Beauty Doctor’s Nurse

By W.E.D. Ross, ©1971
Cover illustration by Allan Kass

Lovely blonde nurse Irene Hunt considered herself lucky to be working in such a fascinating field as plastic surgery. And her growing romance with handsome, readheaded Dr. Max Marshall promised a happy future. Then came the anonymous letter about Max that changed everything—that made her determined to put him out of her mind, to close the door on the past. But transferring to another hospital became more involved than she had anticipated. And even her friendship with the brilliant young plastic surgeon, Dr. Ralph Grant, became more than just a friendship. As Irene found herself drawing closer and closer to Ralph, Max made an unexpected reappearance, eager to resume the romance she thought was over. Could Irene trust her heart to lead her to true love …?

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“Many people are responsible for their ravaged faces in the first place. It’s not age alone that destroys their appearance. Leonardo da Vinci said centuries ago that when a man is past forty years of age, he is responsible for the head he has. And I can vouch for its truth. I can almost tag them when they come into the office Sometimes I feel like calling them Mr. Greed or Mr. Lust or Miss Avarice. It’s written that plainly in their faces.” 

“That’s the attraction of buffets. They give you a chance to be a glutton in style.”

REVIEW:
Irene Hall works at Manhattan General with two great plastic surgeons, Dr. Cabell Grant and his nephew, Ralph. Irene had been dating Ralph, but it had turned out that he had also been “seeing socially a few times between operations” one of his patients who has having a series of operations done to remove a birthmark on her face, “a young woman patient, attractive but definitely neurotic” who had “taken his attention as a sign of love” and, when Ralph told her he did not love her, had attempted suicide, leaving a note with “hysterical, pathetic references to her love for Ralph Grant, and directly accused him of leading her on.” The ensuing scandal had led Dr. Grant to “surprise everyone by turning vindictively on his nephew and accuse him of breach of professional etiquette.” Summarily fired, Ralph had moved to Connecticut to rebuild his career under an aging plastic surgery expert, Dr. Franz Lederer, now 80 and too arthritic to perform advanced surgeries. The feeling at the hospital, we are told, is that Dr. Grant had been “much too harsh and quite unfair” to Ralph. Irene shares this opinion, though she has a personal stake in the matter because “she’d gone out with him several times.” 

After Ralph had left, she’d started dating Dr. Max Marshall, and “it was taken for granted around the hospital that she and Max were going together” though they were not engaged. But her roommate didn’t like Max and thought he was “glib,” and Irene decides “there had been lots of small warnings,” though we’re not given any real examples other than that he was too poor to take her out—“he was supporting a semi-invalid father and trying to set up a practice”—and so came to her house for dinner a lot, so “she hadn’t expected him to spend much money on her. And he hadn’t!” That bastard!

She gets an anonymous letter in the mail—who had sent it we never learn—that informs her that Max had also been dating another nurse at the hospital. So she quits her job and takes a position with Ralph Grant—and then has a conversation with Max, telling him that it’s over between them, not exactly demonstrating much faith in Max if she trusts an anonymous letter to such a degree that she’ll turn her entire life upside down over it.

In numerous scenes, Max apologizes again and again, acknowledges his mistake, ends it with the other nurse, and tells Irene that he loves her. But cold-hearted Irene is completely unable to forgive the apparent fact that Max as exposed her to “gossip and snickers” in the hospital, and off she goes to Connecticut. It seems to me that Max had a lucky escape.

On her first day at Ralph’s hospital, she meets a nurse who is in love with Ralph and whom he has been dating. She declares to Nurse Blanche that “she’d only known Ralph in the most casual way and so couldn’t possible see herself as a rival for his affections.” Then she sees Ralph, and he tells her that he’s in love with her and “was on the point of asking you to marry me” before he’d been driven from New York. Irene replies that if she had known this, she wouldn’t have taken the job—but on the next page, he asks, “Do you think we could pick up where we left off?” And she literally replies, “Why not?” and their subsequent kiss “spoke eloquently of their mutual need,” and now they are “making vague plans for the added happiness that lay ahead.” I’m really struggling to find much honor in Nurse Irene Hunt.

The main crisis of the book arrives in the form of a poor, shifty couple who want a scar from a car crash removed from the woman’s face. They had seen Dr. Grant in Manhattan, who had not done the operation for unclear reasons, and now they want Ralph to do the job. He feels, though, that the couple is hiding something—intuitive Irene just thinks “it’s mostly because they’ve been through a good deal, and this operations means a great deal to them”—but Ralph, after discussing the case with Dr. Grant, agrees to do the surgery, and the woman dies on the table from a severe allergy to the anesthetic. Now the question is, who is to blame? Did the couple deliberately withhold the information of the allergy? Had Dr. Grant known and not told Ralph? Had Ralph been aware and gone ahead anyway?

The reveal at the end, I must say, is unsatisfying. The not-surprising fact that the couple knew and didn’t tell is acknowledged, but one of the two Drs. Grant is also in on the secret, and has their own personal and parenthetical misdoings to add to the mix. The problem with this book—actually, as per most books by Mr. Ross, there are a few—is that the massively incorrect moral assumption in the foundational scenario of Ralph and Max’s respective “guilt” for their social crimes. Ralph has indeed, as Dr. Grant states, committed a severe ethics breach in dating a patient he was actively treating, truly shocking to my eye and one that should absolutely result in dismissal from his job if not his profession, and why Irene and apparently the rest of the staff sees this as inconsequential is unfathomable. Furthermore, it is clear that Ralph was dating Irene and his unfortunate patient/victim at the same time, yet Irene waltzes lightly into Ralph’s arms and an engagement on her first day in Connecticut.

Max, meanwhile, seems to be guilty mostly of being too poor to take Irene to restaurants and of seeing a wealthy nurse—Irene makes much of the idea that Max  must be planning to marry her for her money and social connections, though he never says that’s the case and clearly prefers Irene; he is the first male character I know who cries when she dumps him. Dating or kissing multiple women, even when engaged, is an activity that men often engage in completely without comment in many VNRNs, so it’s unclear to me, when Max is openly sorry and repentant for an apparently minor crime, is he given the cruel boot without even a hearing? And frankly, I liked Max more than Ralph. Worse, Irene is a completely flat character. She demonstrates little charisma, personality, wit or intelligence—she can’t even see the truth of the unfortunate couple—so part from her (of course) pretty face, she ahs nothing to offer her boyfriends or, more importantly, the reader.  So this is one of the dreaded C-grade novels—not great but not so laughingly bad to be entertaining in a different way. This story would need a substantial makeover from an editor’s sharp scalpel to make it at all worth looking at, so I suggest you just enjoy the Alan Kass cover illustration and move on to something with more character.

Volunteer Nurse

By Arlene Fitzgerald, ©1967
Cover illustration by Mort Rosenfeld 

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.

GRADE: B+

REVIEW:
This book was not bad, but reading a decent novel has seldom left me more disappointed. Author Arlene Fitzgerald has delivered the awesomely dreadful Harbor Nurse, 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’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.”

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.

And she does! Because it 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 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. 

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’s idiosyncrasies, which have driven me practically insane in some books (see Young Nurse Rayburn), 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 Daredevil Nurse, 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.

North Country Nurse

By Robert Ackworth, ©1965

Lovely young Mary Loring, her nurse’s training behind her, came home to the north country for two reasons—one, to help the people in this vast wilderness land; the other, locked in her heart, to work with young Dr. Ken Shannon who was coming back here to start his practice. But when Ken stepped off the plane, beside him was a beautiful, titian-haired bride. Now Mary wanted only to escape—from this man she could never have, from her beloved north country that would always remind her of him. It took a startling confession from Ken, and a danger-filled mercy flight with a devil-may-care pilot named Eddie Garrett, to show Mary that she didn’t have to run away—that a girl doesn’t always know the secrets of her own heart …

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:|
“It’s odd that of all the moments a person passes in a lifetime, only a few are important, isn’t it? I wish now that I had decided I wanted to be something, instead of insisting that I must belong to someone.” 

REVIEW:
Nurse Mary Loring has returned to her home, a tiny town of 900 God-fearing souls in the “north country,” unspecified except that it’s not Idaho—Montana? Wyoming? Some state that is home to dude ranches and trappers and loggers—and few medical personnel. Mary is coming back with every intention of marrying Dr. Kenneth Shannon, who also grew up in this town. She’s been crushing on him for a decade, since she was 12 years old—they grow up fast in the mountains—when he left for medical school, and she’s seen him only a couple of times since then, so right off the bat we’re stuck with this extremely awkward and implausible albatross of a major plot device. And it’s not improved when the good doctor steps off the Cessna with—gasp!—his new bride!

Mary immediately decides she will leave town, never mind her vows to help her isolated fellow citizens, which would leave them without a nurse. But only a month after Kenneth arrives, “when people would not be likely to guess the real reason for her departure.” Does it really matter? Anita Shannon turns out to be as incredibly gorgeous as she is shy, completely unable to extend herself or make friends. Mary just hopes that “the absolutely unexpected might happen” while Anita is out taking long walks in the woods, or that “the strange woman who was Kenneth Shannon’s wife might walk out on him.” Nice! Kenneth does his best to get help for Anita—unfortunately asking his best female “friend,” Mary, to befriend Anita, “who was seen less and less as the days went by.”

Again and again, given an opportunity to be generous, mature, and kind, Mary instead puts on a deep freeze, doing little, and then only when absolutely forced, thinking that “her only hope for a future with Kenneth rested with the possibility that Anita Shannon would not make adjustments.” Anita even tries to unburden herself about her difficulties to Mary, but Mary just acts indignant at the “cold peculiar” woman and completely shuts her down, snapping, “Mrs. Shannon”—and her formality of using Anita’s married name is hostile all by itself—“I just won’t comment. What you do is entirely up to you.”

Later, when through her own hard work, Anita starts to open up and make friends with other villagers, “Mary could not help staring at Kenneth Shannon’s beautiful wife. She had seemed almost warm. It was hard to believe.” Naturally, Mary’s enormous hypocrisy is completely lost on her—and possibly on the author as well, as he makes no hints about how horrible Mary has been, and Mary never experiences any regrets about her cruel behavior.

When she’s not giving poor Anita the cold shoulder, she’s running hot and cold with three men in town. She accepts dates with forest ranger Tom Fogarty, even though she thinks he’s boring and awkward, and though she knows her best friend has a crush on him—and she’s completely taken by surprise when the friend, who feels doomed to be a spinster in this tiny town of few single men, leaves town for manlier pastures. Mary also has hot and hunky Perry Wynn, who runs her aunt’s ranch very capably, hinting gently about his feelings for her, but Mary calls him strange too, and gets all cranky anticipating she’ll have to turn down another man she doesn’t want—but is “annoyed” when he doesn’t stand in the barn door to watch her leave. Last is pilot Eddie Garrett, a frightening, arrogant man whose behavior toward Mary crosses well into harassment, making me concerned he’s a potential rapist: Though she’s told him from the outset that she’s not interested in him, he will not take no for an answer, and instead leers, “I’m going to make you get to know me,” and “I’m going to find your breaking point someday—the kind of breaking point I mean.” He grabs her at a dance and refuses to let go as she tries to pull herself away, saying, “When we dance you have to let me hold you in my arms. If I tried it any other way you’d yell blood murder from a false sense of outrage.” But when he tells her he was orphaned and raised by uncaring relatives, suddenly Mary feels guilty about “how unjustly she had leaped to conclusions about him,” and apologizes to him when he kisses her. Ew.

The rest of the book has some pretty descriptions of the north country scenery, especially if you are fond of the forests of the western states, but the medicine is laughable (the doctor, who performs appendectomies, is unable to manage a punctured lung, which only requires a chest tube; Mary brings large quantities of tongue depressors to a forest fire first-aid station) and of course Mary herself is obsessive, self-centered, and vindictive, and her choice of men in the end is unfathomable—she is, in short, not a likeable character. The writing otherwise isn’t terrible, but it’s just too difficult to get around the problems of a stupid plot device combined with a stupid heroine. I love the north country, but I could not love this nurse.

High Country Nurse

By Virginia Smiley, ©1970

Lovely young Cass Fleming wanted nothing more than to be a good nurse. But suddenly her work at City Hospital, the suffering of small helpless children and kind elderly people, seemed too much for her. To make matters worse, her fiancé, Dr. Dan Driscoll, could not understand her feelings. Could she marry a man who was that cold-hearted? Cass decided she needed to get away from it all—to sort out her bruised and mixed-up emotions. The remote Navajo Reservation, where her Aunt Norma taught school, seemed the perfect refuge. But “getting away” wasn’t quite that easy. There were the Navajo people whom she quickly learned to love, and who needed her help. And there was the tall, self-assured young flyer, Sandy Russell, whose playful mockery suddenly turned into something much more serious. Cass realized there was no escape from life and its decisions … and the most important decision of all still lay in wait for her.

GRADE: C

REVIEW:
Nurse Cass Fleming, apparently just a few years out of nursing school, is already burned out. Working at City Hospital in Phoenix, she has witnessed both children dying of cancer and elderly people dying of old people diseases, and she just can’t take it! Plus she had a fight with her fiancé, Dr. Dan Driscoll! So she decides to take a four-week vacation—can you imagine such a thing?—and heads off into the desert to visit her aunt Norma, who is a schoolteacher on the Navajo Reservation. 

OK, I know, you’re already bracing for the racist attitudes of the Great White Woman descending into sandy poverty to bring holy healing to the unwashed, and I will in fact be making reparations in the form of a donation to the American Indian College Fund, a truly inspiring organization that has already benefitted from another horrific book I’ve read (Peace Corps Nurse) and, unfortunately, is likely to be hearing from my checking account in the future as well. On the whole, however, High Country Nurse is less appalling than other VNRNs I’ve read, in that our heroine Cass actually seems to respect and admire the Navajo people she meets. She does, however, feel that their lifestyle is backward—never mind that they were forced out of their homelands and marched on the Long Walk to a prison camp, and then to a piece of land no one else wanted, not exactly prime farmland. Can you blame the Navajo for not trusting anything white people brought them?

Initially Cass is reluctant to get involved in the community clinic, run by an aging Dr. Barton, who begs her repeatedly to help out even for a few hours, but she is on vacation, she insists, and still struggling to get over her heartbreak from witnessing bad outcomes in patients she had cared for. But before long a crisis forces her to get involved, helping to ferry a man with appendicitis to the hospital on the local medical rescue helicopter piloted by heartthrob Sandy Russell. The patient sleeps the whole way, but that’s all it takes for Cass to overcome her reluctance, and now she’s showing up at the clinic in a pale green shift because she neglected to bring any nursing uniforms with her on the trip.

She’s also hanging out with Sandy, and increasingly musing over fiancé Dan’s shortcomings in classic VNRN style. “Dan would want a large, well-staffed office in the best section of the city, with patients in the upper-income bracket.” “Dan had always been so very serious, almost to the point of being stuffy.” “Sometimes lately, when she thought of Dan, he seemed shallow and a bit selfish.” So naturally, when Sandy asks her why she doesn’t wear her engagement ring on her hand—she keeps it on a chain tucked into her blouse—she jams it back on her finger, snaps angrily at Sandy, and, when he coolly says goodbye, she decides, “She would return home to repair her relationship with Dan—and just as soon as possible, they would  be married.” Because marriage will fix everything!

Central to the story is a young girl, Daisy, who wants to attend school but is prevented from going by her grandmother. This is one of Cass’s biggest obsessions during her stay, and she tries again and again to befriend Daisy as well as win over Grandmother Many Blankets—who may recall the compulsory boarding schools for Native Americans that attempted to wipe out Navajo and other Indian Nations’ culture, but no one ever bothers to ask Grandmother about her objections.

Cass’s vacation winds down, and with Sandy now a bit more cool, she heads back to Phoenix to her job, but soon finds it—and her betrothed—a bit dull. “Cass did her work efficiently, but it was always the same—assisting the doctors on rounds, routine work, taking orders, endless orders. More and more often, in spite of her intentions to push it aside, she thought of Dr. B. and his clinic. There, she had shouldered responsibility—there she had felt alive.” Furthermore, Dan has not turned out to be all that great, surprise! Furthermore “since you came back, our dates have been a bit on the dull side,” Dan says. So she decides to return his ring, because “the butte country had changed her. There was no use in trying to force him out of her mind any longer,” she says, and then, out of nowhere, “She was in love with the young flyer.” Now she’s mooning over Sandy, but can’t possibly tell him how she feels.

Eventually Daisy, now ill with tuberculosis, runs away from home and collapses on Cass’s doorstep. Sandy’s helicopter, coming to carry her to the hospital, frightens Grandmother, who is hot on Daisy’s heels. Grandmother believes the helicopter and its radio to be “magic,” though it’s inconceivable that she hasn’t seen the ubiquitous chopper before. Suddenly Grandmother is on board with white man’s medicine and education as well: “You take Daisy to place in city to make her well. Then she will go to the school like other boys and girls.” This shockingly sudden about face sweeps Grandmother’s years of resistance away with the backwash from the helicopter rotors, delegitimizing her feelings without even informing the reader what they even were.

Another side story is Navajo Louise Beh, who wants to go to nursing school, but whose father, a medicine man, is against it. Cass visits Louise in Louise’s home, and “there was, Cass noted, nothing in the room to show that an Indian family loved here.” Louise says, “White man’s school has taught me much better ways,” and my heart broke for poor misguided Louise.

This book is fairly simplistic and formulaic, with cardboard characters and perfunctory writing that yielded nothing for the Best Quotes section. While the thinly veiled racism will make you wince, there’s not much else here to either upset you--or interest you, either. If we hear a lot about sand, we really don’t have much description of the southern Arizona landscape.  Like the other two Virginia Smiley books I’ve read (Nurse Kate’s Mercy Flight and Nurse of the Grand Canyon), this book is not the worst I’ve reviewed, but it certainly is a flat and arid desert.

Dr. Barry’s Nurse

By Arlene Hale, ©1968

Betty Richards, R.N., was upset. Old Dr. Barry, her highly respected employer, was going to retire—and had planned on turning over his practice to his physician-son, Mike. But that wasn’t all. The old doctor was bound and determined to see Mike and Betty married! It was hate at first sight when they first met … but they soon realized that the elder Dr. Barry was dangerously ill. So, out of consideration for his health, they went through with the pretense of falling in love. Then—one dramatic afternoon—the curtain fell, once and for all, on the scene they’d performed so well.

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“All the doctors in the building ogle you. So you’re not such an innocent little lamb!”

“The intellectual types always had moods, it seemed.”

REVIEW:

Arlene Hale is not my favorite VNRN author; of the 20 books she’s written that I’ve been obliged to read, this is only the fifth to score in the B range (she’s never gotten an A). Here we have an example of her finer work: Dr. Barry’s Nurse is not a flashy story, but it is moderately interesting and doesn’t make you sorry you picked it up. A low bar, I know, but unfortunately that’s all we have to work with.

Betty Roberts is actually a fine character: strong, competent, hard-working, and intensely loyal to old Dr. Barry, who paid her way through nursing school after—you guessed it—her parents died, so that she could keep her house, and offered her a job after graduation. That must have been about five years ago because now she’s practically arthritic at 25, a dog’s age in VNRN terms. She’s paid off her debt to him, but he’s like a father to him—she even calls him Pappy—so she’s continued working for him out of her love and loyalty.

But Dr. Barry is bringing in his son Mike from Chicago, fresh out of his residency, to take over the business. Mike is not red-hot on the idea, and Betty, who’s met Mike in passing over the years, hasn’t been overly impressed with him, either, though it’s not clear why: “For reasons she couldn’t quite pin down, she was in no hurry to begin their association,” we learn before he’s even shown up. He blows into the office “like a cold wind off the Arctic,” snippy to the staff and even to patients who could use some reassurance. Betty tells her roommate that Mike is “a stiff-necked, arrogant, cold fish,” and he deserves it. “She could never, never like that man,” she decides, but we have heard that one before!

It soon comes out that Dr. Barry has been hiding a heart condition that has conveniently held itself in check these years until son Mike shows up, and now he’s clotting off his coronary arteries like it’s going out of style. As he’s going down for the third time, Mike tells Betty that they should pretend they are dating to make the old guy feel better. “We both know he could have a severe attack at any time and might not pull out of it. Why would it be wrong to pretend a little, for his sake?” She can think of a lot of reasons why it would be wrong to pretend a little, for his sake, and never exactly agrees to this crazy scheme, but she never says no when he drags her out to the gazebo and starts kissing her because Dr. Barry may be watching. “Make it look good,” he says, so she does—and berates herself endlessly afterward. “Why had she kissed him back so ardently? For Pappy’s sake or her own?” So when the ersatz couple visits Dr. Barry in the hospital after his fourth and final attack, he tells Mike he wants them to marry. “Now. It must be now!” Later that day Mike proposes, and Betty indignantly turns him down—and then realizes she’s in love with Mike after all, and decides she’s only turned him down because he does not love her. But back in Dr. Barry’s hospital room, she and Mike tell him that they are engaged. “Good. Good! That’s all I wanted to hear,” he says, and promptly drops dead. Mike tells Betty she doesn’t have to go through with it, that he’s leaving for Chicago, and she packs up her car to head out of town too. Guess what—they both end up back at Dr. Barry’s office, and you will never guess what happens there!

Though obvious from the start, this book isn’t a complete waste of time. There’s even some humor in it, such as when a would-be masher tells Betty, “I promise you an evening to remember,” and she answers, “That’s what I’m afraid of,” and ducks under his groping arms and out the lounge door. Or when Mike tells her she has “good common horse sense,” she says, “Well, that’s one thing I’ve never been accused of before.” (Though like those trailers on TV that give you every funny line in the film, there aren’t many more in the book.) There are a few curious side plots, like the patient who falls off the Ferris wheel and has amnesia, and her sort-of boyfriend who draws a comic strip is an interesting character. It is too long at 158 pages, and there’s not much new VNRN ground here (even the amnesiac patient is a well-worn old hat; see Doctor Down Under, Nurse Kathy, Nurse Deceived, Nurse with a Problem). But you could do worse, as Arlene Hale certainly has, so maybe we should just be content with that.