data-original-width="1225" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOQf-e86wiW2Fi0Tdd7iMDg1o5lo_Vw6VZ4qvFbLFiBbhAfKuMC-cS4G8jrcCFXsbhR-rPbpHDZbL9fmZwkMCyWVKqBAegbuFefXe-NR1V-7iy4gPp_aVlghx6pgXn8ncyx2atgHqS470rz8uAiK05X4K5wb0WFLuvWF7p67-gbMw-9WEojcjMGIGFM3Qp/s320/Second%20Year%20Nurse.jpg" width="208" /></a></b></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>By Margaret
McCulloch, ©1957<br /></b><b>Cover illustration by
Ethel Gold</b> </span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">From the window by her
patient’s bed, Jan looked down on the entrance to the nurses’ home. As she
watched, a familiar green car swung around the drive. A moment later Dorinda
came briskly down the front steps and took her place beside the driver. “Dr.
Bartholomew, the young surgeon, wasn’t it?” the patient asked. “I didn’t
recognize the nurse.” So this was what the other nurses had been trying to tell
her. Dorinda—</i>her own roommate<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">—was
dating Hank Bartholomew too!</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">GRADE:</b> C+</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>BEST QUOTES:<br /></b>“I guess it’s all a part of growing up. Learning to like
what you’re doing—instead of always doing what you like.” </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“‘Washington’s Birthday is such fun,’ she told Jan when she
invited her. ‘All the cute little hatchets and cherries and things.’”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>REVIEW: <br /></b>I’ve been thinking about the difference between VNRNs that
are written for a teenage audience compared to those intended for adults. This
is the third that I can recall having reviewed (see also <a href="http://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2020/01/candy-stripers.html"><i>Candy Stripers</i></a><i> </i>and <a href="http://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2019/01/mary-adams-student-nurse.html"><i>Mary Adams Student Nurse</i></a>), and they
do generally seem more superficial, unsophisticated, and condescending than the
grown-up variety, and the heroine never actually ends up with a fiancé, much
less a serious boyfriend. And so I waded through <i>Second Year Nurse</i>, which needed its 222 pages to introduce us to at
least 75 different characters (I lost count), many of them patients with
stories only casually touched on before moving on to the next paragraph. Even
patients who we are told affect our eponymous nursing student Jan Russell
deeply, such as a young woman with an infant son and husband who dies
inexplicably before her thyroidectomy, we receive in just a couple paragraphs,
turning the page on them with no real experience of Jan’s feelings or any
lingering effects of the tragedy.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Though most of the book is about the many, many other
students and patients Jan encounters, she also has a few boyfriends. Her high
school steady, Randy, dumps her early on when she leaves for nursing school: After
she insists, “I’m crazy about my nursing and I’m going right on with it,” he
snarls, “Go on back to your bellhopping and bedmaking! You might even catch
yourself a medic. That’s all nurses go in training for.” So between hospital
shifts and classes, she accepts a few dates with Dr. Hank Bartholomew. Though
“it was still hard for Jan to call him Hank,” she decides that “recently
there’d been an increasing depth in their relationship. Not that there’d been
any mention of marriage,” we are told, because that’s usually what happens
after the third date. Well, I could be wrong on that point because soon Dr.
Bartholomew is dating her roommate Dorinda, the daughter of a wealthy woman who
serves on the hospital board of trustees—not that <i>that</i> has anything to do with it—and eight pages after what is
apparently Dorinda’s first date with the doctor, she is sporting an engagement
ring, so maybe there is something to it after all.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Jan also has about three dates with Bruce Baird, who works
in the lab and also as a janitor to earn money to put himself through medical
school—and he’s hoping to become a general practitioner like Jan’s father had
been. But he is usually pretty busy, so she doesn’t see him much. Then, toward
the end of the book, Randy’s mother is seriously ill and Jan assists in caring
for her, so now Randy decides maybe nursing isn’t so bad, after all. “I think
it’s a marvelous thing for a girl to do,” he admits. “I was awfully dumb.”
Which man will Jan end up with? Well, like I mentioned at the start, these teen
books don’t really give you much of a love story to close the book on, so on
the last page all we see is Jan is running down the stairs happily for her next
date.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">I’m not really sure what the focus of this story is, because
it doesn’t offer many details about actual nursing, nor does it give you a
romance. Essentially stopping in the middle, the book gives us no resolution to
Jan’s plans for her career or her love life, and 222 pages is a lot to spend on
a story that goes nowhere. I can only conclude from my admittedly small sample
that teen readers weren’t taken very seriously in the 1950s and 1960s—I
understand that attitude is what in part what inspired the Woodstock era—so I
can’t recommend that an intelligent adult such as yourself spend your time with
a book that doesn’t respect its readers.</span></p>Susannahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12417568186428454938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-864471121777778424.post-37773271107439251752023-10-09T16:33:00.005-04:002023-10-09T16:33:42.024-04:00Nurse in Rome<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_JE4Ea5ouVFp4B2jEcdRMQuTKtBtHHGmuo_FJnACpWLRMXt5qQZ-4CVSp1jFJz8kMtMDzsorBUN0hloskNyEpOBpOrP8OLEt3Rg9BREvSDDmBrEkTOx3Z3zpgP42cfooi8tNIUY1QC2VY5s0Tp7wnK47_Dn-vkqDOEZ4QIfDMl1w75gJYslOybyGoiRuX/s2079/Nurse%20in%20Rome.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2079" data-original-width="1254" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_JE4Ea5ouVFp4B2jEcdRMQuTKtBtHHGmuo_FJnACpWLRMXt5qQZ-4CVSp1jFJz8kMtMDzsorBUN0hloskNyEpOBpOrP8OLEt3Rg9BREvSDDmBrEkTOx3Z3zpgP42cfooi8tNIUY1QC2VY5s0Tp7wnK47_Dn-vkqDOEZ4QIfDMl1w75gJYslOybyGoiRuX/s320/Nurse%20in%20Rome.jpg" width="193" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>By Jane
Converse <br />(pseud. Adele Maritano), ©1967</b></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">For Ginny, Rome would mean Ilario—forever.
Eleanor came to Rome for Ben—and was found by Ricardo. “He’s just a gigolo,”
they said. But to Eleanor he offered thrills, glamour, and himself. He also
offered escape from the memory of Dr. Beniamino Rossi, the man she had loved
too well … and too late. Ginny Newhart and Eleanor Hill held the winning ticket
to an adventure in Rome and took a trip that challenged their careers—and
changed their lives.</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">GRADE:</b> B-</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>REVIEW:<br /></b>Eleanor Hill
has the best roommate ever—which means Ginny Newhart is smart, sassy, funny as
hell, and homely. And, in this case, in possession of a winning lottery ticket that entitles the bearer to a three-week luxury vacation for two in Rome. So
off the pair go! In a complete coincidence, Eleanor had been dating Dr. Ben
Rossi, a native Roman, when he was in the U.S. for his fellowship year. “Love was
as serious a matter with him as his profession. He had wanted to marry Eleanor,”
but she was a farm girl loose in the big city for the first time and not ready to settle down. So she refused to commit and dated around because “he scared me, talking about marriage and
a home and a family. I didn’t know how much he meant to me until it was too
late,” and Ben went back to Italy to practice medicine alone. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Arriving in
Rome, the gals spend a few days touring the hot spots while Eleanor works up
the nerve to call Ben. When she does call, it doesn’t go well. He’s put off by
the fact that she took three days to phone, and lets her know he’s too busy to
take her sightseeing. Brokenhearted, she plans to have dinner alone in the
restaurant when she is approached by a suave gentleman named Ricardo Lienzo,
who claims to be a rich member of a motor oil family overcome by her beauty. He
wines and dines her—then discovers he’s left his wallet in the glove box,
so could she pay for this ridiculously expensive meal he ordered? Sure she can!
Gulping, she pays “a bill that would probably curl the hair of the Junior
Auxiliary’s bookkeeper,” which comes to about $55. The dinner included a bottle
of wine and one of champagne, so when she is staggering out of the restaurant
on Ricardo’s arm at 3 a.m., Ben, who is lurking in the lobby in an attempt to
apologize for his rudeness, decides not to bother and stomps off.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Meanwhile,
Ginny has found herself an architecture student named Ilario and fallen
hopelessly in love. Unfortunately, Ilario’s English is quite poor, and we are forced
to endure a horrific accent: “Whatta you say we stop-a make-a da secrets, an’
we go, eh?” is just the first sentence that drops from his lips, and it gets
worse from there (he cannot get the genders correct</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">—</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">he calls men “she” and
women “he</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">”</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">—</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">and cannot learn the difference, curious for a speaker of a language in which every noun has a gender</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">). We also meet an Italian film director, Michael Orsini, who
unfortunately monologues a lot in an equally terrible accent.
It turns out Michael knows Ricardo, but as Eleanor continues to go around with
the shallow, selfish, obviously phony cad, she keeps forgetting to ask Michael
for a character reference.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">In the
meantime, Ilario introduces the ladies to a very poor family, neighbors of his,
whose young daughter has been essentially catatonic since witnessing the death
of her young brother. This is the excuse Eleanor has for reaching out to Ben
again, who reluctantly agrees to treat young Anita. Eventually it is revealed
that Anita’s illness is—surprise!—psychological, but Ben locates some top-notch
psychotherapy for the girl, and on Anita’s road to recovery Eleanor and Ben
manage to thaw out a bit; Eleanor even grovels a fair amount, pleading for his
understanding and telling him that she is in love with him, just didn’t realize
it until after he had left. When he tells her he has seen her with Ricardo and
that he believes “you hadn’t changed a bit,” she retorts with a stinging tirade,
calling him a self-righteous martyr who enjoys wallowing in self-pity. Still, she can</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">’</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">t get over Ben; later that night, when Ricardo kisses her and asks her to marry him, “she felt
wooden in Ricardo’s embrace.” But she remembers that Ginny has suggested that
Eleanor is “the naïve victim of a slick gigolo” who is trying to marry his way
to American citizenship, and this ironically somehow convinces Eleanor to accept the cad</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">’s </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">p</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">roposal.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Ginny,
meanwhile, has accepted a proposal herself and is planning to marry Ilario and
move to Italy until he completes his studies. Their engagement
party is to be a picnic in the woods, with Ricardo as Eleanor’s date and Anita’s
young brothers also in attendance. A simple countryside meal is not Ricardo’s best
foil, and neither are the boisterous boys, and during the hours Eleanor
suddenly realizes the obvious: that Ricardo is “a conceited phoney, a bore.” Then
Dr. Ben drops by to say hello, and a disaster strikes … and another character
stages a surprise …</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">There’s not
much armchair travel in this book, but it is entertaining. Fortunately, apart from bad
grammar, the Italians in the book are intelligent, hard-working people, and
this may be the first VNRN I’ve read in which a female character actually marries
a non-American man. I appreciated that Eleanor made no effort to hide her
feelings from Ben, no matter how painful it was for her to be honest, as too
many VNRN heroines simply wait around with poker faces, hoping the man will put
the moves on; here she is truly the agent who brings on her own success. Overall
this book is reasonably pleasant—again, if you can tolerate the truly awful
accents. It was a tough slog for me, I have to confess, so depending on how
tough your stomach is, you may wish to skip it. But if you can soffer through
thee ogly diaologo withouta meesery, you mighta lika thees book.</span></p>Susannahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12417568186428454938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-864471121777778424.post-39349183565806899112023-10-01T16:05:00.002-04:002023-10-01T16:05:46.144-04:00Nurse in Doubt<p><b><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzO7ResswpJ_cSFS_b3syDGmKKu4xqieU6yuWLHEdKNSrGEZlwu8RpBdSlFCC-YGEpwfwjP94U7ql4pt1kfZhJytC3diCQw2lA8zhvGQV4C8hJq3VfC9q83yGKjFDfF_XC_1e0vE45OoCpw3jLFU9QKuApetV0bzaeXbw6zHpxI1d2oDJ-ryfh_DOIQZum/s2061/Nurse%20in%20Doubt.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2061" data-original-width="1230" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzO7ResswpJ_cSFS_b3syDGmKKu4xqieU6yuWLHEdKNSrGEZlwu8RpBdSlFCC-YGEpwfwjP94U7ql4pt1kfZhJytC3diCQw2lA8zhvGQV4C8hJq3VfC9q83yGKjFDfF_XC_1e0vE45OoCpw3jLFU9QKuApetV0bzaeXbw6zHpxI1d2oDJ-ryfh_DOIQZum/s320/Nurse%20in%20Doubt.jpg" width="191" /></a></span></b></div><b><span style="font-family: verdana;">By <a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/p/isabel-capeto.html">Isabel Capeto</a>, ©1968</span></b><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Nurse Gail was used to being called to the
rescue by young Dr. Richard Charron, whom she’d known since childhood. The
“emergency” was always the same: how to squash his Aunt Vanessa’s latest
attempt to marry him off. But this time Vanessa Newton had really outdone
herself—combining her passion for match-making with her passion for meddling in
town affairs. She was going to finance a new Community Center for which she had
already chosen the architect: lovely, talented Natalie French. When Gail saw
Richard’s reaction to Natalie, she realized that Aunt Vanessa may have scored a
Cupid bull’s-eye. But what really surprised her was her own reaction … her
disappointment. After all, she and Richard were just “good friends” … or was
there something more …?</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">GRADE: </b>B+</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>BEST QUOTES:<br /></b>“Lady, do you
give all your patients the bum’s rush?” </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“‘Never throw
the little ones back in. Use ’em to land the big ones.’ That was my daddy’s
advice. Over the years, I’ve learned to apply it to more than fishing.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“Wonder which
has the higher alcoholic content—this guy’s blood or the wine he was swilling?”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“You know what
a late-movie addict the Aunt is. She’s learned, via the great, glaring eye,
that only evil lurks in a full, heaving bosom.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“The trouble
with you, Gail, is that essentially you’re too honest. You always level with
people. I don’t, and life is far more exciting.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“Brawn is a
very unstable commodity.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>REVIEW:<br /></b>Nurse Gail
Stewart is 23, and you know what that means—if she doesn’t land a husband soon,
she’ll die an old maid, just like her roommate Peg, who being two years older
is having to face a few hard facts: “When one’s on the wrong side of
twenty-five, one learns to lower one’s sights.” VNRNs make marriage sound like
a truly horrible institution, something of a meat market in which one is forced
to sell themselves to the highest bidder. But our feisty heroine has a few more
years to go before she gets desperate, and in the meantime she devotes a fair
amount of time to rescuing her childhood pal Richard Charron from his Aunt
Vanessa’s schemes to marry him off. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">This time,
though, Vanessa has done the impossible: She’s found a woman capable of
snagging the perennial bachelor’s heart. Architect Natalie French is a
charming, extremely talented, sophisticated and highly likable woman—and it’s a
rare treat to have the romantic competition be a person the heroine actually
likes. Gail, who up until now has thought she viewed Richard simply as a
platonic friend, now feels “as if she had received a blow to her solar plexus.”
Richard isn’t the only one enthralled with Natalie; Natalie’s contractor, Bowen
Merritt, is also hoping to win her heart.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Aunt Vanessa’s
scheme to bring Richard and Natalie together involves funding a community
center that Natalie will design, and much of the plot of the book hinges on
watching the project unfold, with all the bumps in the road a development like
this would necessarily be buffeted by. Richard and Natalie meet frequently for
working dates, inviting Bowen and Gail along with them for their input, as Gail
is becoming increasingly involved—whether it’s to further her pursuit of
Richard or for its own sake is not clear. The love square, I guess it is, of
the foursome involves Gail and Bowen watching with sad eyes as Natalie and
Richard fall for each other, though Natalie does seem to keep the gents
guessing about whom she is most fond of.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">In the
meantime, there is a fair amount of nursing in this book—<a href="https://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/p/isabel-capeto.html">Isabel Capeto</a> was a
nurse her whole life—and there are even a few traumas in the book that are
creditably managed in the ER, a true rarity in VNRNs; our heroine even has the
sense to slap an occlusive dressing on a sucking chest wound within seconds of
meeting the patient (which may not be a big selling point for some, but it does
irritate me when healthcare professionals at a trauma scene run around
splinting and bandaging everyone before turning their attention to the patient
who is going into hemorrhagic shock from a ruptured spleen). It’s also fun, if
you are interested in architecture, to watch the project unfold, and the book’s
attitudes about modern architecture are surprisingly very pro! Isabel Capeto is
a humorous and witty writer, and her books are enjoyable. If the prose and plot
aren’t exceptional—I also never really felt any real chemistry between any of
the pairings in the storyline—I can overlook that for an otherwise pleasant
story, and even if Nurse Gail has doubts, I can recommend this book without many.</span></p>Susannahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12417568186428454938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-864471121777778424.post-45727962630057028912023-09-16T18:21:00.005-04:002023-09-16T18:21:48.468-04:00Ann Kenyon: Surgeon<p><b><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span></b></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: verdana;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsdXhGsPri5LAXOFBBXFWkV6_Rv1b966jurDLIjZwA7qi8vdmLQ9R7H8g328nfCSeG6iFLI2c3GrvLhx0DXLFO0oFU76rskqmgyLeVZVyAnpUnYCLB_xbhR3QmaHIgp6TkIiWJdPe7CzmpMKOUFKZumIp94VJ5av1ZDGUasqJClWKM57AaqVK84FKn1vp7/s2066/Ann%20Kenyon%20Surgeon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2066" data-original-width="1265" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgsdXhGsPri5LAXOFBBXFWkV6_Rv1b966jurDLIjZwA7qi8vdmLQ9R7H8g328nfCSeG6iFLI2c3GrvLhx0DXLFO0oFU76rskqmgyLeVZVyAnpUnYCLB_xbhR3QmaHIgp6TkIiWJdPe7CzmpMKOUFKZumIp94VJ5av1ZDGUasqJClWKM57AaqVK84FKn1vp7/s320/Ann%20Kenyon%20Surgeon.jpg" width="196" /></a></span></b></div><b><span style="font-family: verdana;">By Adeline McElfresh,
©1960<br /></span></b><b><span style="font-family: verdana;">Cover illustration by
H. Rogers</span></b><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Ann Kenyon was young,
beautiful and a brilliant surgeon. In the operating room, she was in superb
command—but the outside world was different. No longer could Ann pretend to
love Dr. Brill Crayden, so skillful, so cynical, so cold. To get away from
Brill, Ann went to distant Ledbie Memorial Hospital, to find herself plunged
into a battle that threatened her professional name and her personal reputation
with vicious slander. Only a dedicated doctor would have challenged the powers
blocking progress at Ledbie. Only a passionate woman would have fallen in love
with a man claimed by another. Ann Kenyon was both—could she avoid paying the
price in heartbreak?</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">GRADE:</b> B-</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>BEST QUOTES:<br /></b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">“Women have no business being that damned efficient.”</span><span style="font-family: verdana;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">REVIEW:<br /></b></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Ann Kenyon has a
classic VNRN problem: Her boyfriend is kind of an ass. Also, he’s named </span><i style="font-family: verdana;">Brill</i><span style="font-family: verdana;">, which for me might have been an
insurmountable obstacle right out of the gate, but she’s stuck by him, good
lass, up until page 7. There she’s criticizing Brill’s lack of dedication and
the fact that he makes callous remarks in the OR like that he thinks the pulmonary
tumor they’re removing is malignant. It’s not much of a sin, because usually a
doctor should have had that conversation with the patient and their colleagues
well before they’re making the first incision, but apparently it’s just not
done that way at Rocky Head General Hospital on Long Island. (At this hospital
they also utilize three surgeons at the table and have a fourth standing by,
just in case one of them is incapacitated, so they definitely have an odd way
of doing things.) Then she admits she has come to “resent his claim upon her
time,” and she’s looking forward to a week’s vacation alone. But before she
goes, she has a </span><i style="font-family: verdana;">wonderful</i><span style="font-family: verdana;"> date with
Brill—except that he asks to spend the night in her apartment. She turns him
down, but somehow this scene is also something of a major game-changer for her
feelings for Brill.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Then, on her train
ride, she sits next to a psychic who suggests the train is going to crash and
seven people will be killed. Guess what happens next! The prophesy comes true,
and the psychic is killed, but Ann gets off with just a fractured femur. This
means she’s laid up in a tiny hospital in Ledbie, Indiana, for months,
recovering with her leg in traction. Magically, after she’s finally able to get
up and around, she’s completely mobile within a few weeks, and signs on at the
hospital when she is offered a job by the chair of the hospital board of
directors, Helen Ledbie, who makes all the decisions about the hospital. Helen’s
stepfather, Dr. Emerson Lyle, runs a luxury practice and takes his hospital
patients elsewhere, but he influences Helen to avoid putting any money into the
hospital, which is slowly disintegrating into an antiquated heap. So it’s not
clear why Ann has accepted the position, even if she is now chief surgeon.
Unless it has something to do with Dr. Peter McDonnal, but he’s all but engaged
to Helen.</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The problem is the
gossip that starts circulating about Ann, and that she seems to walk in on it
fairly often. First it’s suggested that she’s been hired to push the senior
doctor out, and then when Peter starts taking Ann to a wooded lot he’s hoping
to build a house on—and kissing her—folks around town are not pleased that he’s
“steppin’ out” on Helen. Then Ann joins him in his fight with the hospital
board to approve funds for numerous changes, and you’d think he’d be able to
convince his other girlfriend to go along with it, especially after the train
crash left the tiny hospital overwhelmed and incapable of managing the influx
of patients. If <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">another</i> tragic
accident were to happen, that would surely change Helen’s mind!</span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">The prose is salted
with McElfresh’s trademark “mental ligatures,” italicized exclamations of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Oh, God!</i> and frequent mentions of
occurrences behind Ann’s sternum, which makes the writing somewhat irritating,
though these tics are not as overwhelming as they are in some of McElfresh’s other
books. The story is fairly benign, but the cast of characters is enormous and
difficult to keep straight, and some of the politics of funding the hospital
seem bizarre—as do aspects of the plot like the psychic on the train. The
ending is unusual because Ann has not actually landed the man, but does seem
prepared to fight for him—and, let’s be honest, will likely win. In the end,
you could spend your afternoon with a worse book, but I can’t tell you that
you’ll be especially thrilled to have an afternoon with this one.</span></span></p>Susannahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12417568186428454938noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-864471121777778424.post-70841319582690563912023-09-02T11:37:00.004-04:002023-09-02T11:37:55.857-04:00Nurse on Terror Island<p><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b></b></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjavoJJu-NCux3j7mu7WrHJa2jUF4T0DrOe_B5vvDnFWZuGepsTNdb2ScfNLaSajeyfDM5-WD9Ep3ubKgJFhx7vWOFl1X2MQP6T_6TOqr7V3S6trDYVDGR8S8U97jJE_GgYmd_fJLdVlEWl79iRq_N-CTe6bY2mOGZgjikDggemq4ephaUQfmhoSrj2yv57/s748/Nurse%20on%20Terror%20Island%20screenshot.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="748" data-original-width="440" height="419" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjavoJJu-NCux3j7mu7WrHJa2jUF4T0DrOe_B5vvDnFWZuGepsTNdb2ScfNLaSajeyfDM5-WD9Ep3ubKgJFhx7vWOFl1X2MQP6T_6TOqr7V3S6trDYVDGR8S8U97jJE_GgYmd_fJLdVlEWl79iRq_N-CTe6bY2mOGZgjikDggemq4ephaUQfmhoSrj2yv57/w246-h419/Nurse%20on%20Terror%20Island%20screenshot.jpg" width="246" /></a></b></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>By Doris Knight</b><b><span style="font-size: 11pt;">, ©1967</span></b></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">A darkly handsome man
of wealth, a young pop singer of international fame, a fiancé four thousand
miles away, a beguiling 8 year old boy … all these helped to complicate the
life of pretty Nurse Avril Andrews. She had received her nurse’s cap only a few
hours before and was on her way to Orestes Island to care for young Domingo,
the ward of the handsome and powerful Ramon Orestes. She hardly expected to
become the fiancée of two men and find herself in love with a third, and then
lose her heart completely to the convalescing little Domingo. Neither was she
prepared to face the terror which gripped the entire population of the island.
She found herself being drawn inevitably into the web of fear …</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">GRADE:</b> C-</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>BEST QUOTES:<br /></b>“Are you still shaky from the shark episode?” </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><b>REVIEW:<br /></b>It is staggering how many people are drawn in by the eight-year-old
Domingo Montes, a foundling left in a church doorway and raised by a nanny in
London but for some reason flown to Mexico City to undergo an orthopedic
surgery to lengthen a leg left shortened by polio. (A lot of good that surgery
did him, because he is completely forbidden to use the leg, or even get out of
bed very often.) In Mexico he is recovering under the care of Avril Andrews, who is
just about to graduate from nursing school. She, too, is a Brit, and had
decided to take the last year of her training in Mexico, much to the chagrin of
her fiancé Derek, who is “tired of playing second fiddle to her nursing career,”
but at the same time doesn’t seem all that interested in actually proceeding
with the wedding. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Domingo is going to spend his convalescence on Orestes
Island, owned by Ramon Orestes—well, all except a pesky ten acres, on which
some meddling oil company has located a few gushers. The ten acres, Ramon has
discovered, belong to Domingo, though Ramon cannot figure out how Domingo came
to own them, much less give permission for oil companies to start drilling (actually Ramon showed less interest in this question than I did), and neither will we! But the kind-hearted man has adopted Domingo and
is bringing him to the island for more unclear reasons, though he had not seen Domingo
since the boy was three. This kind gesture surely has nothing to do with the
fact that Ramon is intent on owning every square inch of the island—though it
supports a goodly population of natives, so it’s not clear to me how that works—and
preventing the oil companies from having at the island, because “I wish to bar
the outside world from wiping out their childlike happiness in small things,”
he explains to Avril, who finds this attitude only “somewhat paternal, somewhat
overbearing.” And Avril will be going with Ramon and Domingo as nurse, though since the poor
boy spends most of his life in bed under the supervision of the nanny, it’s not
clear what the point of having her along is—until we arrive at the island and
Ramon tells all the locals that he is engaged to Avril.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Well, this is news to her, and why he felt this ploy was
even necessary is yet another unexplained mystery, because all we learn is that
the islanders “want a queen! If he did not promise them a bride, he might lose
the respect of his people.” So Avril goes along with it somewhat reluctantly,
but more so when she discovers that world-famous pop star Sunny Martin, whom
she had met very briefly when he ducked under her restaurant table in Mexico
City to escape hordes of screaming girls who were chasing him, has also turned
up on the island. He, too, has some unexplained devotion to Domingo, and Avril
starts to wonder if he is the boy’s father—but again, even if he were, how would
he know this was the boy left on the church steps so long ago? And if he’s so
devoted to the boy, why did he, also a British national, come to Mexico City to
see him, when he might have done so a few months earlier with much greater
convenience in London? This book is indeed full of endless mysteries.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Then a witch doctor named Donna Santos decides she also
wants possession of the poor kid, to train to be a witch doctor too. She’s
thought to be nearly 100 years old, so why has she suddenly become interested in
taking on a protégé who is not likely to have reached puberty when she kicks the bucket, and why is she picking out Domingo for her
pupil? She’s even threatened to toss a deadly hurricane onto the island if
Ramon does not hand over Domingo to her—oh, and he has to marry Avril tomorrow
to boot, just because. Avril refuses to go along with it now that
Sunny has shown up, though he is sneaking in through the
window to kiss her and arranging secret rendezvous, again for no coherent reason;
he tells Avril, “I had a fancy to come early, unexpectedly, and nose around a
bit.” He seems to be looking for Domingo’s birth certificate, but since this
involves talking to a lot of locals, his presence on the island is hardly a
secret—and he’s tipped off by a mysterious woman in a church who tells him to
look in Guadalajara, and then she’s gone, never identified, never explained.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Meanwhile Ramon is desperate for Avril to go through with
the wedding because if she doesn’t, the superstitious locals will freak right out!
They’ll lose their heads so completely that the havoc would be worse than any
hurricane that might or might not strike the island! Another question is that why,
if none of the main characters believe in voodoo, they all jump to do Donna’s
bidding—and why all her detailed predictions come true.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">There are more bizarre coincidences and plot twists to
endure—including a shark attack, foiled bizarrely by Sunny, who saves the day
in a manner barely survives </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">being chased by teenaged girls—before
this complete jumble of a book comes to a strange close, with Ramon leaving the
island and vowing to return “with the woman he loved”—and we’re
not sure who that might be, unless he’s referring to a woman he married 18
years previously who had abandoned him shortly after their marriage and whom he’d
divorced but nevertheless has been fruitlessly trying to track down ever since</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">—</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">yet another extraneous, unexplained plot twist. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Terror Island gets its name from two previous hurricanes—both
“inflicted” by Donna on the island for someone’s misdeed; the woman’s ability
to predict the weather could have made her a lot of money as a storm
forecaster, because she’s not actually a witch, but what if she actually is? The
book can’t seem to decide—but I can think of a number of descriptives that
would suit the island better, like Bewildering or Insane or Weird, as unfortunately “terror”
is much too strong an emotion to be incited by this book; at most I’d say I was
perplexed. The bizarreness of this book isn’t even amusingly daffy, like some (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2020/04/harbor-nurse.html">Harbor
Nurse</a> </i>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://vintagenurseromancenovels.blogspot.com/2011/05/nurse-at-fair.html">Nurse
at the Fair</a></i> spring to mind) VNRNs I’ve experienced. I’m left to wonder
if a title like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nurse on Hot Mess Island</i>
would have sold more copies?</span><o:p></o:p></p>Susannahhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12417568186428454938noreply@blogger.com0