Camp Nurse

By Kathleen Harris
(pseud. Adelaide Humphries Rowe), ©1961

Offered the position as a nurse at a boys’ camp, in the Catskills, young and beautiful Tanis Thaler accepted reality. However, she was told to look less attractive so that none of the older boys would fall in love with her. Tanis finds a real challenge in being a camp nurse. There are fifty boys to look after and two in particular present real problems to her as a nurse. But as a lovely young woman, she has an even greater problem. Because she must dress and act like a dowdy spinster, the handsome athletic director, Jim Nielson, whom she has grown to love with all her heart, treats her like a sister … 

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“Mrs. Carson’s in number three, all ready for you, Doctor—and she can’t leave until I give her back her shoes and girdle.” 

“What age is an unimpressionable one?”

“She ought to be able to walk back alone. It was not yet dark; and it wasn’t far. But there might be snakes.”

“There was no sense in a girl hiding her legs, especially when they were nice legs.”

REVIEW
“How would you like to take a leave of absence from the office and spend the summer in the Catskills?” said no doctor, ever, to the most dependable staff nurse in their busy surgical practice. So right out of the gate we know we are in for an unbelievable story. Tanis Thaler, recovering from an open appendectomy weeks ago, is apparently not yet fit to go back to work, so her boss decides that sending her to work at a boys’ camp for the summer would be an awesome way for her to get her strength back, because 50 boys would be so easy to wrangle! There’s just one problem: Tanis is just so gosh-darned beautiful that it would be a huge distraction to the impressionable young men. “Try to make yourself look a bit more—severe,” Dr. Wedner tells her, so she shops for dark, heavy glasses, oversized uniforms that “would not accentuate any curves and were too long to show off to advantage of a nicely turned calf. Tanis thought she would look positively dowdy.” 

And what success she has! When on the train she meets Jim Neilson, a stunningly handsome man, he looks her over lustily not at all, instead feeling sorry for the “timid soul, the born-to-remain-unwed type,” whom “no man could possibly be attracted to.” And so he condescends to be “exasperatingly polite” to Tanis for most of the book. In his thoughts, however, he is downright rude, wondering “what the heck was wrong with this girl’s legs that she wore her dresses so long,” and “what was the big idea, anyway—going around looking like a frump,” as if her attire is an affront to his personal dignity.

Fortunately for Tanis’ future marriage prospects, she also has Perry Davis, another camp counselor, who “liked to brag about his conquests with women”; faced with the prospect of a summer in a camp with only one unmarried woman, Perry is determined to make the best of a bad lot. “When marooned on a desert island a guy had to take what was at hand,” because “it couldn’t be that he was interested in a girl who looked as she did, although he had paid her the compliment of saying that she had a fine mind” after their discussion about Krushchev’s speech at the UN summit meeting. Of course, Tanis thinks, “no girl in her right mind wanted to be complimented merely on that score,” but Perry soon realizes she’s a knockout after he’s forcibly kissed her and knocked off her glasses in the process. “Next time I kiss you, it won’t be just because you’re a girl,” the flatterer declares and proposes, because though he has never been interested in getting married, “if he ever did decide to settle down, however, it might be good to settle for a nurse—they earned a good salary.” He then advises Tanis he won’t give her secret away. “Why, if Jim, for instance, knew what a dreamboat you are, he’d try to impress you with all that brawn of his!”

You can’t have 50 boys in a book without some of them being bad seeds, and if the book is set 60 years ago, the toughs are going to have adorably silly names like Stinker. “Scrapper” Donahue is a bully who goes around beating up the little kids and taking their lunch money, causing Tanis to go full-bore guilt trip on the unsuspecting kid. When she catches him pounding little Timmy Parkinson to make him say “uncle,” she scolds him that he should find something better to do with his time. “If you mean a four-eyed dame like you, I’ve got no time to waste on chicks,” retorts Scrapper, instantly winning my affection. Tanis lets this go by and instead delivers some sappy lines like how everyone would admire and look up to him if he weren’t such an asshole. “I’m sure that Timmy—and lots of the others—would, if you’d only let them,” she tells him, and Timmy, true champion that he is, manages not to throw up on her shoes.

Another young camper, Stewart, comes from a “broken home,” and is “over-sensitive—and exceptionally brilliant, moody, unresponsive,” and 17 years old, the perfect target for Tanis. “She had been wondering how to ‘reach’ him—get him to confide in her,” though what she wants to know about is not clear. Ironically, after all the emphasis on Tanis’s looks, when Stewart comes down with mumps (one of two vaccine-preventable illnesses the camp is overrun with this summer), she tells him, “It’s you I like, Stewart—not the way you look.” Stewart, at least, is the only guy in the camp who falls for Tanis exactly as she appears. “It did not matter that Tanis was not pretty by accepted standards. What did matter was that he could talk to her and she listened and understood; that she believed in him. He would never ask for anything more. All he wanted was for this—and Tanis—never to change.” Honestly, Tanis should be chasing Stewart, the only good man in the book.

Tanis attempts to get Jim to let Timmy out of sports essentially because he’s a wimp, but after finding out that Timmy is not “a bit mixed-up”—could this be a euphemism?—Jim won’t hear of it, telling her that if the other boys duck him in the pond, it’s all in fun. “In order to become a man, a boy has to learn to take it,” he says. It’s an alarming point of view, but he does note that you can’t win if you don’t play, and that “a man doesn’t have to excel at any sport, but he does have to learn to stand on his own two feet.” This is actually a valid point of view, coping skills being essential to surviving life, but Tanis fights it in her own weird way, getting Timmy out of sports by tucking him into a cot in the infirmary, and then leaving him there alone all night, possibly because a boy has to learn to take it? After Jim refuses to baby Timmy, Tanis decides Jim is “stubborn, opinionated, and egotistical. No longer could he seem too attractive to her”—because for one brief moment, a character’s physical appearance is not the major factor in whether a person is beautiful to another. Don’t worry, it won’t last. 

Perry eventually sort of proposes to Tanis, telling her to “name the day,” which she does not do—so therefore in her mind they are not engaged, while in Perry’s they are. She acknowledges to herself that she is essentially playing a rotten game with Perry because she’s tired of not having anyone chase her for the summer. “She had only encouraged him because her feminine pride had demanded some masculine recognition—and yes, to be honest, because she had been hurt when Jim had not given her any,” the second part of her nefarious plan being to “jolt” Jim into paying attention to her. “If he didn’t—well, what difference would it make if she were engaged to Perry—or even if, eventually, she decided to marry him?” Seems to me it might make an incredibly enormous difference, and not to mention it’s a really sick game to play.

Tanis also gradually starts shedding her “disguise,” wearing shorts and dumping the glasses, and it works! Jim, appreciating her new look, thinks, “She seemed to be an entirely different person. Not the strait-laced, mousey type of girl he had imagined, but a girl any man would notice.” So Tanis dumps Perry, who immediately picks up on the real reason she had been seeing him: “You wanted to make Jim jealous. Like all the girls, you go for all that brawn and muscle. I suppose you’d marry a guy like him in a second if he asked you.” Because it’s not the person he is—which is not in any way attractive—that’s important, it’s how he looks. And guess what? When, on the last night of camp, she dresses up in pumps and a dress that doesn’t hide her knees for the big send-off dinner, Jim grabs her arm and pulls her off to dinner at an outside restaurant without even asking her, and tells her, “I wouldn’t let you marry Perry if I had to marry you myself”—high motivation indeed—well, that’s all it takes for Tanis!

This is the book’s enormous contradiction. Author Adelaide Humphries (here writing as Kathleen Harris), as often as she has Tanis mouthing words about how it’s who you are that matters, not how you look, the book’s plot clearly demonstrates she doesn’t actually believe that to be true. Jim has not been in any way kind to Tanis all summer, so her realization in the last pages of the book that she is in love with Jim seems to prove Perry entirely correct: Jim’s only redeeming features are his good looks and his killer body. As for Jim, the first time Jim pays anything other than stiffly polite attention to her is when she’s wearing nylons, so his interest in her is equally shallow. The only person in the book with a genuinely honorable character is 17-year-old Stewart, so the moral of the story seems to be that it’s up to the younger generation to save the world. Good luck, Stewart, you’ve got a big job on your hands!

Nurse Lister’s Millstone

By Marjorie Norrell, ©1968

Elizabeth Lister had unexpectedly inherited an immense fortune—but, far from making her happy, it only had the effect of becoming a millstone round her neck!

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“Don’t let all the good times slip past your fingers, child. When you get to my age you can catch up on all the chores of living.” 

“Most Americans like to tour around a lot and see as much as possible in the shortest possible time, a few historic old ruins, places of literary interest and some very beautiful scenery.”

“Never act foolishly and pretend a compliment means nothing to you. Accept it as graciously as you would a gift of flowers or chocolates. Don’t give way to that foolish habit of disparaging yourself, just because you think it’s the right thing to do. Such an attitude only embarrasses the giver of compliment or gift.”

REVIEW:
Elizabeth Lister is an extraordinary nurse. She is so dedicated to her work that when her Uncle Harry unexpectedly leaves her $250,000—apparently a staggering fortune and not just a drop in the bucket toward your kids’ college educations—instead of quitting her job and enjoying the “lolly,” she continues to work, and considers how she might use her inheritance to “accomplish much to help mankind.” (It is curious, and perhaps due to a British sensibility, that leads almost everyone to conclude that Elizabeth is going to give away a substantial portion of her fortune.) Unfortunately, as soon as her friends hear about her good luck, they immediately shun her, “as though I’d some infectious complaint and they were afraid of catching it!”

The answer to this problem is, of course, for her to take a new job far away from her current situation, where no one knows about this “millstone,” which is how she refers to her money. There she meets Dr. Frank Tyler, who believes—the silly man—that “emotional involvement of any kind was definitely out so far as he was concerned for some years to come.” He’s planning on going into research, investigating leukemia, and has plans to apply for a grant from a pharmaceutical company, though that would mean all his discoveries would become the company’s property, to be sold for a profit. Elizabeth quickly decides she will use her money to build a clinic with a lab for the hot young doctor, no .

When he hears about this plan, Frank is overjoyed and deeply grateful! Oh, actually, no, I lied—in true VNRN fashion, he is outraged and cuts off their budding romance with little explanation, only later explaining, “I want to get to the top. But I aim to get there under my own steam.” It’s a ridiculous attitude, of course, because what is the grant that he is hoping to win but a gift? And isn’t every person’s success dependent on others—teachers, advisors, investors—who helped along the way? He compounds his hypocrisy by adding, “If you’d been anyone else, I might have accepted.” Elizabeth’s best friend points out that “he’s think himself doing the right thing, I suppose, if something horrible had happened and you’d asked him to share that!” These men can be so stupid, you wonder why you bother.

But it turns out that it doesn’t take long to convince Frank to accept the plan, though it still means they can’t be together, even though he loves her, but because he does not have “even a remote hope of being able to give you things, wealth, position equal to those you now have in your own right.” What a sexist snob!

The second half of the book is Elizabeth’s persistent efforts to win Frank over, which you know are preordained to succeed, though it takes the quintessential car crash combined with the old jealousy ploy to bring him around. The book is a pleasant read, even if it hinges on this ludicrous plot device. The characters are enjoyable, if not anyone I’d care to spend any extra time with. You could do worse, and it won’t be a complete waste of time, but it is likely to pass out of your head about as quickly as the money would have slipped out of your bank account if you had been the recipient of Nurse Lister’s fortune.

Nurse Martin’s Dilemma

By Rosamund Hunt, ©1961
Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti 

For eighteen months Nurse Beth Martin was stalked wherever she went by the nightmare of her past. At last, in a remote New England hospital she found safety and love. With Dr. Chad Dennison she began to forget her tragedy. Then a little man arrived—asking questions and looking for Nurse Beth Martin. If she ran again, she’d have to run forever …

GRADE: C

REVIEW:
The abducted-baby plot is a bonus because it offers our accused nurse-heroine an oversized scandal, followed by an equally righteous triumph in the end—and an opportunity to sneer at the mother at the same time. Here Nurse Beth Martin has agreed to care for boarding school chum Harriet Sawyer’s infant son—not that she deserves a baby, and we are allowed to ask if she even wants one: “the beautiful spoiled” Harriet had “complained constantly” during her pregnancy and, when the child was born, “didn’t want any of the burden of its care,” to the point that she’s never seen him undressed and “had held him only when he was dressed in his expensive, handmade little garments. Even then, she had been only too glad to hand him back shortly, had seemed to see the baby only as proof of her own accomplishment, a new possession to be shown off to admiring friends and relatives.” Then one afternoon, Beth is alone with Baby Bunky—“Harriet had gone off on a shopping expedition”—when the phone rings and rings until Beth goes inside to answer it, leaving Bunky on the terrace, and when asked to hold, she does, apparently for quite some time, as when she gets back, Bunky is gone! 

The police can’t convict her, though “the tabloids had had a field day,” and she’d fled to Europe until her apparently substantial inheritance (she’s an orphan, of course) has run out, and now, 18 months after her graduation, she has returned to America, somewhere in New England far from the Californian scene of the crime, for a job as a charge nurse of the surgical floor. It’s a tough assignment, as the patients are demanding and the hospital is short-staffed, and Beth, in her first hospital job, “could not have got off to a worse start if she had been trying deliberately.”  She flaunts her college degree before a top student nurse, who, rightfully offended, tells Beth she shouldn’t “ride the girls who know what they’re doing because they’ve learned it by actual experience”—a valid point—and then sets out to ruin Beth’s life. Beth does not learn from this incident, unfortunately, and continues to prove herself to be a snob.

She’s not helped by the ridiculously coincidental appearance of Dr. John Chadwick Dennison, known as Chad, whom she’d known as a child and of course been crushing madly: “She had always felt that the reason she had never fallen in love again was because no one had ever measured up to the ideal she had met, and lost, when she was 16.” Now we watch Beth make an even bigger ass of herself as, having unburdened herself about the Bunky mishap to Chad, she decides that she’s still in love with him and literally thrusts herself between him and Nurse Elinor Chase, who anyone can see he actually cares for. Now she has her obsession to “give new meaning to her life,” and she spends every evening alone in her room waiting for Chad to call, remembering all the words he’s spoken to her and “reading into them what she wanted to be there.” She snubs good-hearted Dr. Bill Holloway, who is the only person to stand up for her when she snatches a tin of salted nuts away from a hospital trustee three days after an open cholecystectomy. She decides on their disastrous date that “she wanted to repay him” and so “if he wanted to kiss her tonight, she would not resist. There would be no disloyalty to Chad. It would be merely a friendly gesture, her way of saying ‘Thank you.’” Um, thanks, lady! Of course, she’s insulted when he doesn’t.

And then a mysterious man shows up at the hospital asking for Beth, and, combined with Chad’s engagement—not to Beth!—she decides “she would have to leave the hospital and the city,” because she cannot face “what a fool she had been.” It seems to me that a little facing up would be good for Beth, but it’s not strength of character but of Mother Nature in the form of a weak blizzard (only 12 to 14 inches of snow, kids’ stuff!) that keeps her in town, trapped on duty as the nurses who live farther afield are unable to show up for work for 36 hours—these can’t be real New Englanders! The stranger is brought in with a heart attack, triggered by standing outside Beth’s rooming house waiting for her, and soon it’s revealed that he’s not out to harm her, but to tell her his mentally ill daughter was the one responsible for kidnapping Bunky, and that the baby is alive and well as one can be when they’re living in Florida.

If nurses can’t get to work, at least planes are running, so Beth is off to the airport, but not before she hears “the voice in her own heart telling her that she was in love with Bill Holloway,” which is especially tragic because she still has to leave town forever, as “she could not drag him or his fine family” into “the publicity, the gossip which would spread, like a flame in a high wind, throughout the city where Bill was building up a reputation as a successful young doctor.” She’s assuming he wants anything to do with her, a bit of a stretch in my opinion, but these VNRN docs aren’t always the smartest of guys.

Of course, Bunky’s mother Harriet couldn’t pick her own child out of a lineup, and only Beth knows about the birthmark she had never revealed to Harriet, knowing that Harriet “had always had a passion for perfection. She had wanted everything she possessed to be flawless.” Summoned by Beth to collect their newfound child, Harriet and husband Ben arrive and so too does Bill, insisting, “I’m taking over!” After he and Beth are married, he suggests, “your past will be nobody’s business,” and besides, it wasn’t her fault! Initially I was hopeful: “No one can be completely free from human errors,” Bill scolds her—everyone, that is, except Bunky’s mother. “If she had been home that day, never letting the baby out of her sight the way most mothers are happy to do, the whole thing might not have happened,” he explains. “It’s rottenly unfair that she slid out of taking any of the blame!”

And so it’s a happy end for everyone except Harriet, who now has to take care of her own child, at least on the plane ride home and until she finds a new nurse. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to be satisfied with Beth Martin, who has been narrow-minded, jealous, and immature from the beginning, only to be transformed with the turn of a page into someone who recognizes all her past mistakes and is held accountable for none of them. There are some enjoyments to be had from this book, and not just from the fabulous Lou Marchetti cover (but who is the blonde? Surely not Nurse Elinor!)—it is fun to be exasperated with horrid Beth—but not many. The dilemma about Nurse Martin is why anyone would care about her, but it needn’t be yours if you just decline to open the book.  

Jane Arden Surgery Nurse

Book 4 of 7

By Kathleen Harris, ©1958

All the women who knew Dr. Tony Gray agreed that he was too attractive for his own good—yet none of them could help falling under his spell. When Jane Arden met Tony, first as his head surgical nurse, then as his latest romantic interest, she felt his belief that marriage didn’t mix with medicine made him “safe” for a girl who had an understanding with another man. And then, abruptly, she found herself up against the most difficult question a girl ever faces …

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“Most of them, especially if they happen to be young and pretty, only take up nursing because they think it will pay off—in good wages, extra bonuses from grateful patients, eventually a husband!”

“So you’re a doctor! Small wonder that so many girls take to nursing.”

“Most girls, as you claim, are smart enough to make the most of their appearance. But some still are not as smart as their grandmothers. … Your grandmother was too smart ever to do things better than a man.”

“[Nurses are] big husky individuals who look down on everyone disapprovingly as though he was covered with germs. As a rule, they are quite unattractive, too.”

“‘Age of the Ultimate Weapon,’ she reminded herself, as one commentator had called it. An age so hurried there was little time for people to be kind to one another, a frightening age, with satellites being sent into outer space and talk of people going to the moon, weapons being created whose power was unthinkable.”

“You must be happy in your new job, watching the doc cut people up.”

“Men should realize that it often takes a woman to help them reach the top.”

“Perhaps she put too much of herself into her work. Perhaps there was not enough left over for a real life, aside from her chosen career, a home of her own, her own man, her own children. Every girl wanted these things more than anything else.”

REVIEW:

Jane Arden, who should be called vagabond nurse, has moved to New York for this book, after stints in Ohio, Florida, and Tennessee in the first three. Again she’s moved into her sister’s apartment, as she did in Florida for Jane Arden Registered Nurse, Roberta also possessing a serious case of wanderlust, as having herself moved from Miami to New York, she’s now set off for Europe and left her empty apartment to Jane. We learn early that heartthrob Dr. Tony Gray is not going to be a problem because “Jane was immune to men,” but we know better! Early on she catches Dr. Tony’s eye because they work in the same OR, and agree to be friends because neither of them wants to get married—Tony because he’s concentrating on his training, Jane allegedly because two years later she is still in mourning her childhood sweetheart, whom she had agreed to marry in JARN despite the fact that he’d turned out to be a complete ass before conveniently dying in a plane crash, but I suspect that in fact it’s because she does not have a heart. You will not be surprised to learn that on her first date with Tony—which of course she accepts because they’re just friends and will never be anything else—Jane shows her true colors when, at a party thrown for her by Roberta’s friends, “Jane couldn’t help a certain coolness from creeping into her voice. She was disappointed in Tony. She had wanted to accept him as a friend. But his actions this evening made this practically impossible.” His big crime? Roberta’s married friend Carol Gaylord flirted with him. The nerve! When he asks her what’s wrong, she lies, “You must be imagining things.” Did I mention that I am not particularly fond of Jane?

In JARN Jane had met young millionaire Nicky Powers, who had inexplicably fallen in love with her, but in book three, he’d packed off to Europe to study art. He’d promised to beg Jane to marry him when he comes home, which he has not yet done in this series. Jane has nothing other than sisterly feelings toward Nicky, yet when she learns that Roberta has met up with Nicky in Paris, she again demonstrates jealous possessiveness of a man she says she doesn’t want. Now, suddenly, “Jane still did not know how she felt toward Nicky,” her jealousy apparently changing her feelings, especially now that a previously smitten man’s ardor for her may be cooling.

When Jane comes down with the flu, Tony shows up at her apartment to take care of her. Though she is still angry with him, she lets him in, because “what could she do? A nurse always obeyed the doctor.” So now they are dating again, and Jane continues her self-delusion that she isn’t jealous of Carol, and also perpetrates an ongoing stream of obvious lies to Tony about her feelings about his friendship with Carol: “It doesn’t matter, Tony. It’s none of my business,” she tells him, while all along she’s thinking he’s “pretty dumb for being taken in.” Eventually they are kissing with an “exhilaration that had taken her on a trip to the moon.” But when Tony is appointed the new chief of surgery and is too busy for dates, here she goes again, “wishing that Nicky would come back from Paris. Maybe she would discover that she did love Nicky. Jane was tempted to urge Nicky not to stay away much longer. She knew if she wrote that she needed him, Nicky would not delay his return.” If she doesn’t actually love any of her boyfriends, she certainly does love to jerk them around.

Turning back to her other puppet, when Tony asks if he can come to her apartment one evening, she goes all out with the standard VNRN fare—salad, steak, cherry pie—and throws in candles and flowers to boot, for a man she repeatedly states she is not interested in. Her ploy works, and Tony tells her, “I’m crazy about you. Please say I don’t have to fight it any more.” Interestingly, she interprets this as some sort of proposal: “They would have to make plans, now that they were in love.” He comes over for dinner a lot, though he never mentions love or marriage, and Jane is outraged when he tells her he’s moving out of his slum apartment and taking a six-month lease on a nicer place a few minutes from the hospital. “Jane felt her heart tighten. Plans like these certainly did not include her. What she wanted to say—to cry out—was, ‘What about us, Tony?’” As if a six-month lease equals a breakup. Honestly, this woman and logic have never even shaken hands. Naturally, she just lies some more: “It sounds pretty grand,” she tells him. But she won’t go there to see Tony, because even though “some girls would think nothing of going to a man’s apartment,” nice girls like Jane, who invite men to their own apartments several times a week, have bizarre double standards.

As much as she wants to put that collar on Tony, she’s doesn’t know how she feels. “Was she in love? she asked herself. She must be. She was almost deliriously happy when she was with Tony. Tony needed her; he had come to depend on her. And it was good to be needed. David had never needed her. He had been so self-sufficient.” And her waffling continues when she decides that “she hoped that when the time came to renew her contract as a surgical nurse, she would be quitting, to be married.” Which she had ardently insisted when she was engaged to her first fiancé that she would never do—though you will be completely astonished to learn that she had never actually mentioned it to the man. And yet she still doesn’t know what she’s going to say when Nicky comes home and proposes. It was all I could do not to hurl this book across the room.

Roberta returns to New York—catching Jane and Tony in the clinch—and Jane can only say “I guess” when Roberta asks if she loves him. To clarify, she explains, “Tony has an allergy when it comes to marriage,” so it seems that “love” to Jane just means “husband.” Roberta decides she is going to help Jane get Tony to propose, and before long Tony is angrily dragging Jane out of the hospital to demand to know why Jane has not told him about “this fellow.” Jane cannot stop with the lies. “What fellow?” she asks. “Are there more than one?” Tony roars, and you know there would be, if Jane could find them. It comes out that Roberta has shown Tony a cable saying that Nicky is coming home and Jane should make arrangements for the wedding. Rather than tell Tony the truth—that’s so not Jane’s way—she snaps that there’s no relationship between her and Tony because “during the very first talk we had, you informed me that you had no intention of becoming involved with anyone.” He reminds her that she said the same thing, and she stomps home. Roberta is pleased with her work: “The best way to get to the bottom of anything is to give the other person a severe jolt—and the fact that Tony took it so much to heart is a good sign.” The only shock here is that Jane then tells Roberta that she can’t marry Nicky. Roberta only gently chides Jane for keeping him dangling for so long, and then mentions that she herself is going to marry Nicky “since you don’t want him. Naturally, being a gentleman, he had to wait until you turned him down before he could ask me to marry him.” So it seems Roberta’s “jolt” was delivered to two people, not just one. These Arden women are cold-blooded killers. Roberta’s wedding goes off in two paragraphs, and Jane makes it clear that though Nicky’s aunt and uncle cable their congratulations, “Jane had been their first choice.” What a self-centered bitch Jane has turned out to be!

Tony hears about the wedding and calls Jane to tell her for the first time that he loves her, but Jane is going to jerk the hook around a bit and asks him if Carol is keeping him from being lonely. “Didn’t I just tell you I love you? What else do you want me to say?” he asks her. Jane, of course, “could have told him, but she didn’t.” Tony, however, is not too dumb to read between in the lines, but too dumb to run screaming from the horror show that is Jane Arden, and he actually proposes. Jane “caught hold of a chair to keep from toppling over.” Then she makes snarky remarks about waiting six years until Tony has become a successful surgeon. “Jane still thought it a good idea not to let this handsome young man be too sure of her,” so she refuses to answer him, saying they will talk about it when she gets home from her sister’s wedding. “She knew she was going to have a good cry as soon as she hung up. But this time her tears would be tears of happiness—all was well with Jane Arden’s world once more.” Unbelievable. I’m going to cry, too, but only because I’m going to have to read three more books about Jane Arden.

Nurse Angela

By Peggy Gaddis, ©1965

“There’s a contagious disease sweeping the hospital!” Handsome Doctor MacDaniel stood before Nurse Angela. She sprang up, her eyes enormous with shock. “It’s a thing called love,” he added, grinning. Nurse Angela sank back in relief. “It’s the spell of the tropics,” she said. “I hear it’s pretty potent.” He moved closer and took her into his arms. His kiss was like a small, gentle hand curling about her heart. But why was her heart afraid?

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“We’d much prefer that men shouldn’t understand us. We’re not a bit complex, but we like to have the masterful sex think so.”

“You couldn’t offer a man a more deadly insult than to tell him he is not your type and that he’s safe with you because there’s no danger of you falling in love with him.”

“I probably won’t ever fall in love with anybody. It’s a very undignified emotion.”

“There was a twinkle in his dark eyes as he turned and walked away toward the men’s ward, where there were four sailors who had been badly burned in an explosion aboard a fishing smack a few days before.”

“You’re doing beautifully, Mr. Abernathy. And we’re going to send you home in another week or ten days.”

REVIEW:
As the book opens, Nurse Angela Dennard is arriving in Pirate’s Cove somewhere in the Caribbean to work for two doctors who have hired her for two years based on her resume, without having met or spoken to her in advance. Immediately upon her arrival, it’s clear that there’s going to be a big problem: “Dr. Mac will flip his lid when he sees you,” says the other “nurse” on the team, a young woman named Nancy Galloway, who has no license or formal schooling but was trained by Dr. Mac. “We were expecting a nurse, but not someone as young and beautiful as you are.” Apparently “there’s an unwritten law at the Cove that no woman under fifty who is easy on the eyes—and you most certainly are all of that—should be allowed to set foot on the place.” This is a real predicament!

For the next dozen or so pages, everyone who meets Angela remarks about how gorgeous she is, to the point where our patience has grown more than a little thin. “Perhaps I can wear some sort of disguise that will conceal what you seem to feel is a very disturbing appearance,” she snaps at Dr. Mac, and then performs the Patented Peggy Gaddis Heroine Exit, marching out of the room with her head held high.

Before long, though, everyone’s forgotten about Angela and her troublesome face, and now we swirl around five people on the island: not-nurse Nancy; ferry captain Nelson Phillips, with whom Nancy is in love; 17-year-old debutante Kathleen “Kitten” Hansell, who has been whisked to the island to escape the scandal of her having witnessed a murder in a New York City night club; Burke Abernathy, a 25-year-old society man whom Kitten has lured to the island to keep her company; and Barbara Clayton, a 30-year-old millionaire who owns most of the island and acts as its main benefactress. These characters also quickly wear thin, as Nancy and Barbara are described as plain in appearance and are both insanely insecure, thinking that no man could ever possibly want to be involved with them. Barbara develops a crush on Nelson, though she is “much too old for him,” and she and Nancy have a contest to see who can be the nastiest, the most self-centered, and the most childish. Nancy wins by a fair amount, as she soon develops a raging dislike of Angela when Angela buys Barbara, hospitalized after she was stomped by Champ the bull, a bunch of pastel negligees. Worse yet, Angela fixes Barbara’s hair and introduces her to Nelson, who kindly agrees to take Barbara to town when she asks him if he will—and Nancy construes this as worst kind of betrayal. “You couldn’t have found her things that would make her look drab and plain and downright ugly,” she snarls at Angela. “I purely hate you!” She continues to be quite nasty to Angela for most of the rest of the book, and to “purr acidly” in a jealous rage at Nelson too, which is sure to help her accomplish her goal of winning the man’s heart, which she had just laid out three pages earlier. Good luck with that, honey.

Nelson, for his part, stirs up more trouble when Kitten Hansell’s grandmother hires him to chauffeur Kitten out to a few nearby cities for an afternoon’s entertainment, and Nancy's jealousy spirals even further out of control—as does Barbara’s, who rips off her new nighties and smashes her mirror in a petulant display when she hears of the outing. Nelson also offers to smack, wallop and spank Kitten—another Peggy Gaddis staple—and, bizarrely, her grandmother chimes in, “And I’ll help him.” Kitten, not too surprisingly, tells Gran, “I think I hate you!” Kitten uses her outings with Nelson to enrage Burke, who has also landed in the hospital after being thrown from a bicycle, and though he knows no one else on the island and has come there only to keep Kitten company, that lovely lass refuses to visit him for the rest of his week-long stay in the hospital, and instead tells him that in time “I’ll hate you even a little more than I do now.” All the women in this book have studied exactly the same playbook, not to mention the same script, and it is dull, self-defeating, and infantile.

Out of nowhere, Kitten’s character makes an abrupt about-face. When Burke, finally discharged from the hospital, shows up at the Hansell house, the two women are talking about how much they care about each other, when they’ve been screaming and threatening violence in every other encounter up until now, Kitten hugging her grandmother and calling her sweetie-pie (Gran reasonably responds, “What a disgusting phrase”). A page later, Burke has proposed and Kathleen is pronounced old enough to marry, though I think at under 18 she qualifies as a child bride.

Things finally start to wrap up, much to our relief: Barbara has asked the accounts man to go over the business accounts with her, and the pair hit it off, so she’s quickly disposed of. As for Nancy and Nelson, out of the blue, they are suddenly “hand in hand, obviously very much in love and radiantly happy” on their way to announce their engagement, no doubt because the last thing Nancy had said to Nelson before this turn of events is announced, was—take one guess—“I think I hate you!”

Angela, meanwhile, a minor character in the book that bears her name, has had a few short but snippy conversations with Dr. Mac, which end either with her marching off in anger—head held high, of course—or she is warning “her silly heart to stop its pounding.” We don’t even learn the man’s first name until page 80. So you know what is coming: In what is their seventh actual conversation together—most of which have been under a page—Dr. Mac proposes to Angela. Well, I must admit that they did have dinner together one night, but they spent most of it talking to other people and not to each other, so that doesn’t really count. Angela responds to his kind offer by telling him, “You’ve been treating me like a piece of office equipment or X-ray machinery,” but “after all your arrogance and brusqueness of these past weeks,” it seems a perfectly reasonable thing to ask, so after a page of de riguer sniping back and forth, she agrees, and his kiss “was like a small, gentle hand curling about her heart and lifting it to her lips.” She’s kissing her own heart? What? It’s a bizarre ending, but after everything we’ve been through with this book, par for the awkward course.

Apart from everything I’ve cited above, there are even more oddities to the book. Author Gaddis throws a gossip columnist into the story early on, the woman arriving at the island to stir up more scandal about Kitten, but she abruptly drops out of the story halfway through, never to be seen again.  There’s also a scene between island local Lisa Morales, who works as a nurse’s aide, drooling with joy at her chance to care for “our patron saint.” Lisa reveals that the Father at their church has cut Barbara’s photo out of a newspaper and hung it up, and the parishioners burn candles and keep flowers before it in their reverence of Barbara, who once bought a bell for the church. In response to what is to say the least a very uncomfortable encounter, at least for us the readers, Barbara does not die of horror and shame, but instead offers Lisa “a real picture, the very best one I can possibly manage,” for them to continue worshipping. I think this qualifies as requiring a donation to the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project in penance.

The book hums along steadily and the writing mostly isn’t bad, but there are just so many psychotic characters in this story—women predominantly, but the men don’t prove too sane, either—that it’s a good thing they’re all stuck on this tiny island in the Caribbean, because it would not be a good idea to turn them loose on general society.

Nurse of the Crossroads

Colleen L. Reece, ©1977

The assignment that reporter Sam Reynolds had been given seemed easy enough: find out about Dr. David Mackenzie; find out what gave him his own special brand of faith. And so Sam left Portland for the small towns around LaGrande, to discover new people and a way of life he had never known existed. Lovely Amber Mackenzie, a nurse, had been alone since her father’s death. But she was carrying on with the work he had  begun—the small Crossroads Clinic was still open; Amber still journeyed into the canyons and mountains to help people in need. Amber’s gentle ways earned her the love of all who knew her and believed in her father’s ideals, and Sam quickly fell under her spell. Sam’s assignment to learn about Dr. Mackenzie turned into something more, as the young man decided to learn about himself, too. And Sam’s presence caused Amber some serious thinking, also. Although she had known and loved Dr. Robert Meacham for years, she felt unsure of herself, unready for marriage. Perhaps with Sam …

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“What chance had she, Amber, against such a doll-like creature?”

“Woman, I won’t rest until you’re my meek, obedient, humble bride.”

“While Robert is marrying a nurse, I think he probably also hopes he’s marrying a woman, not a machine.”

REVIEW:

The story begins from the point of cynical newspaper reporter Sam Reynolds, who was “raised in a poor family, clawing his way out of the slums.” His editor, Don Baker, who—get this—lives in a mansion (no newspaper editor outside of a major city could possibly afford a mansion these days, and in fact might qualify for food stamps)—is obsessed with now-deceased college chum David Mackenzie, who quit his superlative career at Portland Memorial to take up the life of a rural GP in eastern Oregon. Don is yearning for deeper meaning, and thinks David had found it: He “stood without wavering for what he believed. I’ve got to know whether David’s beliefs were real!” He fears David actually resigned to head off a big scandal, but he “must know what it was that kept David Mackenzie going.”

So he sends Sam on a spiritual cum journalistic quest. Sam heads east, making a beeline for David’s gravestone, which states that David had  “accepted the Crossroads Calling.” This Calling is painted as a mystical quest, for some reason, and Sam, and many other characters in the book, pursues it for the duration. After a stop at the cemetery, Sam meets David’s daughter Amber, who is a nurse and continues the work of the Crossroads Clinic. The story shifts mostly to her point of view, and she develops a crush on Sam, while gently resisting VNRN staple doctor-who-loves-nurse-but-isn’t-loved-in-return Robert Meacham. We spend a lot of time on this old saw, and visiting Amber’s patients, and various adventures including the time Amber catches the 14-year-old boy who’s broken into the drug cabinet to steal—aspirin! Tee hee!

The worst part about this book is how it hangs most of its raison d’être on the mystery of David Mackenzie—which Amber spills 100 pages before the end, ending the suspense much too early—namely that David Mackenzie had unknowingly sent a drunk intern to care for a seriously injured burn victim and, checking later, had found the intern passed out in a chair and the patient dead. The patient would have died anyway, we’re told, but Dr. Mackenzie covered for the intern and resigned, though the resignation is completely unjustified, as if every doctor resigned after the expected death of a patient, no one would be practicing medicine. The intern goes on to become a very successful and famous doctor, and Dr. Mackenzie slinks off to LaGrande to practice in his humble clinic.

Somehow all this is supposed to make Dr. Mackenzie even more of a saint, but to me needlessly falling on his sword just makes him look like a self-absorbed, sanctimonious jerk. Even worse, we’re given a lame poem he’d written—again and again this poem is quoted—in which the narrator chose a path at a crossroads that leads away from fame and fortune but toward “the right way, to happiness … and God.” The ostensible point being that you should do whatever you can to help other people. It’s a reasonable point, though it’s not clear why a famous and successful doctor is not helping people; rather you have an opportunity to help more people if you have a wider reach. Furthermore, it’s not clear why this philosophy translates into a religion, and why this makes Dr. Mackenzie so much saintlier than everyone else for having followed it, when others, including his daughter and Dr. Meacham, have done the same.

The issue is not smoothed when every time a character encounters some dilemma, we are told that they are “facing [their] own crossroads calling,” although most of the time these decisions are over something completely inappropriate such as searching for Amber when she disappears in a snowstorm, or helping “evil” Vagabond Vic when he becomes sick. Worst of all, when Amber decides she’s really in love with Robert after all, and he comes to show her an engagement ring she mistakenly believes is someone else’s, instead of being honest with him about her feelings—“I’m not the type to throw myself at a man, no matter how much life hurts without him”—she is nasty and mean, and the pair barely speak for four months after that. The fact that she severely bungled her “calling” in this instance is never pointed out, and after she discovers the ring was actually means for her, “again Amber stood at a crossroads,” and again she fails to tell Robert how she feels, only that she thought the ring was for someone else, leaving it for him to do the heavy lifting and propose, with no hint from her that she’s changed her mind about her feelings for him.

So everyone in the book is, by its long overdue end, touched by the glorifying Crossroads Calling and has a true religious fervor in their heart, but none of it hangs together. All this religious devotion is whipped up out of a basic desire to do the most good one can, but this is not a particularly unique or even Christian (Ghandi, anyone?) principle. The characters talk a lot, but their spiritual awakenings are told to us, not shown, so they don’t feel sincere, and frankly apart from Amber, no one really does a lot of good, either (Sam writes an inspirational book and editor Sam Baker gives up his job in Portland to start a small paper in LaGrande, and little Billy Carter wins over a savage killer dog named Satan just by believing he won’t get his face ripped off). Amber, the main character shows no growth during this story; Sam seems to have, but we are told this, and his character essentially slinks off to a remote cabin to write his book halfway through, and is seldom seen again. This book wants to be inspirational, but it just ends up being insipid and boring.

Nurse Kay

By Virginia Roberts
(pseud. Nell Marr Dean), ©1962

For Kay Fleming, nursing was a second career choice: she always wanted to be a doctor. And perhaps because it was second choice she was determined to be good at it. So when the man she loved, rugged young college football coach Duke Malone, was offered a job out of state and asked Kay to come with him, marry him, she refused. It would have meant giving up a chance to help organize the hospital’s new disaster unit. It would have meant going back on her “duty” … But was she being a dedicated nurse when she sent Duke away—or was she only being selfish? It was a question Kay couldn’t answer until a headline tragedy showed her the truth about herself …

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“I hike all the roads around here, and haven’t been kidnapped even once.”

“There’s just nothing that gives a woman that feminine, fragile air like a soufflé-light mohair sweater.”

“I’m glad you didn’t go through with your lofty ideas. Women doctors are awfully stuffy sometimes.”

“A vacation for me means I’ll have to build a whole new wardrobe.”

“Certainly, intelligent, educated women like you need to have careers. But they also need to make wifehood the main objective in their lives. Nothing can be more treasured than to be chosen by a man because he thinks you’re the most important woman in the world.”

REVIEW:
Kay Fleming is a nursing student, but she had really wanted to be a doctor. A lot is made of this early in the book, but I’m not sure why; it doesn’t really add anything to the story except show Kay up as a self-sacrificing martyr, since the reason she didn’t go to medical school is because (1) she never bothered to tell her parents that’s what she wanted to do and (2) she never bothered to find a way to finance medical school with or without her parents’ help. It does, however, give her a lot of reason to be angrily jealous of her sister, who did go to a fancy private university and throws a fancy wedding for 500 guests that costs $1,000 (tee hee!) and, by Kay’s constant reckoning, siphoned up all the money that could have been used for her own education had she only asked for it. (In the end, though, when Kay snarkily tells her parents of her thwarted dreams, they sell their drug store possibly to help finance a medical degree, and selfish Kay decides she’d rather stay in nursing school after all. So much for that plot thread.)

We follow Kay through her final year of school, during which she starts dating football coach Duke Malone. He is super hot and hunky, and the year flies by! At the end of it, Dr. James Martin offers Kay a job helping him set up a disaster unit. “Jim says every hospital should have a disaster unit—a field hospital—in case of a big disaster, or an enemy attack,” because “with all the big missile installations around here, it makes us a hot target for enemy bombings.” The problem comes when Duke is offered a job coaching for the big football team in Colorado, and he asks Kay to marry him and come with him. Kay, who is looking forward to her big project with Dr. Martin, does not leap into Duke’s arms and say yes, and he is not exactly understanding. “What does that hospital have to offer you that I don’t?” Um, a challenging and rewarding career and a salary, for starters, but Duke is not impressed. “I guess anything as important as that would put a stop to such an inconsequential thing as marriage, wouldn’t it!” Because it’s now or never with Duke; he must have learned about selfishness from his beloved.

Kay hopes that a day or two will help Duke come to a compromise: “Why couldn’t he be understanding and let her have just a little fling at her career before they seriously planned their marriage?” But Duke never bothers to contact Kay after that initial conversation, so when she tracks him down at the stadium, he starts in again. “You’re putting your career ahead of mine—ahead of me,” he says. “You think staying here, doing what any other nurse could do in your place, is more important.” Um, thanks, honey. She wants to tell him off, but instead decides, “One of them must act maturely,” so she asks him to give her a few months to finish her project, but he refuses to compromise. “Why compromise? You’re getting what you want,” he snarls, and off he goes to Colorado. Good riddance! thinks Kay. Or not, and instead pines for him constantly.

Unfortunately, shortly after Duke’s departure, the hospital administration decides to pull funding from the disaster center and give it instead to that cute pediatrician, so Kay is left without her big project or a man. But she continues to work at the hospital during the day and cry during the night, until finally Duke’s Colorado team comes to play the local university. Kay tries to see him again, but it’s no use—Duke persists in being a dick. As fate would have it, just as the big game is kicking off, there’s a landslide at the dam, and lots of workers are trapped and injured! Though the disaster unit is not functional, Dr. Martin has their plans at the ready, and he and Kay MacGyver supplies, personnel, and procedures to set up a triage hospital at the tragedy site, and Kay comes up with the brilliant idea to get the football teams to come help move all the dirt and rocks that can’t be moved by machinery without risking of injuring the workers buried in the rubble. Duke and the teams show up pronto, and soon the injured are being pulled from the mess and expertly treated at the field hospital.

The next day, Duke drops by her apartment. “It’s sad it took a disaster to bring us back together,” he says, and they go off to church because it’s Sunday, and their reunification “became even more treasured with the thought that people in love should share the rich privilege of worshiping together.” Over waffles after the service, they read in the paper that a rich philanthropist is funding the disaster unit after all, but without any discussion of how incredibly selfish and nasty Duke has been, or even whether they can reunite, Kay says, “they can get another nurse to help run the show,” and tells Duke she will marry him. That doesn’t mean, however, that she’s going to give up nursing altogether, because they have hospitals in Colorado, too, maybe. “Goodness, Duke, you don’t think you’re marrying one of those delicate little clinging-vine-type females! Heaven forbid! I’m not one of those homemakers who wants to do nothing but dust a tiny three-room apartment and die of boredom.” No, she’s just a clinging-vine-type who lets her man kick her around without a peep of protest. Now that she’s agreed to give up almost everything, he condescends to admit, “When I saw you working your heart out at that accident I knew how much your career meant to you. How important it was—how many lives you helped save. I felt selfish in ever suggesting that you give it up.” That’s the closest he gets to an apology, and he certainly doesn’t suggest that Kay stay in Arizona and finish the disaster unit before joining him in Colorado; no, that would be too much. So the book ends as Kay gaily decides to have a wedding just as huge and expensive as her sister’s, the wedding she was so contorted with rage and envy about early in the book. But Duke needn’t worry, she’s only quarterbacking “the first play, darling—our wedding. Then you’re the coach forever after.” And I’m off and running for the Pepto Bismol.

The problem here is that Kay is depicted as a strong, independent woman, but when it comes to the man, she always has to be a bigger person than he is, always give in first, always stifle her anger, always give up almost everything that’s important to her, while he acts like a spoiled brat and gets everything he wants. But after we’ve watched her squawk about not having gone to medical school, and her sister spending all her parents’ money, and then make an abrupt, completely oblivious about face, we know that this is not her first hypocrisy. The book is not badly written and is even humorous at times, but Kay’s fickleness is hard to overcome, souring what could have been a better book.

Nurse April

By Katherine McComb, ©1967

Maybe her kid brother was right, maybe April Bonner was a jinx. From her first day on the hospital staff as a full-fledged nurse, things began to happen. A mob rioted outside. A knife-waving fanatic invaded Emergency and seized April as a hostage. A baby was kidnaped from the nursery. Nurses’ training hadn’t prepared the tall, attractive redhead for anything quite like this. It also hadn’t prepared her for handsome young Dr. Ned Sparks, who didn’t mind if April became emotionally involved with him, though he seemed to be serious about someone else, but who warned her about becoming emotionally involved with any of her patients—a warning that came very close to being a tragic prophecy …

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“An R.N. in the family! A female who gives baths and bedpans to strange men—ugh!”

“What pretty girl doesn’t enjoy being stared at—or whistled at, for that matter?”

“You’re as pretty as a new stethoscope.”

“She knew he would be furious if he learned that Mrs. Norman had tried to shoot her, and later tried to wreck the car and kill them all.”

REVIEW:

I tell you, if you ever find out that April Bonner is a nurse at your hospital, pack your bags and run!! This “tall, lithe figure modeling a white nylon uniform, a small white cap perched smartly on her red-gold hair,” is a magnet for bad news, even for the ER, where she is sent her first day on the job. She gets a kid with an open tib-fib fracture after being hit by a car, a worker with chemical burns, and a gunshot victim whose treatment consists of stitching the bullet wounds closed. On her second day, there’s a mob rioting for never-specified concerns, and “mangled bodies” arrive in a constant stream. One of the rioters, looking for the leader of the gang, grabs April and holds a knife to her throat as Dr. Ned Sparks gives him a tour of every patient in the ED until he finds the leader’s corpse in the morgue. The man cries a bit, then pulls April out into the crowded street, where the mob is tear-gassed, but April is pulled to safety by Dr. Ned. Then, on her day off, Ned takes her to the beach, where he saves her from a rip tide that somehow manages to pull her out to sea when she tries to pick up a conch shell on the shore. And they almost get into a car crash on the way home. All this in just four days’ time.

One major source of excitement comes when a newborn is kidnapped after April puts him down for a nap, although April seems more upset about being blamed for the kidnapping than she is sympathetic for the frantic parents; she has “the tussle of her life” with the baby’s mother, who attempts to get out of bed to search the hospital for her missing son. But rest assured, April saves the day when she identifies the kidnapper after the police round up the usual suspects from their “list of women with mother complexes.” And we haven’t even scratched the surface of April’s fantastic exploits, either. There’s also a rollercoaster accident in which two teens fall from the car in front of April and both are killed (April pronounces one on scene and the other dies en route to the hospital); a car crash in which always-on-the-scene April pronounces three people dead and saves one from bleeding out by demanding a “clean white towel” (no other color will do, apparently) from one of the passengers and wrapping the patient’s head in it; a patient, driven crazy by an anonymous letter-writing campaign to make her think that April is trying to steal her husband, threatens April at gunpoint; and yet another car crash, this time with April actually in the car with the psychotic driver, after which April “hovered near death” from “a slight skull fracture and a few crushed ribs.” “Seems like you’re one of those people who always happen to be around wherever there’s trouble,” her brother Bob says, and he doesn’t know the half of it.

She’s also a magnet for the boys, and she is shocked that on her first day the interns are giving her “bold stares and wolf calls in the corridors,” and when she complains to Dr. Ned, he says, “I simply could not reprimand those interns for staring. I would probably have done the same thing myself.” It’s a horrible world the women in this book live in, where they are constantly judged on their appearance; one nurse is fired from her job because she “had a face as long as a donkey’s head, and ears as big,” and the nursing supervisor “went on with a chuckle, ‘the nurse would never take a beauty prize.’” Even April, speaking of her best friend Rita, says, “Rita arrived at April’s apartment in a tan pleated cotton dress that did nothing for her sallow complexion and only accentuated her large hips.” April saves another life when she takes charge and insists that Rita start “rolling on the floor to reduce your hips, and doing stooping exercises to flatten your tummy—and cutting out sweets. Then we’ll go shopping for some clothes with plain skirts, instead of those pleated things,” and she also dyes Rita’s hair and gives her weekly hairdos. And in no time flat Dr. Les Brown is proposing!

April is, unfortunately, a hypocrite. On the opening pages we hear about how April had, at the time of her own appendectomy, “caught a vision. She knew immediately, not what she wanted to be, but what she must be—a nurse. For three years she had dreamed of this moment, had worked toward it with all the strength of her young body and dedicated mind.” Yet once she’s clapped eyes on Dr. Ned, she’s ready to chuck it all: “She wanted only one thing—the love of one man. But she was slipping further and further away from that goal, as if the riptides of life were pulling her, dragging her under.” That may be true, but only because April is stupidly outraged when she tells Ned early on that he can’t be kissing her because he’s engaged to Eunice Frye, and he answers, “I’ve kissed a few pretty girls in my time, but I’ll swear on my Hippocratic oath that I’ve never asked one of them to marry me.” She immediately decides this means that he has decided he will never ask anyone to marry him, and again and again we’re reminded of her stupidity as she fumes along the lines of, “She had heard of men who could not tie themselves down to one woman, and he had practically admitted that he was one of them.” So if her constant snippy behavior to Dr. Ned leaves him disinterested, she only has herself to blame.

The writing here is choppy and comically bizarre, such as the description of one of April’s first ER patients: “It was a restaurant cook with three badly mangled fingers which had been caught in an electric meat grinder. Luckily, none had to be amputated.” As April’s adventures continue to pile up, the story seems increasingly outrageous; by the time the psycho patient pulled the revolver, I was giggling madly on the subway. April’s terrible dilemma over how to win Dr. Ned is solved by April herself after she comes out of her coma, when despite her broken ribs she flings her arms around his neck, pulls him close, and whispers, “I love you.” Her other terrible dilemma about having to quit her job after marriage—early on he’s monologuing, “I’m going to be head of my family, as well as breadwinner. That’s another trouble with these modern mothers. They bear a child, then turn it over to somebody—anybody—to bring it up while they take a job to make more money to buy more clothes, more automobiles, more household gadgets—things less important than the training of their child”—is solved when Ned decides to open a private office and magnanimously agrees to staff it with “Mrs. Ned Sparks.” Awww. Well, until Mrs. Ned Sparks becomes a mother. So overall, if you like the so-bad-it’s-good category, you should definitely add this strange volume to your library.

Jubilee Hospital

By Jan Tempest (pseud. Irene Mossop Swatridge), ©1958

Verna’s career was going very well. At twenty-three she was the youngest Sister the Jubilee Hospital had ever had. But at home, too, she was the youngest sister, continually overshadowed by the brilliant, charming Daphne, and that fact brought a good many unwelcome complications into Verna’s life.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:

“Verna wondered if it was a sign of weakness in her that she did rather thrill to a man like Moray Morton-Alleyne. To be taken in hand by him, to be loved and cherished and possessed by such a forceful personality would be a marvelously exciting experience.”

“The yearning for power is very strong in most women.”

“Men don’t choose wives for their suitability.”

“The police are really most inconsiderate these days.”

“Very few patients have any sense.”

“I’ll try not to drive you to drink or drugs.”

REVIEW:

Verna Ellesworth is the youngest of a trio of sisters that includes middle daughter Ellice and Daphne, the eldest. Verna is a wallflower at home, dubbed, unfortunately, “Baby,” though at work she is hard-working and smart enough to be made the head nurse of the pediatrics ward at age 23. Her sister Ellice has it a lot worse in the nickname department, though, as she’s called “Elephant” by their oh-so-charming sister Daphne. Daphne is a glamorous, beautiful, charismatic young woman who had enthralled or been engaged to half the men in town, moved on to Edinburg where she’d become engaged to a Scottish doctor she calls “MM,” then ditched him at the last minute and eloped with a wealthy Californian 20 years her senior, which is considered a terrible letdown by Daphne’s family. Now that she’s gone, Ellice and Verna are forging lives—love and otherwise—of their own. Ellice is in love with bounder Clay Derrilles, one of “Daphne’s Discards” and son of the town’s rich man. Clay, however, is never going to notice the “brainy” Ellice, an unsentimental, “uncompromisingly squarish,” “much less fun” straight shooter who is “too broad for feminine standards.” If Ellice is not always kind in her speaking, she is always honest, and her actions are extraordinarily caring. She’s decided that since Clay won’t have her, she’s going to pick up another Discard, Francis French, a journalist who is funny, smart, and steady, and as fate would have it, he likes her too. “Let’s face it!” Ellice snaps at Verna when she is reluctant to approve the match. “One can’t always have what one wants, if one doesn’t happen to be a Daphne, isn’t it as well to settle for what one can have, before it’s too late? Francis and I understood each other. We’re neither of us wildly romantic, but we like being together. We shall make a good team.” And they do, as we have ample opportunity to witness.

For her part, Verna feels she is doomed to be a forgotten waif. She is “nice and conscientious and endearing, but not in the least outstanding. It wasn’t often that Verna distinguished herself in any way.” But right out of the gate, she encounters Dr. Morton-Alleyne, and instantly “she felt as if she had just received a violent electric shock,” and suddenly she had “known with a wild, unshakable conviction that he was the fulfilment of her vague and childish dreams.” “She knew that this particular man was for her and she for him. It was equivalent to pairing gloves. There could be no uncertainty. A pair was a pair.” I know that sounds nauseating, but the portrait we are given of Verna as a very young innocent makes it somehow seem reasonable that she should feel this way. She’s so naïve, in fact, that she fails to figure out until very late in the book what the reader realized on about page 20: That Dr. Moray Morton-Allyne, who hails from – wait for it – Edinburg, is actually the Discard who had been engaged to and relieved from marrying Daphne when she ran off with the Californian.

Anyway, the plot—and there is one—involves the Habbitt family: mom Dora gives birth to quintuplets who are nursed into life and health by Dr. Morton and Verna. Husband Bill, driving recklessly to his wife’s side in Clay’s car (Bill works for Clay’s dad), gets into a wreck that gravely injures an old man, Clay included, and flees unseen from the scene, leaving Clay in the hospital holding the bag for a possible manslaughter rap should the pedestrian die. Peculiarly, Clay decides not to rat out Bill but instead pleads amnesia to such a degree that not only is he unable to remember the accident, he also thinks Verna is Daphne come home to marry him, and he insists she wear Daphne’s old engagement ring. Now we have one of those VNRN tropes, the one where the ill, usually paralyzed man must be allowed to think that he’s engaged to our heroine, who does not love him. Clay even has a slipped disc in his back, but his ability to ambulate is mercifully barely questioned. Furthermore, everyone thinks Clay is faking it, and he is soon forced to acknowledge the fact, but everyone is still pressing Verna to marry Clay, including Clay himself.

The wrench in the works for Clay is that eventually Moray takes Verna into his arms and tells her that he loves her. “She raised her lips to his in glad, frank surrender.” OK, that’s unfortunate, but again it is entirely within Verna’s character. Unfortunately, Daphne turns up shortly thereafter, having been divorced after a year of marriage to her Californian, with the intention of reclaiming M.M. Verna, who has idolized Daphne as a near goddess, instantly throws in the towel and breaks off her engagement with Moray, telling him he should have let her know he had been engaged to her sister (which he should have) and that she knows he’s still in love with Daphne.

Back in her own back yard, Daphne turns out to be quite horrid. She’s a self-centered, mean, overdressed (who wears diamonds and sapphires to the Nurse’s Ball?), shallow divorcée, and Verna and Ellice instantly recognize this. She drapes herself around Moray, who clearly is not enjoying it but astonishingly loses what until now has been an overly sturdy spine and is unable to tell her straight up that he has no interest in her. For her part, Verna is pathetically blind to Moray’s discomfort as well as his attempts to tell her that he loves only her. On the evening of Ellice’s engagement party, which Daphne plans to make as much about her as possible, the steadfast Ellice pulls off a stunt that plays on Daphne’s shallow character and causes her to publicly relinquish Moray and instead cast herself into Clay’s arms—the former cad now found new strength and character from his brush with death or incarceration and likely to be able to bring Daphne to heel. So Moray, having done nothing on his own to cast Daphne aside, is now free for Verna to accept again.

The hokiness of some of the plot threads made me want to not like this book, but it just couldn’t be helped. It’s an enjoyable story that sucks you into its characters, infuriating as they can be—how can Mr. Ellesworth be so enthralled with his most disagreeable daughter?—while giving you some really lovely people who make you look up with eagerness when they enter a room, Ellice and Francis in particular. Even Daphne, horrid is as she is, is still interesting to watch, catlike, as you wait for her inevitable downfall. Characters believably grow, and if Verna and Daphne are not any of those, the surrounding cast and the brisk plotting make this a very pleasant story. Only after I had finished it did I realize that the author also gave us Nurse Willow’s Ward, another absorbing story of a family of sisters with snappy dialogue (snappier than this book, it must be confessed). Author Irene Swatridge apparently wrote huge numbers of romance novels, so I look forward to meeting the nurses among them.