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.

Nurse Rivers’ Secret

By Anne Durham, ©1965
Cover illustration by Bern Smith

Everyone at Ripplegate General Hospital was tremendously excited when the film star Dawn Delaney was admitted as a patient—everyone, that is, except Nurse Nina Rivers, who knew Dawn only too well and dreaded the complications she would inevitably bring with her.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“She’d be a proper corker out of that horrible uniform.” 

“No one looks at a nurse unless she’s doing something to attract attention.”

REVIEW:
Nurse Nina Rivers has made a life for herself apart from her family; she comes from a fairly broken home. Her father died when she was very young, and Mother married Alexander Fitchworth, a very nice man who had been a real father to Nina. Of course, he went and died, and Nina became a sort of Cinderella to her temperamental and beautiful stepsister Alexandra, waiting on her hand and foot. Astonishingly, when Mother and Alexandra had decided to move to America, Nina elected to remain in the U.K. to become a nurse, and neither of them has ever forgiven Nina for “abandoning” them and what would have been a life of unappreciated drudgery.

Imagine poor Nina’s surprise when her sister is brought in to her hospital as a pampered private patient—under the name Dawn Delaney, as she is now known, as she is a rising movie star and is making a film in a castle nearby; Dawn had fallen through a rickety balcony when she had been up there outside of working hours with a film mogul who could do things for her career. Nina is immediately sacrificed at Dawn’s altar by none other than Mommie Dearest. Not a hug or word of affection passes from Mommie’s lips after years apart from her first daughter before she is exhorting Nina not to tell anyone of the relationship. “You’ve always said you didn’t care for that sort of life. This is what you prefer, and as soon as Alex has recovered, she will go right out of your life again, and not trouble you,” she says, blaming the victim. “You must come and have tea with us one day,” she adds, finishing the job with a knife to the heart.

But Dawn/Alex is a spoiled brat, always on the call light and sobbing in self-pity, and the only one who can soothe her is Nurse Rivers, who is constantly pressed into duty to pat the limpid hand of her sister. Dawn is also one of those ladies who “always found the men belonging to other girls much more acceptable to her than other men. She didn’t mean any harm; she just couldn’t help it.” Yeah, right. And of course the first man she notices is Dr. Antony Alsford, who is all but engaged to Nina—if only they can settle the thorny issue of whether she will quit working when they get married. “I just want a career of my own,” she tells him repeatedly, but he is having none of it. “He didn’t like his girl-friend to be the one with ideas, the one to want to make plans. He would want a yes-woman, Nina felt.” It’s clear why she wants to marry him and why she is heart-broken when he becomes starry-eyed over the dewy, rose-colored Dawn—and breaks off their engagement with a story about how he is doing her a huge favor by ending it. “I’m standing in your way,” he generously explains. He has no idea how right he is, and unfortunately neither does Nina.

Because there’s nice old Dr. Stephen Cornwell to help her over the rough patches, give her a lift into town and buy her tea and pass over his handkerchief. Though he starts out “much as a kindly uncle,” his charm grows naturally on Nina, and he is clearly in love with her—though she, of course, is the last one to figure this out. She does come to understand something her own feelings early on, however—“a rather special feeling towards Dr. Stephen Cromwell, that had begun deep down in her almost imperceptibly, and was now like a glow of warmth on a cold day, stealing gently yet swiftly all over her. A glow that made her want to be with him all the time.” Unfortunately Dawn, recognizing the attraction between the pair, now decides that, having won Antony for her own, she no longer wants that fickle man and has her heart set on winning poor Dr. Cornwell. “She hadn’t really wanted Antony permanently; she had just wanted to feel that she could take his attention away from another girl, and now she was finished with him.” What a sweet girl!

Now Dawn is making herself sick with longing for the good doctor, and Nina feels she has no choice but to exhort Dr. Cornwell to go along with the charade that he loves her in order to help her recover. “Dawn wanted him, and they must consider her, because she was so ill,” she decides. He flat out refuses, however, proving himself to be a man of principles and character. “She’s behaving like a spoilt child. She wants something. She must have it. It doesn’t matter if it’s some pretty toy or a man’s attention, it’s all one to her. And I, for one, will not pander to it,” he tells her, adding, “I think you’ve let Dawn and her mother make a doormat of you for years, and I’m going to personally stop it.”

But Nina is a clever lass, smart enough to figure out another way to get Dawn off Dr. Cornwell’s leg—even if in enacting her plan she risks losing the doctor for good. Complications and misunderstandings ensue, of course … and in the end we have another fairly typical Harlequin story, sweet and slow, with an admirable, strong heroine—and in this instance, we are lucky to have an attractive love interest as well. Some side characters are well-drawn; Nina’s mother in particular was terrifically horrid in a subtle sort of way. If overall this book is not especially sparkling, it’s still well worth an afternoon.

Volunteer Nurse

By Arlene Fitzgerald, ©1967
Cover illustration by Mort Rosenfeld 

Why had she really come to Silver Creek? She knew she wanted to help people in distress. Was being a nurse the best way? Was it the way to escape Ron? Now she would have to find the answers for two other people: the man who had stolen her heart and the one who had claimed it.

GRADE: B+

REVIEW:
This book was not bad, but reading a decent novel has seldom left me more disappointed. Author Arlene Fitzgerald has delivered the awesomely dreadful Harbor Nurse, so I had high hopes that I would encounter more fabulously bizarre plot twists like the nurse ziplining out to a fishing boat during a hurricane to help amputate the leg of a fisherman who was attacked by a shark. Alas, no such excitement befalls Nurse Glee Barlow, who has volunteered to spend a few weeks at the JCAHO-certified Silver Creek Clinic in Arizona in a town with a population of 525. Like many VNRN heroines, she has a fiancé she doesn’t think much of, yet cannot bring herself to decide she shouldn’t marry. Ron Snider is a “terribly spoiled” mama’s boy, the apron strings strengthened by the fact that mother is very rich. “Ron had been proposing regularly, and he felt that she would be willing to settle down to a husband and babies.” She, on the other hand, worked hard to become a nurse, and “wanted to be free to do as she pleased as a full-fledged R.N. and as a woman at least, for a while.”

En route to her clinic, Glee’s car is nearly hit by a horse-drawn carriage caroming out of a dude ranch. Slamming on the brakes and not wearing a seatbelt, she takes a blow to her sternum—or rather, “the steering wheel crushed the soft roundness of her breasts,” in typical Fitzgerald fondness for inserting sexual references into irrelevant descriptions. The carriage driver immediately pulls her from her car and starts fumbling with the buttons of her dress, insisting, “I’m not being fresh. I’m a qualified M.D.” Phew! Her relief is enhanced by the fact that Dr. Kirk Tesdal is one of those homely men who is nevertheless “unnervingly handsome,” and she drives off thinking she would like to see him again.

And she does! Because it turns out that he’s in town to interview for a job at the clinic, and though he’s superlatively qualified (his ineptness at unbuttoning blouses notwithstanding), he’s turned down for the job because he’s not married. Hmmm. When Glee arrives at the clinic, she finds that it’s holding a few cases of anthrax. You’ll be intrigued to know that Glee has a photographic memory, and recalls several pages of her medical textbook verbatim, even obligingly turning pages now and then for us, so we can appreciate the intricacies of the disease, which is treated with a lot of scrubbing up and incinerating clothes and bed linens, and injecting Dr. Tesdal with penicillin “into the firmness of his buttocks,” which Glee accomplishes while admiring his tan line and lean waist. 

The medical staff manages several crises including another horse-drawn carriage crash that results in one victim requiring a splenectomy, a car crash in which the driver’s arm is nearly severed and handily sewn back on, and a heart attack. We are treated to some of Fitzgerald’s usual tricks, such as her fondness for “slashing” with a “firm mental scalpel” at any inconvenient thought, and her reliance on “firm nurse’s discipline” to get through difficult tasks like crossing a raging creek (of which there are many in the Arizona desert) on a fallen log. But overall the author’s idiosyncrasies, which have driven me practically insane in some books (see Young Nurse Rayburn), are infrequent here, and the worst sin she commits is the idiotic but unfortunately common trope of giving the heroine an unlikable fiancé yet rendering her completely shocked to discover in the final pages that she doesn’t really love the jerk after all. But there are some plusses as well, such as the fact that the medicine and surgery described in the book is detailed, interesting, and fairly accurate. Arlene Fitzgerald has given us one other B-grade book in Daredevil Nurse, so this completely readable and even entertaining book is not a total anomaly for her. But, paradoxically, I might have enjoyed a worse book more.

Nurse Lucie

By Georgia Craig (pseud. Peggy Gaddis), ©1964
Also published as Nurse at Guale Farms

Nurse Lucie Hatcher walked headlong into another world when she arrived at the small Georgia clinic at Guale Farms, eager to work with the skilled Dr. Wesley Warren. Lucie didn’t plan to get involved with the handsome young doctor, nor with the rich owner of the experimental farms, Perry Latham. But she did … with both. Then suddenly, women from Wesley’s and Perry’s lives appeared and disrupted Lucie’s paradise. Could she give Wesley up to the mysterious woman from his past? Could she fight the powerful and jealous Latham family for Perry’s love? Lucie’s paradise soon turned into a nightmare …

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“You’re much too pretty to be working at a grim job like this.” 

“A job? My dear girl! That’s a nasty word. Go immediately and wash your mouth out with soap and water.”

“The one end and aim of every woman is marriage and a home of her own.”

“She’s really a looker, isn’t she, now that we’ve got her dried out and all?”

REVIEW:
Lucie Hatcher has left Atlanta to come work in a small rural town, and a good number of the local folks are bewildered as to why she—or he—is willing to “bury herself in a place like Lathamtown. It’s just about the most lonesome place anybody ever heard tell of.” But it’s well paying, and she’s always wanted to experience life in the country, as she’s been a city gal her whole life, and now that she’s arrived in her “silly scrap of a yellow pillbox hat” she’s here to stay, dammit! 

She’s offered a ride from the bus station to the clinic by the pathologically angry schoolteacher Jane Berner, who warns Lucie that she’s to keep her mitts off Gareth Latham, who has just returned home after getting kicked out of college yet again. He’s the stepbrother of Perry Latham, who runs a large experimental farm in nearby Lathamtown and “doesn’t want anything that would bring tourists this way. He doesn’t want Graysville to install drive-in movie theatres, or taverns, or beer-and-wine package stores, or pin-ball machines; anything that might lure the young of Lathamtown astray. He’s not going to allow such devices within easy reach of his people.” Lucie lets this description of an oppressive local dictator pass with little comment or musing about how one person could possibly prevent the development of a whole town, and when she actually meets the tall, very good-looking man with a lean, sun-bronzed face, any further reference to this alarming aspect of Perry’s character drops away and is never mentioned again. As long as he’s cute, who cares if he’s fascist? It’s not long, of course, before he’s kissing her goodnight.

Perry has a stepmother, Belle, and she and Gareth “will never let Perry marry any woman.” When Lucie rightly expresses her incredulity that a grown man, especially a fascist, will be led around by his stepmother, she is told that Belle will “go after the girl. Once Belle gets the idea that Perry is seriously interested in any girl, she’ll sharpen up her knives until they’ll make every scalpel in the clinic seem dull.” Lucie also starts to question, when Jane puts the idea in her head, why “a doctor as young as Dr. Warren is and as skilled would be working in a small rural clinic instead of setting up a fine city practice somewhere or specializing in doing research.” But Dr. Warren is described as a local authority to whom other area doctors regularly consult, so his practice does not seem unsatisfying, if one is interested in primary care for an underserved community—and it’s curious that such a practice, today considered noble, would be scorned.

But Dr. Warren’s practice takes a considerable hit when Leonore Arnold, his fiancée, shows up in a rainstorm. It turns out the woman has gone insane after seeing her mother murdered by home invaders and has been committed to an institution—but has improved enough from her previously catatonic state to learn where Dr. Warren is, escape and find her way 20 miles to his door. Dr. Warren immediately tries to resign because when the town hears that “there’s a mental case here, the story will be built up that she’s a lunatic and her presence here makes everybody unsafe.” Perry insists that he stay, and that Leonore is sure to get well, even if she must never, ever remember that horrible incident again, because “her love will restore her to complete sanity.” Sure it will! Also, remember that since only the clinic personnel know she’s there, the secret won’t get out, “because nurses aren’t allowed to discuss their patients with outsiders.” Lucie, however, immediately lets drop in a packed waiting room that the doctor in charge of the sanitorium has arrived in the clinic to see a patient, and tells Belle that the patient “is no maniac,” just “a girl who is mildly ill mentally.” (And, it must be pointed out, she repeatedly tells anyone who asks about numerous other patients under her care.) So much for keeping a secret. 

Soon patients stop coming to clinic or calling for Dr. Warren’s services, and everyone, including Lucie, is perplexed as to how word got out, interestingly enough. Unfortunately, Leonore herself is one of those classic Peggy Gaddis characters, a beautiful, “bright-eyed, inquisitive child” who has no personality or brain whatsoever, and flings herself at poor Dr. Warren whenever he’s near, pleading, “Please, please, darling, let me stay here with you! I’ll die if I have to be taken away from you!” Not surprisingly, Dr. Warren at one point admits to Lucie that he no longer loves Leonore, but since the nutty shrinking violet is utterly helpless, he is soon declaring his love to her face and insisting they be married immediately. Another thorny issue raised and then perplexingly dropped completely.

Then Belle pops in to threaten Lucie, as promised, that she must not marry Perry, though she has absolutely no weapon to use against Lucie. Perplexingly, Lucie—who is now in love with Perry—tells Belle that she has no interest in Perry but plans to marry Gareth, which sets Belle back on her heels a bit, but then Lucie reverses course and says, “I wouldn’t marry either of the Latham men, even if they were the last men in the world!” Guess who has just come in the door behind her? The only possible way the pair could be reconciled is if Leonore, whose mental illness has mysteriously rendered her unable to walk, takes off into the swamp in her wheelchair and the rest of the gang is somehow unable to find her, and the overwhelming stress of the situation sends Lucie straight into Perry’s arms. The good news is that Leonore is found in a coma suffering from concussion, and the prognosis of her mental illness improves enormously because “a mild concussion might be helpful in restoring her mind. Perhaps when the concussion heals, she may be able to recall the past.” A couple of x-rays—a highly sensitive test for diagnosing mild brain injury (not)—“had been most satisfactory,” whatever that means, and a week later Leonore wakes from her coma!

The overwhelmingly bad medicine in this book is actually comical if you have any actual medical training or ever watched a few episodes of “Grey’s Anatomy,” and it’s hard to understand why Peggy Gaddis, who wrote what feels like thousands of nurse novels, never bothered to learn anything about the subject. Her penchant for raising difficult problems—like a man whose leg is amputated after he is attacked by an alligator and whose wife leaves him because he’s “a cripple,” though Lucie indignantly protests that the young woman is only in shock and will come to her senses and return (she doesn’t)—and then utterly abandoning them unresolved is also infuriating. But overall this is far from the worst Peggy Gaddis novel I’ve met (that would be Dr. Merry’s Husband, which rated a D-), ranking in the top third of the 34 novels of hers I’ve reviewed to date (God help me, I’ve at least that many more to read before I can rid myself of Peggy Gaddis forever). So if you enjoy the occasional novel that you can chuckle at (not with) without suffering overmuch from aggravating writing and characters, this may be a good bet for you.

We can always count on Valentine
for a hideous cover illustration.

Hospital Corridors

By Mary Burchell
(pseud. Ida Cook), ©1955
Cover illustration by Paul Anna Soik 

Madeline felt that she was on the brink of a completely new life when she left England to do a year’s nursing in a great Montreal hospital. But she found that, after all, she would not be totally among strangers, for she had already met on board ship—though he was said to be so unapproachable—Dr. Lanyon, a distinguished member of the staff; and one of the patients would be the beautiful (but very difficult) Mrs. Sanders whom she had nursed before, with her good-looking and attentive son among the visitors. Still, everything else—except her familiar, well-loved work—would be excitingly new, and she might even have occasion to work for Dr. Lanyon …

GRADE: A+ 

BEST QUOTES:
“The not-really-ill patient is usually the one who gives all the trouble.” 

“I never supposed he thought of anything but cutting people up in the neatest and most miraculous way possible.”

“There is no logical answer to a jealous woman. If you do have trouble, don’t try to argue. Silence is safer—and simply maddening for the other person.”

“‘Did someone die?’ enquired Madame Loncini cheerfully, for, like many aggressively healthy people, she always liked to have an opportunity of pitying those who were less fortunate.”

“Happiness is a state of mind, and almost entirely independent of outside things. But, if it is to have any permanency and—and inner radiance, it must be founded on belief. In oneself, in others and in the ultimate rightness of things.”

“A man of such romantic temperament that he can make love among the white enamel fittings of a hospital kitchen is not to be lightly dismissed."

“Few people want advice, and almost none take it.”

“If one always thought about jealous mammas, think how much fun one would miss!”

“Nothing is worse for the patients’ morale than a red-eyed nurse.”

“I wouldn’t thank anyone who reduced me to terms of solid worthiness and nothing else.”

“All men are show-offs.”

REVIEW:
I feel a little lucky that I found this book, given that its title includes neither Nurse nor Doctor, which are nearly ubiquitous in VNRNs—because to have missed it would have been a great loss, as it is the best book I’ve read all year, and only the third to rate an A+ rating. But two other books written by Ida Cook (both under the pen name Mary Burchell) that I have reviewed (Surgeon of Distinction and The Strange Quest of Nurse Anne) have both earned A- grades, so clearly one would do well to hunt down everything she’s written just to be sure they don’t miss any gems.

The plot starts off with the tried-and-true trope of meeting the hero and being swept off her feet without knowing who he is. In this case, our heroine Madeline Gill is enlisted by her half-sister Clarissa to join a trip to Montreal from their home in England, where Clarissa will be travelling with her new husband to live, once they get married, as he is a surgeon there. Madeline dutifully finds a one-year stint for her final year of nursing school in a hospital there and has everything arranged to head over on the boat when Clarissa suddenly marries someone else. It’s too late to change her plans now, so Madeline goes through with it—and Clarissa lines up a nursing gig for Madeline, caring for the mother of her suave employer, successful novelist Morton Sanders.

Morton’s mum is not the easiest of dowagers, made worse by her paranoiac jealousy of any woman Morton looks at—and he looks at quite a few, including Madeline. But she keeps her head down until she is safely in Canada, only to learn that Mrs. Sanders is going to be a patient at her new hospital, and Morton declares he intends to see a lot more of Madeline. Her life is complicated by the fact that on the voyage over, she had run into Dr. Nat Lanyon and danced with him one evening—without, of course, learning his name. Imagine her surprise when she finds that he is the demanding but brilliant hospital surgeon—and even worse, the subject of a passionate crush by Florence Ardingley, the homely and imperious head of the ward she is to work on, the same ward where Mrs. Sanders is also ensconced, of course!

Morton keeps his promise to date Madeline, and she does find herself swooning a bit for the cad. He proves his worth by landing her in hot water on several occasions—but always Dr. Lanyon is available to scoop Madeline back to safety. It’s not hard to see why Morton is not the man for her, but it is author Ida Cook’s talent that she is able to make it clear why Madeline is attracted to him, and why he is attracted to her. Unfortunately their mutual interest does not escape Mrs. Sanders’ notice, and she sets up a trap to blacken Madeline’s reputation that to be honest I saw coming a mile away. Again, Dr. Lanyon to the rescue! But finally the dark secret that she is Clarissa’s sister comes to light—and the light in Dr. Lanyon’s eyes when he looks at Madeline is snuffed out. “Dr Lanyon, who in some curious way had been her friend and protector in no small way during her first weeks at the Dominion, had suddenly become a remote, almost ill-wishing stranger.”

But another calamity strikes requiring Nat’s intervention: When Morton bows out as her date to the hospital ball at the very last minute, he rescues Madeline again by offering to take her himself, when he has never attended the ball in the history of the world. More anxiety ensues when Clarissa is having troubles with her new husband and decides she wants Dr. Lanyon back, arriving in Montreal with the express purpose of reclaiming his love, and Madeline is required to act as chaperone as he shows Clarissa all over the hospital, the city, and half the province of Quebec—and the sting of being relegated to the level of “a not very useful car gadget” causes her to fling him out of her life forever and rush off to an important meeting with Morton, who “has something particular he wants to say to me before he goes” back to London.

The outcome is pretty clear from the outset, but the story in its unfolding is sweet and slow and believable. Madeline is strong, passionate about her work and good at it, and willing to stand up for herself and fight when necessary. Nat Lanyon has an actual personality, humorous and honest and feeling—not one of the straw heroes we are told to love but can see not one single reason to. The book has a number of charming supporting characters in Madeline’s fellow nursing students, not to mention Morton, and humor sparkles on almost every page. In short, this is a sweet, simple, but strong book—an Ida Cook staple, it seems—without serious flaws to detract. If this book does not head the list at the VNRN Awards in January 2024, I will be very impressed indeed with the writer who can surpass this treasure.

Nurse Jenny

By Margaret Howe, ©1958
Cover illustration by Harry Bennett 

Jenny Dawson was pretty, young and blonde, but she had absolutely made up her mind to dedicate herself to her nursing career and to the little nephew who was left in her care … Then, in her new job at the famous Merriman Memorial Hospital, she met—Dr. Peter Hurley—broad-shouldered and serious-minded … and Jack Merriman—handsome, wealthy, debonair … The story of a lovely and courageous nurse who finds that  life can be very complicated indeed when one is devoted to a demanding career, and much more so when one is young, beautiful, and admired by two very attractive and eligible men …

 

GRADE: C-

 

BEST QUOTES:

“The knowledge that Jimmie would never be a mental case cheered her.”

 

“Jack told me I was silly not to have a pretty nurse. It’s bad enough to be here, without having to watch a homely woman for hours.”

 

“A pretty girl like you shouldn’t dedicate her future to a crippled child.”

 

“We’d better get out of here before the hospital gossips start a rumor that they caught me necking with a nurse.”

 

REVIEW:

I have said before that a C grade is really the worst possible grade for a novel: not so awful that it engenders at least some emotion, not laugh-out-loud bad, and certainly not enjoyable, it plops squarely into the category of books that there is absolutely no reason to read.

 

Nurse Jenny Dawson has inherited her nephew, Jimmie, a four-year-old with cerebral palsy, from the boy’s mother Belle, after the father, Jenny’s brother, died in a truck accident; “how callous and indifferent Belle had been from the moment Jimmie was born. She hated him. She would have put him in an institution.” So Jenny had taken him, then depleted her savings and abandoned her job to travel around the country to see various specialists to try to get him care. Merriman Clinic has gotten her one remaining dime for “this last attempt to find someone who could help,” and sure enough, Dr. Peter Hurley agrees that Jimmie has the potential to learn to talk, possibly even walk. In return for his treatment, Jenny takes on a job as nurse at the next-door hospital, caring for demanding matriarch Nora Merriman, whose money has endowed the hospital, and who has broken her hip in a fall and “might easily become a cripple” without proper nursing care.

 

Nora’s son Jack is a cad, flirting with everything but settling on nothing, encouraged by his mother, who feels that nothing is good enough for her boy. He starts chasing Jenny, who goes on dates with him and appreciates his charm, but she is put off by his lack of seriousness. At the other extreme is Dr. Peter, who is nothing but serious: “He doesn’t seem to get a kick out of anything but his profession,” observes Jack.

 

Well, his profession … and Jenny, whom he repeatedly asks out for coffee, even starts hugging and kissing her, all the while telling her, “I can’t allow my emotions to trick me into anything which might endanger my ambition to be a successful doctor.” That’s why he likes Jenny, he tells her, because she “expects no more than I can offer.” What a tease!

 

Eventually Jenny’s savings are wiped out and she worries she will have to take Jimmie out of the clinic, where he now receives round-the-clock care and therapy three times a week, which has somehow brought him to a vocabulary of ten words from none. But Dr. Peter contacts some wealthy philanthropists who offer to fund Jimmie’s treatment as long as Jimmie’s mother Belle agrees. Belle smells the money that could be made off Jimmie, as Dr. Peter and the investors are thinking of starting a national charity to benefit kids with cerebral palsy and starring Jimmie on posters to draw public attention. (It’s a little weird that either by coincidence or deliberate rip-off, the author has hijacked the story of the Jimmy Fund, which began a decade before this book was written by utilizing a 12-year-old cancer patient to raise funds and awareness, even down to using the same name for the boy with CP.) Now Jack, Peter, and Nora are all working to save Jimmie from Belle’s clutches, all to win Jennie for themselves, as a nurse or a wife. Who will succeed? Well, you won’t be shocked to learn that it isn’t Nora.

 

The curious parallel between Jimmie and Nora Merriman is only briefly touched on, when Nora wails, “It’s the prospect of a future as a cripple that appalls me.” When Jenny reminds Nora of Jimmie’s deficits, Nora replies, “Thinking about others doesn’t make it easier for me to face the future,” and flops back into her satin pillows and eiderdown quilts.

 

In the end, Jimmie is saved from his mother, who is essentially bought off, and Jenny wins the man you know she will in the final three lightning-fast paragraphs. The characters are flat and the writing is wooden, which is surprising, given that Margaret Howe has put her name on the cover of 2011 Top Ten VNRN Visiting Nurse—though she also claimed three other mediocre books (Special Nurse, Debutante Nurse, and The Girl in the White Cap). The best thing about this book is the Harry Bennett cover, even if on my copy of this book the printing register is out of alignment, making it look blurry and alien. But what’s inside the cover is off as well, so that may be fittingly appropriate.

Island Nurse

By Dorothy Daniels, ©1964 
Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti

Nurse Diana Carvell studied long and worked hard to plan her future, but the blueprint didn’t include Ethan Sloane, who stormed into her life with the crashing impact of a wave against a rock. He affected her as no man ever had—not even Dr. Barry Latham, whom she expected to marry. Was she strong enough to resist this brooding, mysterious young islander who was carefully guarding a secret? More important—did she really want to? On a tiny island, at the height of a hurricane, a beautiful girl faces her moment of truth and makes a decision that will come as a thrilling surprise …

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“It’s doggone careless of Barry, letting you run around loose.” 

“There is something to the old movie and TV business of boiling lots of hot water. Keeps folks too busy to interfere with the doctor.”

“May I examine you? I promise the fee will not be too high and my medicines all taste like peppermint candy.”

REVIEW:
Diana Carvell is planning to marry Dr. Barry Latham, who is in his final year of residency as a surgeon. Curiously, though she works as an OR nurse, she has never been in the OR with him—until one day when she is on the scene when he inexplicably walks away from a routine appendectomy. Word is Dr. Latham doesn’t have the nerve to be surgeon—odd to be finding this out on his fifth year of residency—but then it is revealed that he was just upset because his dad James is being admitted with lung cancer. Diana is enlisted to care for James after his surgery, which fortunately cures him completely, and then the Lathams recruit her to come to their summer home on an island off the coast of Bar Harbor, Maine, to watch him recuperate. She agrees to do it, although it must be confessed “she was considering breaking off with Barry because of his mother’s complete rejection of her”—the woman has not been overly friendly when she comes to visit her hospitalized husband. But she and Mrs. Latham have a quick chat, in which she tells Mrs. Latham, “You believe I’m not good enough for your son,”—a strange way to win the affection of your maybe-future mother-in-law. But it works, temporarily at least, and Diana jets off to Bar Harbor.

She’s picked up on the pier by Barry’s longtime friend, Ethan Sloan. Ethan is about to start his fourth year of medical school—he’s running a bit behind because he insists on paying his own tuition without loans or help from any of his rich friends. Ethan has an overly arrogant manner, telling her on their ride to the island, “I’m going to marry you.” He continues this conceit without a break, except for the time he tells Diana, “I’m not that vain,” and she has to be helped up off the floor when she’s done rolling around laughing. Oh, wait, no, what actually happened is that she agreed to several dates with him, including a late-night swim and smooch on the beach, and before long she is “almost running in her eagerness to see him.” When Barry shows up days later, now finished with residency and planning to work at the island hospital here and there for the summer, she decides “there was no point in holding anything back,” and fails to mention the kissing or the fact that Ethan is planning on marrying her.

Barry is also a picture of contrasts. Though he is Boston “Back Bay, Choate, Harvard,” Barry had decided not to follow his father into finance, showing “a great deal of spunk and ambition,” but in school, “his approach to medicine and surgery was casual. He did work hard and well, but there wasn’t a need for him to excel above others so he never really tried.” When he shows up on the island, he pursues waterskiing and boat racing with reckless abandon, working toward the big boat race at the end of the season. But Diana has work to do caring for James and helping out at the hospital; “she’d never be content, as Barry was, to spend the whole summer simply having fun.” Soon enough, he misses a call to help a man with a gangrenous wound because he’s off on the mainland buying a speedboat—but worse than that, he also fails to come back in time to pick her up for the big dance at the Latham house!

Ethan’s there to dance with her, though, so not all is lost, and she tells him, “When I saw you, I felt like turning cartwheels,” the gymnastic floozy. Unfortunately she doesn’t have time to demonstrate because Barry turns up, Ethan disappears, and Alicia Atwell’s appendix acts up. Diana and Barry get her to the hospital, but then Barry starts acting squirrely—and though Diana talks him into the surgery, it’s “not the sure, hard sweep of the blade an experienced surgeon would have used,” and he worked “almost too carefully, Diana noted,” taking 40 minutes to do a surgery that could have been done in 15. Afterward, “he was shaken and drenched with sweat. When he removed his gloves, his hands were shaking.” (Shades of Nurse Ann in Surgery!) But then she remembers he’s been running around all day with his new boat, which must be why he did so poorly. And she lies to the island MD, Dr. Evans, when he asks for the truth about Barry’s medical skill. “Barry is a poor doctor, an incompetent surgeon,” he tells her. Curiously, Diana declares, “I don’t believe he’s a bad surgeon. I think he’s inexperienced, that’s all. I believe in Barry Latham, as a man and as a doctor.”

Dr. Evans decides to take a week of vacation, curiously at the height of the season when the island is most populated, leaving it alone to be mishandled by Dr. Barry. But just as Diana and Ethan are dropping him off on the mainland, a hurricane blows in—the worse storm ever! Will Barry be able to find a spine and help the injured? Who will Diana decide to marry?

I’ve been known to gripe because a huge disaster plays out in a few paragraphs, and now I’m biting my tongue—this one takes 15 pages, and it drags. Parts of the book had interest and real humor, but so much of it didn’t hang together—is Barry afraid or arrogant? Does Diana believe in Barry or doubt him? At least she’s not quitting her job after she lands her man, but neither man was much of a bargain, so it was hard to feel too pleased with her choice. Overall there just isn’t enough to recommend this book.

Seaside Hospital

By Pauline Ash, ©1964
Cover illustration by Bern Smith

As a nurse, Lisa Bryant knew the importance of treatment for kleptomania, but when she found that her own sister was suffering from it she didn’t know who to turn to—well, she did know, but she was determined not to drag Doctor Randall Carson into it.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“For a girl with such an innocent face, you certainly manage to get men to run around and do things for you.” 

REVIEW:
The first pages of this book bring Nurse Lisa Bryant’s younger sister Jacky, who has been incommunicado for three years, back into her life with a bang. “Do you know,” Jacky trills, “that’s the first time I’ve seen you in nurse’s uniform! Isn’t it perfectly hideous?” We are not surprised to learn that Jacky “takes, all the time, and has very little to give back”—but Jacky takes literally, and has swiped a solid gold cigarette case that Lisa has to get out of the pawn shop to save Jacky from ruin. And you will not be surprised that Lisa is eventually suspected to be the thief, which is how these klepto stories usually go (see The Case for Nurse Sheridan and Nurse’sDilemma). But here we have a new twist, in that the man Jacky has been stealing from was her boyfriend, who tells Lisa, when she nobly returns the case, that he won’t call the cops if Lisa will “be a hostess, a companion—which she had had to agree to as the price for Jacky’s freedom.” Ew. 

Well, she has some free time, because she’s just been jilted by gadabout Derek Frenton. You have to acknowledge that he has a point when he tells her, “You adore hard work, or else you wouldn’t be so keen on staying at that hospital of yours until you qualify, marriage or no marriage. As for myself, I’ve never done a day’s work in my life, and a working wife would bore me as badly as I should bore her. I know you’ll be sensible about this, so let’s call it quits, shall we?” The knife in the back, though, is that he’s fallen for Jacky, the louse!

She also has a run-in with Dr. Randall Carson, who is “the most important (and the most short-tempered) surgeon at St. Mildred’s,” and wouldn’t you know, the man always seems to be picking on her. “She wished he wouldn’t keep watching her. It almost made her do stupid things. She tried to assess the thoughts going on behind that lean dark face of his, and wondered what he was feeling behind those cold, slate-grey eyes. He was so efficient himself that he just hadn’t patience with anyone who hadn’t achieved the standard of perfection, she supposed.” He is, in a word, horrible—so guess who Lisa develops a crush on?

Unfortunately, Lisa perseveres with her near-suicidal compunction to clean up after Jacky, which means she gets tangled up in all sorts of bad situations, such as when Derek Frenton’s mother’s jeweled brooch is stolen at a house party, and when another cad that Jacky had been dating decides he’d rather go out with fresh, unspoiled Lisa and blackmails her to make her go along with the plan. We know the eventual assault is coming, but alas, Lisa does not.

It’s a fairly convoluted story, with all the secrets and entanglements and coverups, that it’s a little hard to keep track of who knows what, and which lie is being told to whom. Meanwhile, there’s a young boy who’s been run over, and wouldn’t you know it, Jacky’s tangled up in that, too, having attempted to steal a diamond ring from the mother right before the accident, but now the parents are not coming forward to claim their mangled son, and Lisa is playing detective to try to track them down. Of course, through all of this, Lisa tries to keep Randall from thinking the worst of her—with little success, as he is always on hand when she is getting into or out of one man’s car or another. Eventually she takes Randall into her confidence and tells him the truth, so they decide they are going to have Jacky committed, and as Jacky attempts to sneak away before they can capture her, there’s a scene on the beach with the tide coming in, and Lisa and Jacky are trapped in a cave, while the police are closing in on them as well as on the blackmailing beau, who is wanted by the cops (surprise!). Of course, Lisa takes a tumble from the cliff while attempting to go for help, but that’s just the usual clever ploy to snag her man in the end.

I was hopeful from the first sentence: “Casualty was almost empty after a really busy Monday, when they brought in the man who was to play such havoc in Lisa Bryant’s life.” The rest of the book was not as quite as interesting, particularly when they trotted out the klepto relative with the covering nurse storyline, and the plot did get a bit bogged down in the end. But overall it was a quick-paced, lively and pleasant enough book. I could swear I’ve read this trapped-in-a-cave bit, too, but I couldn’t find it – no worries, that will pop up again, I’m sure, along with another kleptomaniac and an aloof, older doctor you can’t imagine anyone would reasonably fall in love with!

The Much-Loved Nurse

By Pauline Ash, ©1967

Nurse Leila possessed a rare quality—the ability to draw people out. Wherever she went, within the hospital or outside it, people found themselves falling in love with her. All except the one person she really cared about. Was there anything she could do to change the way he felt?

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“I think you’d be wretched without something of your very own to keep you occupied, but I can’t help feeling, sometimes, that you ought to have a family to raise, instead of just a job.”

“I wish you nurses would just nurse, and not talk to the patients at all!”

“This young man was going to kick against the pricks, every inch of the way.”

“If he could have shrugged, he would have, but he couldn’t because of his injuries.”

REVIEW:

Poor Nurse Leila Richmond. She really likes taking care of patients, which in this case means running errands for them, giving advice about their personal lives, carrying secret messages to the secret people in their lives—and unfortunately, as she’s on the men’s ward, all these patients soon come to feel they’re in love with her. And why wouldn’t they? “She was a golden girl. Golden of skin, golden of hair—and her eyes—they caught the sunlight, and they danced, and it was the happiest, the most beautiful face he had seen for a long time.”

A number of patients are yearning for her tragically: Dudley Marchmont, a wealthy young painter, whose hands were burned in an unsuccessful attempt to rescue a child from the fire that burned his apartment building to the ground (an especially gruesome backstory that is barely commented upon); Jeffrey Philbey, a mountaineer with an unhappy marriage who had forced his reluctant wife to come on a climb with him, and in the accident that ensued he’d become a “spinal case”—though it seems likely that he will regain some use of his legs—and his wife was killed, leaving his 7-year-old ward, herself the orphan of his brother, in his disinterested custody; and Marwood Tappender, a travelling businessman with a habit of taking typists to dinner (but nothing more!) when he’s on the road, but he has not told his wife of his hobby, and is being blackmailed by one of the typists. Phew! And did I mention that Marwood’s wife Arabella is the sister of surgeon Kearney Holdstock, “a big man, with massive shoulders and a fine head which he held rather high,” with whom Leila is actually in love?

It’s not hard to see that nothing but serious trouble and hospital gossip is going to come of Leila’s heartfelt desire to help her patients struggling with despair—“You’ve only got to say you need something, and she’ll come galloping to do it for you!” exclaims one patient. Kearney’s feelings for Leila cause him to be sucked in to Leila’s efforts to help her patients, and it isn’t long before he’s in love with her too, but as the hot water rises around Leila’s neck, she’s convinced that the only way out—once she’s solved everyone else’s problems, naturally—is to quit her job and go work at another hospital. The women’s ward, apparently, where she would cause much less collateral damage, has no need for a dedicated nurse.

As she’s running away from the hospital with Kearney in enamored pursuit, her train crashes, which of course leads to the rapprochement of the heroine and her man. This involves her promise to marry him and quit working, even after earlier consideration of quitting her post at the hospital was described as quite a burden to bear: “With the end in sight, St. Mary’s assumed a new atmosphere, an atmosphere she didn’t want to lose. She had  been a part of this great family for long enough to be a little scared and very sad at losing it.” But with a man to be gained, she’ll chuck it all! “No more trying to arrange other people’s lives, my sweet,” says her surgeon, drastically arranging her life for her without a flicker of irony. “You’ll have quite enough on your hands managing your own,” he tells her, implying her life will revolve around him and their future children. She hesitates—and he says, “Leila, if you want to go on carrying the burdens of your patients, you have to make a choice. It’s them or me.” Well, the choice seemed obvious enough to me! While it is true that Leila gets herself excessively involved with her patients and needs to be redirected, she’s clearly a great nurse who turns hopeless patients around, and it does not stand to reason that she shouldn’t be a nurse at all. I felt the loss to the hospital, the patients, and to Leila herself—will she really be happy puttering at home with little to do (until the babies start cranking out) waiting for her surgeon husband, who will be working 60-plus hours a week, to show up?

It turns out I had read this book before but had failed somehow to write the review, and now, remembering nothing of it, I was forced to wade through it again. I can’t really say it was worth a second go-through. There’s a lot of drama in the plot, and as each patient tumbles for Leila she is completely incapable of telling them that she does not love them and that they need to pull themselves together, only compounding her problems. We’re told that Kearney is a good guy—he loves his sister very much, and he agrees to play along with several of Leila’s escapades—but she largely thinks he does not care for her and just enjoys yelling at her, not completely without reason. In the end we have a fiancé 13 years older than our 20-year-old heroine and who has few outward charms to put the reader on his side. The story is entertaining enough, but there’s not enough in this book to love as much as the fellas who all love this nurse.

Nurse Angela

By Peggy Gaddis, ©1965

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

GRADE: C-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Challenge to Nurse Honor

By Pauline Ash, ©1965

A lot of people though Jeziah Selby had been unfair to his four daughters when he left them his fortune only on condition that they first worked for two years in the hospital that had meant  so much to him. Only the eldest girl, Honor, was happy to do as he wished—but were the others necessarily selfish to rebel?

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“She scuttled away, remembered she wasn’t supposed to run unless it was fire or haemorrhage, and waited till she got round a corner before she smartened her pace.”

REVIEW:

This Harlequin romance about four sisters named, I am reluctant to tell you, Faith, Hope, Charity and Honor Selby, seemed similar to other Harlequin books I’ve read, including Nurse Willow’s Ward, also about four sisters, and Reluctant Nurse, about a woman who is forced into nursing by a domineering father. Here we follow Honor, who is the one daughter who actually wanted to be a nurse, and her three sisters, who with far less enthusiasm do office work around the hospital. The other three all had budding careers as a musician, model and actress, but had been forced to put them aside when dear old dad died and stipulated that if any of his children were to inherit, all of them had to work for two years in the hospital. If any one of them should cut and run, no one will inherit. You may not be shocked to hear that the non-nurse sisters are not very happy about this. “I just can’t begin to understand what possessed Daddy to make that horrible will,” Charity moans to Honor. Bizarrely, Honor is the only one of the set who does not seem to feel that her father has done anything horrible. “You know very well what Daddy wanted—a son, to carry on the family tradition,” she answers Charity, as if this is going to either excuse Dad’s behavior or make Charity feel that Dad actually did care about her. “He thought the theater was a useless way to spend your life,” she adds, twisting the knife while she has the chance. She should have been a surgeon instead of a nurse.

She persists in torturing her other sisters as well; when Faith says that when the two years are up she is going to resume her music training in Vienna or Milan, Honor tells her, “Daddy didn’t want that sort of life for you.” Again and again we witness Honor’s cruel inability to empathize with her sisters or acknowledge that her father had not treated her sisters well. “He was being very wise,” she decides. “My sisters knew very well how he felt about their chosen careers. He was only enforcing by death what he hadn’t had time to enforce in life. Daddy was fair, he never asked too much of anybody.”

When she’s not acting “all stiff and starchy like the older staff,” Honor is fighting with her boyfriend Lucien Lorimer, a rich cad with whom she has little in common, but who proposes nonetheless. It won’t take a Sherlock Holmes to deduce that Lucien actually had a thing with Honor’s sister Faith at one point, and the pair are still fond of each other, but Honor is as dumb about them as she is about her father. For her part, she is nursing a crush on surgeon Elliott “Jake” Falkland, who clearly is fond of her, too. Honor, naturally, is unable to see his affection for her; even after Jake tells her that he’s not interested in other nurses’ troubles, only hers, she decides that he “had given no great indication that he wanted to be specially friendly with her.” So the pair stumbles through much of the book with stupid misunderstandings because neither can see the obvious, much less speak it. The problem with this device is that it becomes increasingly maddening as the book goes on. “The fact that he had taken her in his arms and kissed her didn’t really mean that he loved her,” we hear two-thirds of the way through, and we’re ready to take a number behind all of Honor’s sisters and give her a good smack.

Eventually the tragedy that Charity foretold—“No good will come of keeping any of us here. One day something awful will happen, because we’re honestly no good at the job, and then you’ll be sorry, Honor!”—comes to pass. Faith and Lucien, out for a boat ride with a few drinks on board, crash, and Faith hits her head and lapses into the inevitable coma. The accident brings almost everyone’s feelings out into the open—Lucien and Faith’s, and Hope and the passenger Alan Froy, who happens to be a music talent scout and whom Hope had met a year earlier. It also cracks the ice encasing Honor’s heart, at least as far as her sisters are concerned, and she goes to the attorneys to see if there is a way out of the will—but the attorney hints that dad had yet another trick up his sleeve. But before she can get the whole story from the attorney, she witnesses a man being stabbed in an alley, is conked on the head by the perps, and lapses into a coma of her own. Waking from it, she’s back to her old ways, needling Hope when Hope reveals that she’s leaving the hospital to go to Italy to nurse Alan back to health and, incidentally, marry him. “It will keep, won’t it?” Honor says, suggesting her sister postpone her wedding. “There’s only another twelve months to carry out Daddy’s wishes, and you did say you’d stay the course.” Honor really, truly, has no right to her name.

While she lies listlessly in the hospital thinking that her relationship with Jake is over while all her sisters have chucked the traces at long last and run off with their various beaux, the attorney shows up and tells her that if the sisters can’t last two years, then they get half their share of the inheritance instead of none, but Honor, who has stuck to it, can keep her full share. Not likely to promote sisterly affection, but half an inheritance is better than none. She rouses with this news to read a letter from Jake saying that he thinks she does not love him so he will leave the hospital, and so she manages to stagger out of her hospital room and scream his name before passing out again at the top of the stairs, but the doctor is nearby and hears her, and she hadn’t actually plummeted down the stairs after all, and everything is quickly put to rights between her and Jake.

Overall this story is fairly sweet and well written, but the problem is that Honor as a heroine is just awful. She is selfish, cold, and unfeeling toward her sisters, blind and stupid about the men in her life, and in the end exhibits little character growth except that she’s finally able to make a (ridiculous) attempt to keep Jake from leaving; surely a phone call would have sufficed? It’s very hard to spend so much time with someone you cannot bring yourself to like, so the challenge here is not for Nurse Honor but for us, the reader, to manage to stand her long enough to finish the book.