Border Nurse

By Dorothy Dowdell, ©1963 

Jeanne Reynolds was troubled over the events of the past few days. She had been following the explicit instructions of the owners of the Desert Valley Growers’ clinic. Then what did the warning from Merritt Williams mean? “I’m afraid you’re going to be hurt,” he had said last night as they stood at her door. “I find you enchanting, Miss Head Nurse of the Growers’ Clinic. But I’m afraid that one of my cleverest plans is going to boomerang on me.” He had kissed her then. The morning headlines made clear his meaning. Jeanne realized then that her heart had mistaken a foe for a friend.

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“I’d rather be glamorous than nice.” 

“When I grow up, I’m going to buy a Geiger counter and hunt for uranium.” 

“Think about me sometimes while you’re strapping a sprained ankle or giving a shot.”

“I’m quite dangerous with a hypo when I think of some of the exasperating things you do and say.”

“She’d better get busy! She’s twenty-four. She’ll be an old maid if she doesn’t look out!”

“We’re going to get married no matter what happened, but it will be lots nicer to be solvent.”

REVIEW:
Jeanne Reynolds has left her job in Los Angeles to work run the clinic for Mexican migrant workers under the auspices of the Growers’ Association of Desert Valley, California, largely because she is fluent in Spanish (her father grew up in the Panama Canal Zone, as his father had been a government employee there, and spoke the language at home). You’d think, though, that poor Jeanne has a hex on her for all the trouble that brews up. First, a hot young lawyer named Merritt Williams who is working to unionize the native-born American migrant farm workers shows up at her clinic with an injured American worker. She is unable to treat the man, though, because this clinic is set up exclusively for the Mexican workers through a joint agreement between the Mexican and American governments. The resulting publicity—a full-page ad in the paper the following day—names her as the villain in the incident, misquoting her and misrepresenting her actions. She is furious about it, but her boss is even more so! “The biggest mistake I ever made was hiring you!” he shrieks before stomping off. She’s so upset that “not even a shower and putting on a becoming green jersey dress raised Jeanne’s spirits” after this exchange.

Later she tells off Merritt for attacking her personally, telling him, “I never want to have anything to do with you again!” But that darned guy is “the most exciting person she’d ever met! He’s like a Greek god,” so before long she’s out on a date with him, swooning in his arms on the dance floor. He reveals that his parents were migrant farm workers, and that’s why he is fighting so hard to unionize them. Then he drops the bomb that “I’d have to be the master of my household. If you learn to care for me, it will be because you think I am invincible. In your heart, you want to be dominated.” And that’s where I would make a beeline for the door, but it doesn’t seem to phase Jeanne one bit. “Was he right? Did she really want to be dominated?”

Next the Mexican consul shows up at the clinic because some patients are complaining about Jeanne, and then a patient that Jeanne has prescribed a medication for a stomach bug dies the day after he saw her, so everyone is convinced the man was poisoned by Jeanne’s prescription. Jeanne’s boss takes the opportunity to chew her out again, so she cries on Merritt’s shoulder and in the process decides that she’s in love with him. “If he asked her to marry him, she knew she would accept.”

But the union guys are causing trouble for the growers by getting the migrant workers to refuse to work for them, so their crops can’t be harvested. A good friend of Jeanne’s, Gary Hunter, is a farmer whose small tomato farm is on the brink of bankruptcy, so Jeanne helps him out by spending one Saturday picking tomatoes with a bunch of his friends. Now it’s Merritt’s turn to chew out Jeanne, because she’d crossed a picket line to help Gary, and seethes through most of their date until she finally snaps and tells him that Gary can’t support the unions because their contract requires him to guarantee laborers work 30 hours a week, and his small farm doesn’t need that amount of labor. “He doesn’t make profit enough to pay a lot of idle men,” she points out, so Merritt declares he’s not going to discuss the matter any further, a convenient tactic for jerks who are wrong. The next day, delivering dinner to Gary after he’s been working in the fields, Jeanne discovers that his truck full of tomatoes had been attacked and his crop destroyed by three anonymous gangsters. She’s convinced that Merritt is behind the attack, so she leaves a letter in his mailbox that she never wants to see him again. “She was in love with Merritt, but she had to admit that he had a merciless streak in him.”

How will it all wind up? Likely as you think it will, but not the way you wish it had, as she lets Gary, the nicest man in the book, get away. She also seems entirely pleased to be walking away from her career—well, it must be acknowledged that she’s had the most difficult year ever—to become a wife and mother. Curiously, a side plot about the married doctor she works for possibly having an affair, possibly with Jeanne’s roommate—the doctor repeatedly asks Jeanne to call his house at 10:30 pm and say that he needs to come to the clinic immediately, and Jeanne, the dope, always goes along with this unethical behavior, thinking that “it’s none of my business,” clearly not realizing that her actions are making her a part of it, that she is helping to cause the pain experienced by his young son, with whom she is good friends. We never find out what’s actually behind the doctor’s actions, though Jeanne decides “the doctor would have his periodical affairs, and nothing would change.”  There are some interesting debates about the work that laborers do and how it is valuable but not valued—not unlike those in the similar book Graduate Nurse—and Jeanne’s arguments with Merritt hint that she will stand up to him, he will not be the “master” of his household, and that he will actually appreciate her reasoning from time to time. It would be a more interesting book, though, if these parts played a bigger role, and we had greater confidence that the man might actually come to realize the error of his chauvanistic ways. As it is, it’s a mild enough read, with enjoyable armchair travel of the Southern California desert country.

Saturday’s Child

By Betty Neels, ©1972 

Abigail was a true ‘Saturday’s child’; she worked very hard for her living. And it looked as if she could expect to go on earning her own living, for no one seemed to be in any great hurry to marry her—least of all Dominic van Wijkelen, who admired her as a nurse but who seemed to have no personal feeling for her at all—except dislike!

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“Abigail took off her gloves and unwound her scarf and went to find the kitchen, small and a little old-fashioned, with a gay gingham frill round the mantelshelf above the small electric cooker and a row of pot plants on the windowsill.” 

“There was no doubt at all that pretty clothes did a lot for a girl.”

“Happy times are for remembering.”

REVIEW:
This is the fourth VNRN by Betty Neels that I have read, and all the usual ingredients are here: The plucky 24-year-old orphan, here called Abigail Trent, with few friends and no family, a hard worker who never complains—the book’s title being a reference to an English verse, the book explains: “Saturday’s child has to work for her living, and Abigail was a term used some hundreds of years ago to denote a serving woman.” She thinks herself “not in the least pretty,” failing to understand that her kindness, honesty, and smile (not to mention a new pink dress) render her quite beautiful, indeed. She’s hired to work in Amsterdam caring for an English woman with a gastric ulcer, and there she meets Neels Standard #2, Professor Dominic van Wijkelen, a “giant of a man,” handsome and 40, “arrogant and ill-humored,” always treating our stalwart heroine “with the cold courtesy she had come to believe was the only alternative to his ill-humor.” But she refuses to be overly intimidated by the man and occasionally throws some sass his way, which clearly rocks his world view but makes him take more notice of her as an independent woman not interested in chasing his skirts. 

Next is the Neels Standard Plot: Though he is nearly relentlessly mean to her, occasionally he is kind, and soon—here on page 54—“somewhere behind that forbidding manner must be the man she had fallen in love with.” And though “the professor was as likely to fall in love with her as the moon would turn to cheese” (wensleydale?), he does keep finding work for her that keeps her in Holland and him visiting her (patients) every day. Neels is likely to toss in a dance that he invites her to after which he kisses her and tells her, “You have almost restored my faith in women,” hinting at a broken heart that has kept him bitter and alone. There will be at least one child in the story, here Dominic’s three-year-old niece Nina, who requires expert nursing that he witnesses with extreme gratitude as she works tirelessly—sometimes around the clock—to encourage the lovable muffin back from the brink of death.

In this iteration of the Neels classic, we are lucky to meet two delightful elderly characters, both much beloved by Dominic and who need nursing by Abigail. She brings another elder to the table, a former employee of Abby’s family before her parents died, when they were better off, and to whom she is extremely devoted, planning to support for the duration of her career; Dominic hires the old man to be a gardener and odd-jobs man. These three we can see have wisely assessed the hurdles the relationship between Dominic and Abigail must clear and are working behind the scenes—sometimes literally, as we are not always witnesses to what we can easily believe to be their gentle hands on the wheel—to assist the would-be lovers to an understanding.

Ultimately it becomes harder for me to know what to do with Betty Neels. Though this is, on its own, an excellent book, it shares so many similarities with the three preceding books I have reviewed that it’s hard not to feel like I am getting the same whole cloth I have had before, just with a few different patches sewn on to differentiate it for the sake of the copyright laws. It’s a great book easily worth recommending, but I just wish I wasn’t closing the cover feeling that I’ve read it all before.

Kit Cavendish—Private Nurse

By Margaret Malcolm ©1965 

Kit had always taken care to keep her work as a private nurse quite separate from her private life—but she was unable to prevent this happening when she took a job in the Baylis household. And as things turned out, she was quite right to be apprehensive about it.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Whether we liked it or not, there’s only one world for everybody to share, and the sooner we realized that we had no right to expect a bigger or better share than other people, the more we would enjoy what we had got.” 

“You know, with a face like yours, anyone would imagine you had a sweet, sympathetic nature. Always ready to lay a soothing hand on a fevered brow—metaphorically in this place, of course. But how wrong one would be!”

REVIEW:
Kit Cavendish, who has been working as a private nurse for the past year, has just been hired to care for a wealthy gentleman recovering from a broken leg sustained when he fell while having a heart attack—so he has two ailments to recover from. As it happens, this man lives just outside Kit’s hometown, which she left six years ago for her training. She no longer has any family in the area to bring her back before now, but she accepted the job because she thought it might be fun to go back and see her former haunts. 

It isn’t. It turns out there’s a big new factory in town—owned by her patient, Ralph Baylis—and as a result, “Where there had been fields and farms and perhaps a few isolated houses there were now rows and rows and rows of small, ugly houses, each exactly like its neighbor,” built to house the new workforce. Then there’s a young man from her past, Victor Wrinch, who is now an accountant for the factory. Years ago he’d had some unrealistic ideas about his relationship with Kit, who was too nice for too long about it, until the day she found “she had had to be almost brutal” to clue him in to her disinterest in him romantically. But when she arrives in town by train, Victor is the one waiting to meet her at the station, telling her that he and Ruth Baylis, her patient’s wife, had decided on Kit for the job: “Someone intelligent who could keep him occupied with other interests so that he doesn’t have time to worry” about the factory. Or the fact that Ruth Baylis—incidentally 20 years Ralph’s junior and his former secretary—has stepped into the role of running the business while Ralph is home doing nothing at all out of fear that he might have another coronary. Unfortunately, you can see the trouble coming a mile away, because how could a woman possibly run a company well? “When a woman thinks she’s as clever as a man—or cleverer—she always goes too far, simply to convince other people. And she doesn’t care what methods she uses either.” Another option for this story line—and a more interesting one at that—would have been that Ruth actually was good at running the company, but Ruth starts out mean and lying, so we know something shady is afoot.

Then who should show up but Jason Heathfield! (If I’m going to snark about the Baylis’ age difference, I should also mention with raised brow that he’s 14 years older than Kit.) He is the cardiologist on the case, and had abruptly ditched Kit four years ago for no apparent reason; of course, “she could never marry any other man” after that. So now she has Jason’s slightly warm—or is it just slightly less cold?—demeanor to negotiate on top of the family drama, which includes not just the mystery of what Mrs. Baylis and Victor are doing at the factory, but Ralph’s son Noel (from a previous marriage) to fend off and Ruth’s niece Sue, an overworked and underappreciated Cinderella. Noel likes to play around with life and women, and while Ralph is hoping Noel will come to work at the factory, Ruth just wants to keep her current position as boss and uses Kit as a vehicle to tarnish Noel’s reputation with his father. Sue, of course, is in love with Noel but doesn’t stand a chance, due to her shy demeanor and Kit’s outstanding and forthright personality.

Then one day, out for a walk, Kit meets Jason just as she is setting out a huge picnic, and she asks him to join her. In the course of general conversation, he says something vague and obscure and covers her hand with his—“She knew beyond doubt that what he had said was much more than a mere generalization. He had expressed a personal hope—and one which concerned not just other people, but themselves.” She’s a bit of a mind reader, and she needs to be, because that’s the end of that conversation, except he promises never to let her go without a fight again! Until Kit is abruptly sacked by Mrs. Baylis, and Jason says not a word as she packs up and heads back to her old hospital job in London. “She realized you’d got too strong a character to be got round, so she’d made up her mind you’d got to go”—Victor tells Kit, explaining that Ruth wanted to keep Ralph an invalid and out of the office so she could keep the top job, while Kit wanted exactly the opposite, as she knows it is best for Ralph to be healthy and occupied.

In the end Jason comes around and explains why he’s been such a curmudgeon, but it’s hard to start liking a fellow on page 184 when he’s been an aloof ass for the previous 183. Some of how the tangles are tied up make for sweet endings, particularly the way Ralph Baylis wins yet simultaneously makes peace with his unhappy, frustrated wife. I wish Ruth Baylis hadn’t been such a shrew, as it is easy to dismiss the real problem of there being few real outlets for intelligent gifted women in the 1960s when the woman in question is a scheming harpy. But overall this book is a good read with interesting characters and plot developments—if only the book’s hero had been included in either category.  

NOTE: This author should not be confused with the pen name Margaret Malcolm, under which author Edith Lyman Kuether wrote the novel Headless Beings, her only book.

A Nurse Involved

By Peggy O’More, ©1968 

Also published as Stand By Nurse

The staff of City Core Hospital was faced daily with the problem of saving the lives of would-be suicides and of trying again and again. Nurse Iva Loring had an inner drive that had taken her through school and training at top speed. She gave too much, too rapidly, to her work and was on the verge of a nervous collapse when she took time off to regain her perspective on life. Now she was easing herself back into work as a stand-by nurse. Her special empathy for the depressed and discouraged made her an ideal nurse for the suicide detail. But there was a question of whether or not she was too understanding and too involved to be effective. Iva, herself, had to examine her values and choose between the career to which she was dedicated and marriage to the devoted young hospital pharmacist who had stood by her without making any demands on her emotions. Could Iva make that choice?

GRADE: D+

BEST QUOTES:
“It is easier to forgive a thousand others than one’s own self.” 

REVIEW:
The silver lining of the dark cloud that is this particular Peggy O’More Blocklinger book—an author who is easily one of the worst—is that it’s the last of her books on my shelves that I hadn’t read. There may be more out there in the world, but I am not planning on looking for them any time soon. 

In this book we have Nurse Iva Luanne Loring, who is given a middle name probably so that the author can engage in her penchant of making everyone’s names alliterate—Woodson Wortman, Henry Hanson, Mark Mansfield and at least four more populate these pages. Iva works at City Core Hospital in California, a medical center that seems to treat only suicide victims—we meet at least six—as well as victims of major car crashes and brutal assaults, including what may be a first in my VNRN reading, a rape (the victim is advised to change her name, join a mission service and move overseas). Iva herself is recovering from a nervous breakdown brought on by overwork, requiring that she spend six weeks on the beach—can I get one of those?—so she’s only supposed to be working part-time, though she does seem to work most days anyway. Her own psychological frailty makes her particularly hip to pop psychology and management of the crazier patients, as in typical clunky Bowman phrasing, “trying to adapt emotional feet to shoes of a contour different from those feet.”

Iva’s main problem is that she is engaged to Woody Wortman, a “druggist” at the hospital, who she hardly ever sees and never thinks of with any fondness or even, it must be confessed, at all. “With her, the goal was marriage to Woody, creating a home for him,” she believes, stating,  “Where home is the principal consideration I must forget myself and think of Woody, think of a place for him to come home to,” and doesn’t that sound like a fun life? Woody conveniently shakes her up a bit when he announces that he has purchased a drug store some distance away and plans to install his mother and aunt in one of the apartments on the second floor—a plan that the anal-retentive Woody had not mentioned until it was done. At least Iva has the sense to realize that this is not good: “He must have studied and planned this move for a long time. He would have scanned its possibilities from every angle. Yet not one word had he breathed to her!”

So while Woody is now miles away building up his new business, Iva calls a hiatus to their engagement. Fortunately she has Dr. Ben Dorsey to act as her chauffeur and luncheon companion—though she certainly does not hint at any feelings toward the man any more than she had toward Woody, and Ben himself is one of those who “has an allergy to nurses. Meaning he’s not married, and if and when has no idea of succumbing to the wiles of a white cap.” So it is shocking in a number of ways when he slips a ring on her finger as they are treating yet another suicide attempt in the Emergency Department, the romantic fool!

Here, as in most Peggy O’More Blocklinger books, we are regularly lectured with her patented psychobabble, as in, “If, as some scientists were insisting, thought was a volatile force, what a variety of poisons could be filling the air.” Yet Iva’s own psychological problems—her relentless drive to overwork—are solved on a single introspective afternoon drive in the country, and a page later she has returned whole, with the plan to go back to school to get a PhD in psychiatry. We also get the author’s tendency to use single words as sentences meant to convey pages of meaning, usually indecipherable to us—“‘Cat,’ murmured Iva, and Woodson looked at her, shocked.” Blocklinger’s prose is stilted and clunky, as in, “Food accepted and ingested,” and, “Iva believed bed was indicated.” There’s none of the hilarious stupidity as one would find with Arlene Fitzgerald’s best; this book is just plain stupid—another Peggy O’More Blocklinger novel to avoid. And please, don’t send me any more!

Settlement Nurse

By Rosamund Hunt
(pseud. Miriam Lynch), ©1966 

Wealthy, attractive Nurse Rebecca Hazlett had no great love for the patients of “The Downs,” the slum area where Dr. Paul Coleman had his office, though being near Paul, despite the fact that he hardly noticed her, seemed to make it all worthwhile. But when she met Paul’s friend, handsome, enigmatic, politician Steve Pryor, she found herself eager to help in his fight to clean up the city—working with the poverty-stricken, going into the depths of the slums, mindless of the underworld dangers that surrounded her. Suddenly she realized her life had taken on a new meaning—but dare she confuse it with love?

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“No one was actually rich these days. She might have told him that high taxes and the maintenance of a place like the house of Larchmere Street did not give her parents much leeway.” 

REVIEW:
Wealthy Becky Hazlett is a child, just 21 years old (why must VNRN heroines be so alarmingly young?), fresh out of nursing school, which she had attended in part “because she had wanted to escape from the sort of life her mother had planned for her”—that of an upper-crust society wife—but also because she liked the challenge of it, and the knowledge that she was doing something “most people would find difficult or distasteful.” So, in short, it was most certainly not because she had any burning desire to help people, especially those less fortunate than herself.

Then why is she working in the Downs, the town’s slum, when she “never came into Folger Street without a feeling of distaste”? Well, silly, it’s because she’s in love with Dr. Paul Coleman, who for some unfathomable reason has decided to take up “the most difficult phase of the medical profession in a run-down section of the city where money was scarce and patients put the doctor’s bill at the very end of the list of necessary expenditures.” And why is she in love with Paul? “Because every other young, single, impressionable nurse in the hospital had yearned and speculated, Becky had become interested in him. Because so many other girls wanted him, she knew that she had to have him. It was a form of swimming upstream again.” Well, I guess there are worse reasons.

But needless to say, because otherwise this would be a short book, Paul has no interest in Becky. In classic VNRN fashion, “He never saw her as a person; merely as someone to help ease his heavy burden of duties.” Though  perhaps Becky isn’t being entirely honest with herself; “there was about her face a look of something like aloofness. And too much pride. She had heard herself described, during her training days, as a ‘snob’; and one of her instructors had call her ‘a spoiled brat.’” Perhaps her disdain for the people she works with is not invisible to Paul either.

Then a pal of Paul’s, Steve Pryror, stops by the clinic. He’s running against the forever incumbent for mayor, who has a grifty sort of administration that, according to Steve, helps enforce the poverty that keeps the Downs full, and he wants to change it. He wins the endorsements of Paul and therefore Becky, as well as financial donations from both. But when Steve then publishes an ad in the paper naming them both as financial supporters of his campaign, Becky’s genteel parents are shocked and embarrassed! Furthermore, this puts her in some physical danger from the goons of the Hardcastle administration, but ensuring Becky’s safety is taken up as a personal mission of local ex-con Robbie Hood (self-named, though Paul quips that Robbie “steals from the poor to give to himself”), and Robbie escorts Becky on her work errands, much to her mixed feelings, as she finds Robbie tedious and boring, but recognizes the usefulness of his protection. As her bodyguard, however, he meets her cousin Alicia Coatsworth, who has dropped by the family manse for an extended vacation, and soon Alicia is out on the town with Robbie, wearing clothes borrowed from Becky—and now there’s a photo in the paper of the pair in a seedy nightclub after hours, but the caption misidentifies Alicia as Becky.

Well, this is just too much for her parents, so Becky moves out of the house and into a shabby but clean house in the Downs, where an impoverished widow with two teens is compelled to rent rooms to meet expenses. Becky quickly enjoys being part of a warm, affectionate family so unlike her own, and living in the neighborhood begins to shift some of her condescending attitudes. As she chats up the young daughter, who is keen on becoming a nurse herself, Becky begins to realize her own shallowness and self-absorption. “She could feel no pride in herself as a person. She could see now how false had been her values and motives, how enormous her selfishness.”

Then there is a political rally by Steve after which he is savagely beaten by the current mayor’s thugs—which Becky witnesses along with a slightly deranged old woman who lives in the area. Becky treats Steve on scene, then specials him in the hospital in the evenings until he is out of danger.  Becky and the aged Miss Augusta Shelburne are now star witnesses in the prosecution, and in even more danger. Becky promptly moves Miss Shelburne into the house where she is living so the thugs won’t be able to find her, but unfortunately decides to take this crucial moment to move back home to the safety of her parents’ house, sadly abetted by Paul. “I’ll feel better when you’ve left the Downs behind,” he tells her, though he lives there himself and presumably always will, which will make him quite a hypocrite if and when he marries Becky and she moves in with him.

The rest of the story plays out in an easily predictable plotline, but I did appreciate that Becky is the rare VNRN character who actually grows over the course of the book, and not in an abrupt, unbelievable manner. It is told more than shown—“the change in her did not come overnight, and certainly it did not come easily,” we are told, with examples including her willingness to smile at others on the broken sidewalks—but we still have it nonetheless. My only disappointment with the story was Becky’s step backward when she chucks her independence to run home to Mom and Dad, who had never been particularly supportive of her career, to be “pampered and fretted over” by her parents and their extensive staff. If overall the book has no sparkling prose or even any good quotes to pull out, it’s still perfectly serviceable.

Nurse Jane in Teneriffe

By Jean S. MacLeod

When her sister died, Nurse Jane Lambert went out to the Canary Islands at her brother-in-law’s request to help care for his children. She had always loved Felipe, and could not help hoping that now perhaps he might come to care for her. But she arrived in Teneriffe to find a very different situation from what she had expected.

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“All truth is brutal on occasion.” 

“Ideals aren’t much use without money to back them up.” 

“Creative genius has a moral code of its own.”

REVIEW:
Is it a nurse novel when the nurse in question has left her job and only spends two afternoons volunteering at the local clinic during the entire book? Here it might, I think, because Nurse Jane Lambert loves nursing and plans to return to it—and her general qualities of compassion, strength and independence are those of our accustomed nurse heroines. So, that settled, let’s turn our attention to Jane, who has flown to an island in Spain some months after her sister’s death to “seek out her sister’s children in an alien land,” where they live in luxury with their father, a titled plantation owner. Her secret agenda stems from the fact that she had been in love with her brother-in-law, Felipe, and had been dating him when her sister Grace had rudely stolen him away and married him. Jane still loves him, of course, because he was “kind, considerate, charming and a little remote.” When she arrives, however, she find he now possesses only one of those qualities—guess which one?

Jane wants to believe that the crushing heartbreak of the failure of his marriage, or rather the more devastating insult of his wife’s affair and pregnancy, have made Felipe the ruthless, “harsh and unrelenting overlord” he is now, but this is hard to swallow, and Jane’s complete lack of judgment about people doesn’t help. Everyone seems to know that she’s come hoping to marry Felipe—his Mrs. Danvers-esque sister Teresa, who cruelly manipulates the household for her own ends; the local doctor; even Felipe himself.

The children, Chris, age 4, and Rozanne, either 5 or 6, are as uninterested in Jane as everyone else is. Chris is already a spoiled, “haughty” “autocratic” monster, while his sister is openly neglected and abused, but whose constant sullen and rude attitude nonetheless makes her an unappealing character, as much as I’d wanted to pity the unwanted child. So Jane mostly just hangs around the house or accompanies the children on their trips to town. She does manage to get into trouble when she stops for an hour at Dr. Andrew Ballantyne’s clinic—there’s a big epidemic on, you see, and her one hour of work will make so much difference! It does to her, anyway: “A strange excitement ran through Jane as she slipped into the familiar uniform, a sense of renewal, of purpose. She had come home.” When Felipe finds out Jane has been “missing,” however—30 minutes late in collecting the kids from their swimming lessons—he’s furious! He snaps at Andrew, who has walked Jane back to the pool, that she is not entitled to make her own decisions and all but forbids her to work as a nurse for Andrew—in part because he believes Andrew was Grace’s lover. (Jane believes this, too, so it’s quite startling when she tells Felipe, “I just can’t imagine Andrew Ballantyne doing such a thing,” when she’s been convinced of it on numerous other occasions.)

Then on the patio that evening, as Jane’s “heart fluttered,” Felipe insists he will marry Jane. “It was the thing she had wanted more than anything in the world”—but it’s clear now that he does not love her. “He needed her to grace his house, to be a second mother to his children, but there was no love left in his heart.” Now suddenly Jane decides that though she had loved him, her fluttering heart must have just been indigestion. “I never really knew you. You were a—sort of symbol to me, a—a figure of romance." And poof! now she’s in love with Andrew! “her first swift, passionate attachment to Felipe was as nothing compared with what she felt now.” But “twice she had loved where Grace had come first,” she thinks, still believing the noble Andrew had been having an affair with her sister.

Up until now the book had been somewhat Gothic in its attitude—haunting would be too strong a word, but at least mildly complex and dark—but suddenly it loses its character and becomes a madcap frenzy of activity. There’s a dying baby to save, a stolen emerald, a secret and stupidly fruitless journey to town just to warn Andrew that he will be accused of the theft by the vindictive Felipe, when the town gossip mill has delivered the news faster than she can ride a horse (it’s her third time), Rozanne runs away and is chased by Jane, a fall down a cliff, and then an extremely long conversation between Jane and Andrew as she is barely managing to cling to the precipitous cliff. All the “mysteries” are revealed to the unsurprised reader, and even Andrew’s ignominious career in the “backwater” clinic is suddenly given a glorious future. The last third of the book didn’t fit the rest of it, and that was a disappointment.

The plot is reminiscent of Peggy Gaddis’ very annoying Nurse at Spanish Cay, but Harlequin regular Catherine Airlie is a new author for me, and I found her writing pretty good, though this the only “nurse” novel she seems to have written. Jane is a bit wishy-washy as a character, showing strength and resolution one minute, then gullibly swallowing obvious falsehoods or climbing a wall and becoming too frightened to climb down. Other characters are well-drawn and at least interesting, and the descriptions of the island are really enjoyable. So Nurse Jane is a mixed bag, but not a total loss.

13th Annual VNRN Awards

Lucky 13 finds us back here again, to bestow wreaths and booby prizes to the books that made us sit up and take notice this year, for better and for worse. I have to start with Betty Neels, who, with her fourth Best Book award this year, has netted that honor with all four of her books I’ve reviewed.  She’s going to find herself a tough act to follow, so stay tuned to find out what happens with her next review, as she will surely have at least one in 2026! Doris Knight has a similar winning streak but in the more dubious direction, as reviews of the two books we have met here have both captured Worst Book awards. She’s another author I will be sure to pick up next year, to see if she, too, can continue her unfortunate trend. 

As for the rest of the crowd, Teresa Hyde Phillips was a short story writer who penned just one novel, and it has captured the top spot on the Best Books this list. It is a pity that there will be no more of her works to enjoy! Some long-time favorite authors also step into the spotlight, as witty Dorothy Fletcher nabbed her sixth Best Book award and Adela Maritano, AKA the fabulous Jane Converse, won her fifth. Peggy Gaddis also proves herself a schizophrenic writer, winning in both Best and Worst Books category this year—the second time she’d achieved this unusual feat. And Dan Ross, a C+ average writer, gave us one of his worst, so be sure to miss that one.

If you’re not a fan of statistics, you can skip this part: This year’s award recipients were taken from the 24 books I reviewed this year, penned by 23 different authors. The Best and Worst Authors categories include all the VNRNs reviewed for this blog (605 to date!), but only authors with more than one review are invited to participate.

Best Books
The Prodigal Nurse by Teresa Hyde Phillips
Tabitha in Moonlight by Betty Neels    
Society Nurse by Jane Converse (pseud. Adela Maritano)
Starring Suzanne Carteret, RN by Diane Frazer (pseud. Dorothy Fletcher)
Nurse at Ste. Monique by Juliet Armstrong
Nurse at the Cedars by Peggy Gaddis
Dr. Garrett’s Girl by Miriam Lynch
Hospital of Bamboo by Juliet Shore (pseud. Jan Haye)

Worst Books
Nurse of the Crystalline Valley by Mary Collins Dunne
Nurse Felicity by Peggy Dern (pseud. Peggy Gaddis)
Backstage Nurse by Jane Rossiter (pseud. W.E. Dan Ross)
Runaway Nurse by Doris Knight

Best Quotes
“Relax, Merrill. I’ve had breakfast, and I rarely gobble up nurses before lunch. You are perfectly safe.” Nurse at the Cedars by Peggy Gaddis

“What happened to that darling little girl who had bubonic plague? I didn’t hear any more after she left Pediatrics.” Nurse Kelly’s Crusade by Nell Marr Dean

“There are days when I hate it all—when I want to chuck it and get into something easier and—well—less smelly.” West End Nurse by Lucy Agnes Hancock

“There’s two schools of thought about raising kids. One was to bring ’em up the way they ought to be; and the other was just to let the FBI handle it later on.” Nurse at the Cedars by Peggy Gaddis

“You have spunk, Jane, as well as a fertile imagination, and those qualities I admire in a woman. That and a nice little body.” Nurse in Danger by Maisie Greig

“I’m going uptown to get some mushrooms, Mary.” West End Nurse by Lucy Agnes Hancock

“You’re a beautiful girl. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have run me over.” Runaway Nurse by Doris Knight

“I’m a Harvard man. I wouldn’t get myself seriously shot outside a lady’s boudoir.” The Prodigal Nurse by Teresa Hyde Phillips

“Sassy redheads are my dish. Watch out you don’t share the fate of Red Riding Hood’s grandmother.” West End Nurse by Lucy Agnes Hancock

“What I’d like to do, Meredith thought grimly, is pull that dyed hair out by its roots.” Nurse of the Crystalline Valley by Mary Collins Dunne

Best Covers
Nurse Brookes by Kate Norway (psued. Olive Norton)
Nurse Felicity by Peggy Dern (pseud. Peggy Gaddis)
Society Nurse by Jane Converse (pseud. Adela Maritano)
    Illustration by Allan Kass
Starring Suzanne Carteret, RN by Diane Frazer (pseud. Dorothy Fletcher)
    Illustration by Harry Bennett
West End Nurse by Lucy Agnes Hancock

Best Writers
1. Ida Cook (3.9 average based on 3 reviews)
1. Noreen Ford (3.9 average based on 2 reviews)
3. Faith Baldwin (3.8 average based on 4 reviews)
4. Marjorie Lewty (3.7 average based on 3 reviews)
5. Marguerite Mooers Marshall (3.6 average based on 5 reviews)
5. Marjorie Moore (3.6 average based on 3 reviews)
5. Betty Neels (3.6 average based on 4 reviews)
8. Irene Mossop Swatridge (3.5 average based on 4 reviews)
9. Olive Norton (3.4 average based on 11 reviews)
9. Elizabeth Seifert (3.4 average based on 3 reviews)

Worst Writers
1. Mary Collins Dunne (1.5 average based on 2 reviews)
1. Mary Mann Fletcher (1.5 average based on 2 reviews)
3. Ruth McCarthy Sears (1.6 average based on 6 reviews)
4. Peggy Blocklinger (1.7 average based on 13 reviews)
4. Doris Knight (1.7 average based on 2 reviews)
4. Zillah Macdonald (1.7 average based on 3 reviews)
7. Arlene Fitzgerald (1.9 average based on 6 reviews)
7. Elizabeth Kelly (1.9 average based on 3 reviews)
7. Virginia McDonnell (1.9 average based on 2 reviews)
7. Virginia K. Smiley (1.9 average based on 4 reviews)