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 novel.

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)

A Nurse for Sand Castle

By Arlene Hale, ©1969 

When her doctor fiancé was killed while serving in Vietnam, lovely nurse Leah West wanted only to forget. Gratefully she accepted an assignment to care for a child seriously injured in an auto accident, for it meant going to live in the isolated mansion of Sand Castle, far from painful memories. But soon Leah found it was not that easy to escape. In her appealing, yet tragically embittered young patient, Leah had to meet her greatest test as a nurse. And in the impassioned rivalry for Leah’s affections between the child’s wifeless father, the brilliant and sardonic Alan Saber, and his handsome playboy brother, Hutch, Leah had to face her most agonizing test as a woman.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“These days when he went out he went for the sort that could ony be described as a dish.” 

“Why are you so upset over a harmless little kiss?”

“Sometimes the people that need our help most aren’t sick in bed.”

REVIEW:
With A Nurse for Sand Castle, the prolific queen of average writing, Arlene Hale, has churned out another C novel. Here, if you must, you will meet Nurse Leah West, who is tragically mourning the death of her fiancé, Dr. Paul Gardner, killed in the Vietnam War six months previously. As we open the book we watch Leah’s friend Dr Jerry Bartley insist that she leave Grover City Hospital to recover from her “nerve exhaustion,” telling her, “You need to fall in love again.” And so she sets off on an assignment to nurse six-year-old Sarajane Saber, who wears leg braces and requires crutches after a car crash a year ago.

Sarahjane and her father Alan had returned to the family mansion, Sand Castle, located on the beach, three weeks before Leah was hired by Alan’s brother Hutch to care for the little waif. Alan is a painter, and spends all his time in one of the turrets working, drinking, and staring at a portait of his wife Celia, who is never to be discussed, apparently killed in the car crash. Hutch also has his issues, and is livid with his brother for abandoning his daughter—he only spends time with her twice in the book, once when the child is seriously ill and once when Leah insists that he come on a picnic with them, and when she crawls up the steps to his attic studio and asks to be let in. “How many times have I told you not to bother me when I’m working?” he shouts before slamming the door in her face. I personally think that’s a pretty serious crime, but Leah thinks there’s more to it than that. “Why hadn’t he done more to help Alan?” Leah wonders. “Why had he allowed some old antagonism from the past to stay between them?”

Needless to say, despite Leah’s crushed heart, she is soon kissing both Alan and Hutch—though it must be confessed that Hutch actually just grabs her the first time—and also threatening to walk off the job, even packing and booking a plane ticket, when Alan tells her, “Do you think that you’re doing your job as well as you could? I don’t. Because you’re holding back part of your heart. You’ve got it all locked up for Paul—a dead man!”

Eventually Leah has little Sarahjane walking again, and all the pathetic, obvious secrets everyone has been carrying are turned face up on the table. Everything winds up exactly as you knew it would, with several characters staging wildly unbelievable about-faces in their personalities, and now we can close a dull novel with no interesting character and little plot. When the only interesting feature is that Hutch has quit smoking and instead eats apples, always tossing one to Leah and her “fielded it expertly,” it’s not a promising sign. Next time you meet a book by Arlene Hale, take my advice and give it the cold shoulder, because it won’t give you much, either.

Society Nurse

By Jane Converse
(pseud. Adela Maritano), ©1975
Cover illustration by Allan Kass 

Love sick. That’s what pretty Nurse Nina Bateman was, though she knew handsome, wealthy, dedicated Doctor Mark Danover was way out of her league. Then Mark asked her to take a private case, caring for a beautiful young heiress, Cindy Calvert, who happened to be Mark’s next-door neighbor. Was he looking for a competent nurse, or, as his manner suggested, was there something more behind Mark’s request? Everything seemed wonderful, until Nina met Cindy and her domineering mother. Nina realized before introductions were over that she couldn’t stand the haughty Mrs. Calvert. And what was worse, Mrs. Calvert made it obvious she thought Mark would make the perfect husband for Cindy! How could Nina compete for her heart’s desire against the ambitious scheming of her lovely young patient’s overpowering mother?

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“I’m surprised at you. I thought that line went out with starched collars and the five-cent cup of coffee.” 

“A man who told you that he loved you should also believe in you.”

“I was furious. Hurt and furious about you letting that creep make a pass at you.”

REVIEW:
Some authors inspire certain feelings the minute you pull one of their books off the shelf. Jeanne Judson inspires a contented smile, Peggy Gaddis an exasperated sigh, and Jane Converse an anticipatory giggle. And when we have her Society Nurse open before us, we will giggle aplenty. Nurse Nina Bateman lives with her unloving mother in a rundown section of Chicago’s North Side, where she works at a clinic for the downtrodden.  There, two glorious afternoons a week, the godlike Dr. Mark Danover, who lives in a different sort of North Shore suburb, comes to work for free at the clinic, but he is not the sort to brag; “He was doing something he wanted to do and saw no reason to be praised for doing it.” So yes, Nina is in love with Dr. Mark, but “there was no encouragement to be found in his warm smiles, his thoughtful gestures, or even from his complimentary remark,” because “he was uniformly pleasant to everyone.” A rare find in a VNRN, a love interest who is genuinely a good man. Sigh … 

One day, though, Nina and Mark get to talking after a long, hard day, when she reveals she is one of the kids from the ’hood, and that she spends most of her evenings home alone with a book. “Nina thrust her chin up in the air. ‘I happen to like good books.’” And I happen to like Nina! Naturally Mark seems to, too, and asks her out to dinner—and then ruins it by saying he wanted to talk to her about a private case he’s hoping she’ll take on because the patient is a 17-year-old girl with diabetes, and Nina is so well-versed in endocrinology. Also, the patient is a very special friend of Mark’s, and his next-door neighbor. Of course she agrees, thinking she’s likely to see him more often—but the case turns out to be more than she expected.

Poor little rich girl Cindy Calvert is the sweetest little naif with a penchant for saying things like, “Oh, wow, Miss Bateman!” Cindy also has a penchant for Dave Tolson, another poor kid who is putting himself through medical school by mowing Dr. Mark’s lawn—how quaint! But Cindy’s mother Faye is one of those classic divas with “dark eyelashes that were too long and too upswept to belong to their present owner,” who “surveyed Nina as though she were examining a somewhat questionable pot roast.” The only reason Nina gets the job is that she is recommended by Dr. Mark, and Faye has her eye on Dr. Mark as the future Mr. Cindy Calvert, though he clearly has nothing but avuncular feelings for the young girl almost half his age.

So in moves Nina, where she has front row seats to witness Faye’s attempts to “keep Cindy in a state of perpetual childhood,” forbidding her to leave the house, exercise, see friends or especially that Dave Tolson, all because of her disease. “Yet, if anyone who lived here was sick, it was the woman who had made a bright, aesthetically lovely, completely lovable girl see herself as a burden—someone to be ashamed of.” Nina spends her days counting the calories in Cindy’s diet, measuring out and delivering insulin shots, testing blood sugar, and trying to instill a spine into sad, brainwashed Cindy, who is gushingly grateful to the mother who is trying to convince her that she’s “a burden, she should be grateful that people cared about her at all. It had taken years of conditioning to make the girl accept this self-effacing state; the results would not be undone in a few short conversations with a newly engaged R.N.” But liberate Cindy is what Nina cannot help but try to do, and spends afternoons giving her pep talks about her rights.

Needless to say, Nina soon tangles with the imperious Faye, who has told the household staff to tell Cindy’s beau Dave that she’s not available when he calls, but Nina has answered the phone and passed it to Cindy. Summoned to Faye’s lair for a scolding, Nina tries to explain that relationships are good for Cindy, but Faye calls out Nina (somewhat rightly) for overstepping what she knows to be the rules in a house where she is only an employee. Nina, bless her, stands up for herself, saying, “I don’t consider myself a member of your household staff, Mrs. Calvert. I have a degree in nursing. I’d like to be respected as a professional.” Unfortunately, the conversation goes south from there, as Faye calls Nina “common, cheap, conniving” and Nina shouts, “You’re the coldest, the cruelest, the most selfish excuse for a human being I’ve ever met!” And guess who is walking through the door at that moment?

Mark is appropriately shocked. “Frankly, I’m astonished. Name calling! It seems so beneath you,” he tells Nina, but to keep Cindy from falling to pieces at losing one person in her life who cares about her, he convinces the shouting women to give it another try. “If I make any radical changes now, Cindy is liable to run off with that absurd thing with the freckles,” acquiesces the gracious Faye. But it isn’t long before the ladies are back at it, as Faye starts preaching the gospel that her young, gold-digging boyfriend, Reverend Ronald Perry, espouses—that you can cure disease with your mind. (The ever-sassy Nina remarks, when he attempts to sell her his snake-oil theories, “You don’t mind if they keep the surgical wards at County open? A ruptured appendix can be such a nuisance to someone who doesn’t know all you do.”) Faye follows this up by insisting that Nina reveal her true colors—that she’s angling to win Mark for herself. Nina has just admitted that she’s in love with Mark when the man himself walks in—what a knack he has for showing up at awkward moments! He asks Nina if it’s true, and good for her, she replies, “That I love you? I’m not ashamed of that. What if I do?”

Of course it turns out that he loves her too, and there’s a lot of smooching then. But true love never sails smooth in a vintage nurse romance novel, and soon the boyfriend Ronald is assaulting Nina just as Faye walks in—obviously taking lessons from Mark about when to make an entrance. Ron, unphased, tries to salvage what woman he can by insisting, “You must have enjoyed that as much as I did,” to which Nina replies, “I haven’t been so thrilled since my dentist told me I’d have to have root canal work.” But Faye runs straight to Mark, who refuses to hear what Nina has to say about what happened, and she is promptly fired by the cold-faced pair.

Then she’s back working at the old clinic when a stricken Dave Tolson turns up, telling Nina that Mark is out of town at a conference and he is sure that Faye has fired the new nurse and embarked Cindy on a faith-healing treatment plan prescribed by Ronald, and he’s certain that Cindy has lapsed into a diabetic coma. Off sprints Nina to the rescue—will she get there in time? And if she manages to save Cindy, can she cure Mark of his stupidity as well?

Of course she can—she’s a smart, strong, spicy Jane Converse heroine. The writing is sprinkled with Jane Converse’s excellent bon mots, and the characters are enjoyable. If Faye Calvert is too easily dismissed as “whacked out” and insane—it would have been less simplistic and condescending to deal with her as what she is, a deeply troubled, insecure woman who would imperil her daughter to try to keep her man, and there are plenty of people like that in the world—that’s the biggest flaw of an otherwise thoroughly enjoyable book.