Dr. Garrett’s Girl

By Miriam Lynch, ©1970 

Why did the name of Dr. Kennett Garrett turn every face hostile, and seal all lips? Lovely young nurse Julie Garrett desperately wanted to find out. For she was Dr. Garrett’s daughter, too young to have really known him, when he died, and now back for the first time in the closely knit New England town where he had practiced. Quickly Julie found work in the office of Dr. Robert MacDougall. Soon she had lost her heart to the handsome young physician, and earned the hatred of the beautiful, willful woman who wanted him for her own. But the trials of love paled beside the threat of terror as a shadowy figure tried to force Julie to give up her search for the key that would unlock the doors of mystery that surrounded the past—and free her to find happiness with the man of her dreams.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“He could be impatient with middle-aged women with lives of such paucity that they wasted his time and their money with imaginary ailments. Once Julie heard him snap at one of them to stop reading medical columns in magazines and go home and scrub her kitchen floor and thank God for her good health.” 

“He, like all doctors, never wrote anything that could be deciphered without eyestrain and loss of temper.”

“They tell me it’s not cause for gossip these days if a girl goes to a man’s apartment at dinnertime.”

REVIEW:
Julie Garrett is on vacation when she arrives in Riverford, the town in which she spent her first six years, and where her father, Dr. Kenneth Garrett, was the town doctor. She’d wanted to see her early home, but is startled when the proprietor of the shabby and struggling hotel turns her away after she reveals she’s Dr. Garrett’s daughter: “I don’t have a room in the place for you. Just remembered,” he tells her convincingly. Confused, she stumbles into the current doctor’s office and meets Dr. Robert MacDougall and finds that he is “someone she had fashioned in her hopes and dreams.” He, of course—overworked, over-dedicated small-town GP—is clueless about the mystery that makes door after door close in Julie’s face after she accepts Dr. MacDougall’s desperate plea that she accept a job in his overrun office and looks for an apartment to rent, to find only a room in the house of elderly spinster Charlotte Spencer, who is clearly lying to Julia when she denies any knowledge of Dr. Garrett. 

Of course there is the usual rich, evil woman longing to hook Dr. Robert, and she is Flavia Harrison, a widow with a four-year-old diabetic son and heir to the fortune of the Lawrence family, who founded the hospital, school, and even Dr. Garrett’s education. She literally stomps over Julie at their first meeting, as she pushes her way past a room full of patients for an “urgent” confab with the doctor, who seems unable to tell her to take a number. Julie is not able to say no, either, remaining at her job for only the crumbs of attention of the overworked doctor who never has time to thank her for her overtime: “He was completely absorbed in his work, and he evidently saw no reason for praise or comment on her long hours and hard work.”

Then the calls in the night, a rasping voice croaking, “You’re not wanted here,” the letters adorably composed of cutout newspaper letters stating the same, the slashed tires, all convince her that she’s wasting her time pining after a man who cares not for her and who is so clearly in the sights of a very determined woman. On the verge of packing her bags, she meets Craig Farnsworth, Flavia’s brother, and now Julie is the one being chased—taken out every night for dinners and dancing. Robert, damn him, amiably chats up Craig in the office when the young man pops in to wait for Julie at the end of the day, “did not even seem to notice that she had a suitor,” such a cute word!

You can see the natural disaster peeking over the horizon at mid book, so you will not be surprised when it starts to rain. The river, so close to a community of poor folks too proud to ask for help, begins to rise. Curiously, this also coincides with a  huge surge in disease requiring hospitalization, so Julie is sent to help staff the local hospital, where she works about 30 hours straight without sleep or even meals—and for once, no “note of recognition or hostility. She had simply been one of them, working as hard as she could to keep death at bay.”

While on her hospital tour, she cares for an attorney, Martin Balfour, as well as her landlady, Charlotte Spencer, both of whom cough up more than a little pneumonia-associated phlegm as they reveal that they, along with Julie’s father and Eleanora Lawrence, town darling and original heir to the town founder’s fortune, were a firm foursome as young people—one wonders if Charlotte hadn’t been, along with the two young men, in love with Eleanora. More truth unfolds—though it’s hard to see how this will improve Julie’s standing in town—though it is perplexing why she is held responsible to such a high degree for alleged sins of her father, who had died 20 years previously—not much to think about in small towns, apparently—but so too does the truth between Julie and Robert emerge, so there’s half an unsurprising happy ending for you.

Though the writing is not much more than average, I did appreciate this book for the actual surprise, after 500+ nurse novel reviews, this book offered in the reason for Julie’s ostracism, as well as in its climactic scene, in which the motivations and villains are laid bare. If the repercussions—does the villain get away with it, as it seems they will? Will Julie be accepted by the community at last?—and the problem of the heroine falling in love with a man who barely recognizes her existence and who promises only that “although he left her often, he would always come back to her” are left unanswered, overall this is a book with at least a bit of novelty to it that makes it worth reading.

Leave It to Nurse Kathy

By Arlene Hale, ©1963 

Kathy Dugan, lovely nurse at Benton General Hospital, was very much in love with Dr. Jerry Whitfield, handsome young surgeon. Not only were they a marvelous team whose combined efforts had saved many a life, but rumor had it that they were soon to be married. But one day Kathy saw an announcement in the society pages of the local newspaper that was like a physical blow. Jerry was to be married—to someone else! The next few months were like a nightmare to Kathy. She quit her job at Benton and became the assistant to another doctor—whose past was shrouded in mystery. Then she met the handsome Dave: athlete, scholar and principal of the high school. Kathy’s mind was in a whirl, and all three men were constantly in her thoughts. Then, out of the clearest blue, disaster struck. And Death reached out its fingers for one of the three. It was then Kathy realized whom she really loved—and whose life meant more to her than anything in the world.

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“So I know a tibia from a fibula and can handle a hypodermic syringe with the best of them! But when it comes to love—” 

“You’d give anyone a fever!”

“You know, I’m a healthy guy. But if I thought you’d be my nurse, I’d go out and try to catch a virus of some kind.”

REVIEW:
Nurse Kathy Dugan is held up to us as the very best scrub nurse in the whole world. But it’s hard to reconcile that assertion with the fact that, when she discovers that her casual boyfriend, surgeon Jerry Whitfield, is engaged to another woman, she quits on the spot. I mean, wow. It’s hard to get much more unprofessional than that.

Fortunately, the very skinny Dr. Nile Mason has come home from Africa. His father had been the beloved town general practitioner, and had hoped that Nile would take over his practice, but Nile had been lured by the bright lights and big paychecks of the big city. There, it is suggested, he fell in love with a woman named Maria, but it didn’t work out. Africa didn’t work out, either, so he’s back and darned grumpy about it. The town isn’t too impressed with his surly ways, but he gradually accumulates patients anyway, particularly since he has Kathy to run his front office and smooth over the irritated townsfolk.

Soon Kathy starts dating Dave Garst, who is the new football coach and principal of the high school. Dave is a super nice guy, “cheerful, determined, eager to build a satisfactory world of his own.” Naturally, all she thinks about is Jerry. Rumors start to fly about her and Nile, though, after her nosy landlady can’t help but see Nile kiss Kathy one evening after he’d become nauseous eating the dinner she’d made for him. This naturally made him decide he should have more love in his life, and he was “alone in a room with a pretty girl who seemed at least to care a little about him.” True love sparks! Rumors are also circulating about Nile and his ex hometown girlfriend, who, crushed by his sudden departure for New York, had married a guy she didn’t love who is now driven to homicidal lunacy by his jealousy. There’s a skinny kid shadowing Nile, too, but Nile promptly catches the boy and beats him up, so if we had any doubts, it becomes clear he isn’t the most stable of characters. Come to think of it, there aren’t many decent characters in this book at all.

Anyway, the inevitable breakup of Jerry and his society girlfriend that you saw coming from the moment it was announced in the paper (apparently the only one who took it seriously was Kathy) occurs, and now Jerry is back on Kathy’s front porch, asking her to come back to his OR and to his arms. But, as forewarned by the back-cover blurb, disaster strikes! And Death reached out its fingers for one of the three! Because nothing makes a gal swoon more than a man bleeding out! Anyway, the book ends with the bleeding man’s life saved and his dignity intact, too, as he tells Kathy that once they’re married she won’t be able to boss him around anymore. Awww. My heart melted.

The story here is a little all over the place, with many loose threads and characters all trying to find an empty lap, but very little reason for the reader to care about any of them except poor Dave, who is the most deserving and least respected man in Kathy’s life. The ending doesn’t make you feel any better about any of it, because you do feel that the guy who landed Kathy could have done better for himself, as she’s not particularly thoughtful, strong, or even likable. I’m not sure what author Arlene Hale wanted us to leave to Nurse Kathy, as directed by the title, when Kathy really doesn’t seem capable of managing much. A better exhortation would be for us to just leave Nurse Kathy, period, as you probably won’t value any time spent with her.

Nurse Julie

By Mary Mann Fletcher, ©1967

When lovely, blond Julie Blake saved the life of young Rammie Wynant—the frail, neglected son of millionaire Bram Wyant—even the arrogant Dr. Ben Foreman had a few words of praise for her. Certainly Julie was a brilliant nurse. But she was also a woman, and she soon found herself hoping that Dr. Foreman was gazing at her with more than professional interest. And when Julie suddenly found herself being courted by a mysterious stranger, the doctor’s jealous reaction suggested that his interest was not just her imagination. What were Ben Foreman’s true feelings toward Julie? And who was this enigmatic stranger who claimed to be just a beachcomber … but whose sophisticated manner suggested much more? A near tragedy revealed the truth about both men. Now Julie had to discover the truth about herself.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“Any night of the week in emergency rooms of hospitals all over the world brings grief and heartache and harrowing sounds of pain and despair, but Saturday night brings more misery than has a right to exist.”

“Ben Foreman gives me a trachelodynia—that’s a pain in the neck, as if you didn’t know.” 

REVIEW:
I really do not understand why there is such a firmly established trope in nurse romance novels in which a moody, mean, distant man is exactly the guy our heroine tumbles for. Why is that a thing? It makes absolutely no sense, and yet here we are, for the hundredth time, meeting “easily the most unpopular doctor at Hope Hospital with the nursing staff, because of his rough manner and abrupt way of talking” and “black moods and general surliness,” Dr. Ben Foreman. One night, alone in the ED, Nurse Julie Blake oversteps her scope of practice and suctions a choking nine-year-old boy. Brusquely shoved aside when Dr. Foreman shows up, she talks to the housekeeper who’d brought the boy in and learns that he’d been eating peanuts, and suggests to the doctor that the kid likely aspirated one. Turns out she’s right, but Dr. Foreman can only chastise her for having taken off her regulation stockings in the hot Florida night. “But somehow every time she was around him, she found her heart beating faster and she had trouble keeping her mind on her work.” It’s hard to understand why a talented, intelligent woman doesn’t think she deserves better.

We are allowed into Dr. Foreman’s crabbed little mind, only to discover a personality deeply in need of therapy. He’s an orphan who had fought hard to succeed but was sponsored in medical school by a single rich man who essentially adopted him—so he certainly could have had it a lot worse. Ben has decided to be an “open-heart” surgeon, and “would have years and years of study ahead of him, as well as additional years of residency. He never thought of girls, never dreamed of marriage—he couldn’t afford such a luxury, not for at least another five years. His hatefulness toward Julie in the emergency room was a defense mechanism,” because he seems to believe that he can have either his career or a girlfriend, but not both. Come to think of it, this is exactly the choice the women are often forced to make: career or marriage? Except that for Ben, it’s a temporary sacrifice, whereas for the women, it’s permanent.

So throughout most of the book, we watch Ben being angry, hostile ass, and we watch her waffle: One minute she’s mooning over him and the next deciding that “she actually didn’t enjoy being with Ben—he was much too disagreeable to her, too likely to cut the ground from under her with a word or a look.” “Why should she be so anxious to please a man who either ignored her or insulted her?” Good question! And one that, unfortunately, we will never find a satisfactory answer.

A hundred pages into this fairly dull book, out of nowhere Ben walks Julie to the bus stop and kisses her goodnight. She’s struck starry-eyed, but the next day she’s off for the weekend to the home of the choking boy from the opening chapter, Rammie Wyant, invited by the housekeeper while Rammie’s father Bram is away on a business trip—a bizarre situation, completely unprofessional for both women. While sunning herself by the beach cabana, Julie meets a beachcomber and spends the afternoon frolicking in the sun with him, then out for a luxe date—“My goodness, twenty dollars for two dinners!” she exclaims. “What are you anyway—a millionaire?” Of course, the answer is yes, he’s Bram, hoping to get Julie to like him for himself, not his money.

Initially it seems like Bram will succeed, but then there’s a hurricane, and Ben and Julie are trapped in the hospital, caring for a house full of patients on a short staff—and even on a good night, Julie and one other nurse manage 17 patients (today, six patients for a night nurse is usually the max). The hospital, which in a side plot is on the verge of being closed down by cold, unfeeling real estate developers eyeing the hospital’s prime location on the Florida coast, is eventually saved as you knew it would be, but by an out-of-left-field bizarre coincidence that felt completely lame. In their joy, Ben and Julie start kissing on the sun porch, and somehow this is meant to signify that “it was Ben that she wanted, had wanted all along,” so there’s another disappointing ending, in which she discards a kind, thoughtful man who is happy to be with her for one who is an unmitigated jerk through much of the book. Author Mary Mann Fletcher seems to like horrible men, as she created several in the D-rated Psychiatric Nurse, a book so bad it might be worth reading. I’m not sure, though, that I find this C-grade book a step up, because in the end I can’t really recommend you spend any time on Nurse Julie.

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.

A Nurse Comes Home

By Georgia Craig (pseud. Peggy Gaddis), ©1963

“Stick to your own world, you’ll never last here,” handsome, young Dr. Chastain told Nurse Holly on her first day at Mission Hospital. Holly had left a luxurious world as private nurse to wealthy patients to work among the city’s poor, but Dr. Chastain, in charge of Mission Hospital, was not impressed. He seemed to go out of his way to be unpleasant to Holly and made it plain he disliked her and her “charity.” Holly couldn’t understand why she wanted his approval so much. Didn’t she have wealthy Murray Howard in love with her? She couldn’t care for two men at the same time—or could she?

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“He’s a swell guy and a caution with them knives and scalpels of his.”

“I admire the skill and the competence of luxury doctors. I also admire the nerve with which they present exorbitant bills for minor services.”

“Doctors and interns are too busy with their professions and careers to think about marriage.”

“I never thought I’d see the day when I’d find a girl who could look even lovelier in a formal dress than in a nurse’s uniform. There’s something about those starchy, rustly white outfits that make a fellow feel that all’s going to be right with the world as soon as the nurse puts a cool hand on his fevered brow.”

REVIEW:

Nurse Hollace Lowman is a 22-year-old nurse in search of a man. “I’m going to fall in love one of these days, for keeps, and I’m going to get married for life, and have a home. That’s what I’ve wanted more than anything else in the world,” she says. This obsession stems not only from the mores of the age but from the fact that she is a “half-orphan”—her mother died and her father took off for parts unknown, leaving her to be raised in foster homes. But don’t feel sorry for her; she’s no Oliver Twist! “I was well cared for and sent to school just like anybody else,” she declares. And now she’s a vagabond living in a hotel with a box containing all her worldly possessions; so much for her deep connections with her foster parents.

At least, though, she cares for patients well-to-do enough to keep her in the finest mansions and summer homes while she’s ministering to their health needs. Again, though, the author wants to put the usual trope on its ear, as when Hollace is accused of pampering “the imagined ills of hypochondriacs,” she defends her rich clientele with vigor, saying, “a great many of them are seriously ill. They have operations from which their recovery is slow and sometimes painful; they have accidents.”

To wit, when we meet Hollace, she is just putting the finishing touches on the recovery of wealthy Paige Randolph, who is four weeks out from an appendectomy that nearly killed her—hard to believe that’s true, but this is fiction, after all—and is still not yet allowed to drive her own car. On their way home from the country farm where Paige has been convalescing, they drop by Mission Hospital, which the snobbish, shallow Paige has most uncharacteristically adopted as her pet charity project; indeed, many times in the book she is credited as being the only reason the hospital is still in business. But it’s not the hospital or the “horrible people … not really human beings” that Paige really cares about. “If you could see the way they live, the utter squalor! They are animals,” she says of the patients. Rather it’s the tall, cool drink of water that is Dr. Elliot Chastain she has her eyes on, though he is giving mixed signals. We hear that his eyes light up when she comes by, but his speech to her is sarcastic and indulgent, not exactly signs of true love.

When Paige and Hollace pull up to the front door, they find Miss Sara Ballard, 80-year-old resident RN, wracked with pain from a cancer that she won’t get treated because then there would be no nurse at the hospital—obviously missing the point that if she’s out a month for cancer treatment that’s less than she’ll be out if she dies from it. Hollace is instantly smitten with Miss Sara and volunteers not only to come work for the clinic but to do it for free and to pay for things the patients need out of her own pocket. In short, Hollace is a patsy, and proves it by wandering outside one night after she’s moved into the hospital and being dragged at knifepoint to the drug cabinet so she can get her new friend some opioids. Fortunately Dr. Chastain interrupts the interview and the gentleman caller is hauled off to the clink.

All this cements Dr. Chastain’s opinion of Hollace as a soft, lazy babe in the woods with an immorally cushy job. “I’m a nurse, not a glamour gal,” Hollace spits, and actually gets into a pretty feisty row with Dr. Chastain the likes of which I’ve not seen in a Peggy Gaddis novel, where the ladies usually just roll over for their lord and master, the MD. But of course the pair starts off the book throwing lots of verbal knives at each other, until page 48, when Dr. Chastain kisses her. “My goodness gracious!” she thinks later. “Why, I liked having him hold me! I liked having him kiss me! I’m not sure I didn’t kiss him back! Oh, how could I have?”

Before long, Hollace has attracted the attention of worthless playboy Murray Howard, who had previously devoted himself to Paige. That spurned woman is now furiously jealous of Hollace, though she continues to profess no interest in Murray. Eventually Murray proposes to Hollace, but she by that point knows she is in love with Dr. Chastain and gently turns him down. Eventually Paige wins the battle by bringing Miss Sara back from her convalescence, so now Hollace is out of a job and goes trudging reluctantly back to the penthouses of her former patients. But now “she grew very weary of their constant absorption in their own concerns. Neurotics, all of them, she told herself distastefully.”

Not to worry, though: Another VNRN trope in the form of a huge fire sweeps through the slums, and Hollace drops her self-absorbed, neurotic patient on the eiderdown counterpane and sprints back to the hospital. She works tirelessly for countless hours, and when the fire is out and all the burned patients are swathed in bandages and tucked in bed, she announces she’s coming back to work there permanently! Then the news trickles in that the townspeople are so ashamed that there was a slum in town, which somehow they have been completely unaware of until now, that they are rebuilding it and will charge no rent for the houses there and are building a toy factory where all the poor slobs can work to boot! On the last page, Hollace has a big blowout with Dr. Chastain and tells him she’s in love with him, and then it’s just half a page more before we can close the book.

This book of Peggy Gaddis’, here writing as Georgia Craig, that seems like it set out to reinvent some of the old standards, like the unhappy orphan, the undeserved rich patients (though it changes its mind at the end), the heroine who can’t say how she feels, even the degree of defiance the nurse demonstrates toward the doctor, as Gaddis usually loves to have a heroine scrappy of speech but wilting of action—which even Hollace can’t completely avoid when she says, “I’ve come home at last, because wherever you are is always going to be home for me.” But we’ve also got plenty of the usual suspects: the initial antagonism between the future lovebirds, the slums reborn, the much beloved elderly woman (a major staple in Gaddis novels, although here Miss Sara seems more imperious than lovable, and has an awkward habit of constantly referring to the slum’s residents as “my people” as if she were a queen). A few minor flaws include the fact that the work Hollace does at Mission Hospital is never described, nor are we told why it becomes so compelling to her. And Paige’s longstanding and time-consuming interest in the hospital is completely outside of her flitting, superficial character. But Gaddis can be a very good writer (except when her carefree—usually rich—women are “caroling” instead of speaking), and overall the book’s differences from the usual fare make it worth reading.