Ellen Ferris was aghast at her first sight of Scarlet Point Lodge. Never had Aunt Madeleine mentioned that the hotel she had recently purchased on the shores of Iowa’s Big Spirit Lake was in fact a run-down four-story monstrosity with a red tile roof and Gothic-arched Spanish belfry towers. Even more astonishing was Aunt Madeleine’s revelation that she had only four guests—really five, she carefully explained, if you counted sandy-haired Doug Cooper, the young writer who helped out with odd jobs in exchange for his room and board. But Aunt Madeleine had plans—ambitious intentions of restoring the lodge to its former graciousness—and she had hired Frank Welborn, an architect with blond hair and deeply tanned skin, to supervise the renovation. Resignedly Ellen tried to concentrate on setting up a first-aid station for the lodge’s four elderly guests. It was for this purpose that the blue-eyed nurse had come to spend the summer at Spirit Lake. And she had welcomed the invitation, because it afforded her time to ponder the problem that had arisen during her last semester of teaching at a California nursing school. Before long, however, Ellen’s problem was eclipsed by the thornier ones involved in running Scarlet Point Lodge—and in managing her own unpredictable heart. And then the odd occurrences began …
GRADE: C+
BEST QUOTES:
“No matter how far a guy travels there’s nowhere to look for
subject matter except within oneself.”
“Good food can distract almost anyone from unpleasantness.”
“Sincere compliments for work well done never spoiled anyone.”
“History is a crop that sometimes gets plowed under.”
“Every place in the world is special, but life moves so fast that it takes a magician, or an artist, to make people stop and notice the uniqueness right at their doorstep.”
REVIEW:
Ellen Ferris had never wanted to be a nurse, but had been
forced into it by her Aunt Madeline, who had raised her after she had been
orphaned at 15. But she’d gotten her way in the end, becoming a teacher at a
nursing school after she had obtained her RN. Now she’s again doing her aunt’s
bidding by coming to Scarlet Point Lodge, the run-down hotel on the shores of
Spirit Lake in Iowa, to serve as staff nurse for the whopping four guests at
the lodge who seem to be staying all summer as well. She’s in a bit of a pickle
at school: A wealthy man’s daughter is flunking Ellen’s class, and if she
flunks the student, the father is going to change his mind about the endowment
he’s planning to give the school. So Ellen is hoping this little sojourn away
from school will help her figure out if she’d rather keep her principles or her
job.
Before long strange things start happening: food is going missing from the pantry, and Ellen finds a hair ribbon on the third floor, which is closed to guests. And someone has used the rowboat! Aunt Madeleine also demonstrates some erratic behavior such as standing on the railing of the third-floor belfry and becoming too frightened to get down, not to mention staffing and stocking out a first aid station for a meager four guests when she has better things to do with her money, as her hotel is literally falling apart and the lawn isn’t even mowed. But that doesn’t seem to bother Ellen as much as the hair ribbon does.
Meanwhile there are two young men to compete for Ellen’s hand in marriage, because it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a heroine of a nurse novel must be in want of a husband. There’s Doug, a writer with a gloomy outlook—he obsesses a lot about the history of Native American massacres in the area, constantly calling Ellen’s attention to the site of this attack or that one—and he has some odd ideas: “I believe there’s a universal thought bank that’s made up of every thought and every idea that has ever existed. And I believe that each individual mind is an inlet that’s in some mysterious way connected to this huge thought bank,” he tells her, adding that he’s tapped into this thought bank, because “even if I’d never read a word about the Spirit Lake massacre, I know I would have sensed a feeling of death when I visited this area. It’s all around us.” Because no one anywhere else has ever died. She likes him anyway, but does think “there was an unrest about him that troubled her, interested her.”
The other young man, Frank Welborn, is the architect that Madeleine has hired to spruce up the hotel. He’s “a sleek type who might have stepped from a clothing advertisement in a slick magazine,” and we first meet him when Ellen discovers him in her room, allegedly measuring the space for future renovations. She dates him too, even though he uses the adjective “super” in about every other sentence, but on the plus side he’s never even heard of the Spirit Lake massacre and “never cared much for local history,” so he’s not bringing up dead people all the time. He tells Ellen to pass her student and move to New York City with him. “You aren’t afraid to try making it in a big city, are you?” Luckily he decides they should head out on the dance floor before she’s obliged to continue this “uncomfortable conversation,” but there she decides, apparently based on Frank’s smooth dance moves, that “Frank was a man a girl could build a dream around.”
When she’s not kissing boys, there’s lots of other action at Scarlet Point Lodge for Ellen to get involved in. There’s a huge storm in which the 77-year-old guest decides to go for a walk and a tree falls on him, giving him a head laceration, which Ellen treats with sedatives and then sends him off to bed, possible concussion or brain bleed be damned! The fireplace chimney gets blocked and smokes out the ground floor, causing one of the guests to have a severe asthma attack and vows to check out immediately. “Madeleine Ferris is an idiot,” he pronounces, having only just arrived at a conclusion that would have been painfully obvious from the first minute on the place. But Ellen shows who the idiot is when she distracts him from his idea with a buttered muffin. Then she finds a runaway girl, 12-year-old Lori Wilde, who has run away from a foster home while her mother serves six months in jail for shoplifting food. Lori, intent on not being seen, is shining a light around the dock and singing along to a radio in the middle of the night when Ellen timidly ventures out to see who is making all the ruckus. Lori might not be as dopey as her hiding skills make you think, as right away she asks Ellen, “Why are you bothering to ask me dumb questions?”
Janey van Allen, the young woman who Ellen caught cheating on the exam, turns up after driving 1,500 miles and tells Ellen that the reason she cheated on the exam, though she is otherwise an A student, is that she had been caring for her 7-year-old sister with severe tonsillitis for the previous three days and hadn’t had time to study. She begs for forgiveness and swears she will never cheat again. It’s curious that this story hadn’t surfaced weeks earlier, at the time of the actual incident, but hard-hearted Ellen is unimpressed. Then Doug proposes, but he’d just gotten a letter from someone named Julie Jackson and doesn’t explain it to Ellen, and then she sees Frank holding Janey’s hand and there’s lipstick on his cheek, so there go both of her men, as easy as they came. Only a hotel fire will put everything to rights!
Honestly, you’d swear Ellen is jinxed the way one calamity
after another happens to her. She herself is a confusing character, as she is
determined to do the “right” thing by expelling her student from school but
herself repeatedly fails to report the runaway child, leaving the girl to sleep
in the woods for days. She also doesn’t seem to have much sense as she
navigates the world, freaking out about Doug getting a letter from a woman and
swooning for the asinine Frank. Overall this book and a number of its
characters, Aunt Madeleine in particular, are a bit perplexing. Failure of
logic and inconsistent characters are two of the most common problems VNRNs
have, and Nurse of Spirit Lake has
both in abundance, so you might want to save your time and pick a different
book.
