Dedication Jones

By Kate Norway
(pseud. Olive Norton), ©1969

Staff Nurse Didi Jones was torn between enthusiasm for her interesting new job and the feeling that she ought to be “settling down” as her fiancé wanted. But would there have been any problem, if she had really cared about him?

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“I don’t know how you dare to argue with that woman. She terrifies me. I go all hemiplegic at the sight of her.” 

“The way to a man’s heart isn’t through his stomach anymore. It’s through his twin carburetors or his new putter, old dear. You’re not with it.”

“Depression in a young woman of under twenty-five is either a psychosis or it’s reactive to the boy-friend situation.”

“Incompetent people are always terribly bossy, just to try to prove that they can control things.”

“Gossip can be psychotherapy. So can cigarettes, love affairs, fast driving, a good boo-hoo or a nice cup of tea.”

“You’ve had too much vitamin B. You’re getting aggressive.”

REVIEW:
As we meet “dedicated” nurse Delia Jones (she also goes by Didi, unfortunately), she is working at King Edward VII Memorial Hospital in England and has fallen victim to the classic romance trope in which her fiancé is not an especially charming individual who is always pestering her to quit her job and get married even though she really loves her work. “Geoff didn’t approve of wives who worked. He didn’t understand, I told myself. Teddy’s wasn’t like a shop, or an office. It was a life.” So you know there’s going to be a lot of tedious back-and-forth about that, when the answer is obvious. Her best friend, Rose—a delightful, flirtatious, sassy type—tells her, “If you marry him, dear girl, you’ll just be a—a chattel.” And worst of all, for you literary folks, “Geoff didn’t approve of Muriel Spark. He had found Miss Brodie unsavoury.” Just leave the bum! 

In the meantime Didi has started working in the Isolation Ward, which for some reason includes a lot of psychiatry cases. This means she is seeing a lot of a certain Dr. Dwyryd Ffestin-Jones (he’s Welsh). He’s kind, firm, but a little distant—in short, the quintessential British nurse novel love interest.

Next comes trope #3, in which Didi has mailed her engagement ring back to Geoff, but he’s been injured and may never walk again, so it’s not clear if she feels free to keep walking out the door. Then suddenly Dr. F-J is not speaking to Didi, and she’s not sure what has happened—so naturally she comes down with flu and is in a coma for a week, but fails to recover because she’s so upset about Dr. F-J’s behavior that she is shipped home to recover for a month or two. Only a chat with a psychiatrist—just not that psychiatrist—helps her get caught up with hospital gossip and figure out what the problem is. She promptly takes action and saves her own day …

Overall the book is very formulaic, but it has pleasant characters—again, per usual, the best are the strong, independent heroine and her feisty roommate, as well as a few other nurses who come across well, while the men are mostly limpid and uninteresting, including Dr. F-J, I’m sorry to report. There is a subtle humor throughout, such as when Didi tells a friend, “If I don’t spill to some neutral observer, I shall burst,” and he replies, “And I’m no surgeon, so we can’t have that. Spill away.” Once again Olive Norton, here writing as Kate Norway, lives up to her solid reputation as a gem of an author, and I can again recommend the tenth book I have read by this excellent writer, and hope that she’s written a lot more nurse romance novels that I can look forward to.

Nurse with a Dream

By Norrey Ford, ©1957
Cover illustration by Chapman 

When Jacqueline Clarke came from France to nurse at a Yorkshire hospital she had never known any Englishmen except her father. Soon she was to meet two very attractive ones; her farmer-cousin Guy, who ruled over his broad acres from a centuries-old farmhouse, and the distinguished surgeon of whom nurses spoke in awed whispers as “the great Mr. Broderick.” Guy fell in love and started proposing marriage almost at once, while she wasn’t supposed even to speak to Mr. Broderick—and what a sensation there was when she did! She couldn’t presume to imagine that he would ever give her a serious thought … and yet the idea of him seemed to come persistently between her and Guy.

GRADE: A

BEST QUOTES:
“We’ll make a nurse of you some day. Even if we kill you.”

“We all condemn what we can’t understand.”

“No house is big enough for two women if they don’t agree.”

“He is a doctor, but only just, I’d say. I mean you could still see bits of eggshell and fluff on him.”

“Whoever heard of two weeks’ convalescence, when we’re short-staffed and you’re not actually dying?”

“Only twelve more operating days to Christmas, Nurse?”

“‘He showed me the Charleston. His grandma taught him.’ She rolled down her nylons and proudly displayed blue bruises. ‘Those old-timers must have been tough.’”

“Bad as January was, it rushed all too soon into February, and those nurses taking the examination went about with glazed eyes and moving lips.”

“If you understand children, you understand men, mostly.”

REVIEW:
Jacqueline Clarke is a Cinderella of a nurse. Orphaned during “the war,” she has “warm youth and vitality,” “richly curved red lips and gentian-blue eyes, fine skin as delicate and rosy as a ripe, sun-warmed peach.” Her father was English and her mother French, and she was raised in France her entire life, so though her English is perfect, she speaks with “the slightest trace of accent, just enough to make her sound enchanting to English ears.” I hate perfect heroines; what’s wrong with being a normal, flawed woman? 

Anyway, Jacqueline has returned to Yorkshire, the land of her father, to learn about his home country. She says she’s never met a young Englishman, which seems hard to believe, given that she works in a hospital. Not that it matters; “I’m not interested in men. I just want to be a nurse,” she says. Then we hear about the lion surgeon Dr. Broderick, who “doesn’t care for nurses. He’s a terror and twists their heads off, like eating shrimps.” I’m betting $100 he’s starring on the last page.

On her first weekend off, she takes a trip to the moors to see the farmhouse where her father was raised, and meets a birder named Alan who takes her on a long walk with him. She’s telling him how nice her father was to her, when suddenly she gasps, realizing that “today she had been happy and comfortable with a man who had not talked down to her, or patronised, or treated her as a pretty little woman fit only for flirting; to this man, as to her father, she was a person, with a mind and ideas of her own.” Heady stuff! They talk of love, and he insists, “my love is elsewhere”—perfect grounds for a misunderstanding, as indeed there is one about his identity, which we saw coming half the moor away.

At the farmhouse, she meets her half-cousin Guy, and his mother Connie—her father’s wicked stepmother, who indeed “looked like an earthy troll”—and he is a big, handsome Guy, who makes her pulses race, but you know there has to be someone to interpose. Actually, it’s initially more complicated than that, as, when Jacky takes a stroll on the moor, she spots a dog and is then knocked unconscious. She’s soon found by Alan, however, and carried several miles to the village. She wakes in her own hospital, but the curious twist is that she has lost her memory of the day, and when Alan shows up and chews her out for being irresponsible, as he thinks she had fallen from a steep crag he had warned her about. She is livid, and spars feistily with him, even threatening him with a water jug before he ducks out the door. “As a junior nurse, I’m less than the dust, but as me I won’t be anybody’s doormat,” she declares, winning my heart instantly. And … Alan turns out to be Dr. Broderick! Who would have guessed!?!?

Of course, she can’t believe that a mighty surgeon could like her, even though they have frequent friendly and amusing exchanges. Her confusion is manipulated by Guy’s sister Deborah, who is hankering after Dr. Broderick herself, and she convinces Jacky to agree to marry Guy, so as to avoid subjecting Dr. Broderick to idle gossip that he could be involved with such a lowly creature as herself. “It was so plainly a breach of hospital etiquette to have her life saved by its most eminent surgeon! Perhaps if he had known she was a nurse, he’d have left her lying there, and saved himself and everybody else a great deal of unpleasantness!”

For his part, Guy has been pressing her for her hand—insisting, actually, in the most unpleasant and frankly alarming way. He tells her he’d like to hold her in his hand—“Slowly, keeping his gaze on his palm, he closed his muscular hand till the fingers were pressed down tightly and his knuckles showed white.” Yikes! She valiantly resists: “You can’t just say ‘that’s for me’ as if I were a cake in a confectioner’s window,” she insists, but he does anyway. He doesn’t improve his case when he says, “As if a woman’s career mattered, when she has a chance of marrying!” (To her credit, she laughs in his face, saying, “Do men think they are the be-all and end-all of a woman’s existence? Do you think we’d throw anything over that we cared about, just to marry one of you?”) But she gets flustered when he kisses her, so she wonders, “Was this love, this pounding of the heart, this disturbance of the senses?” Eventually she figures out it’s not, but by then she believes it’s too late to get out of marrying Guy, which is a preposterous manifestation of honor, and I would say that it’s dishonorable to marry a man you don’t love, to yourself and to the gentleman in question.

Anyway, everything sorts out in the end, as you know it will, but the great fun is watching it all unfold. This book has some really lovely people in it, but tops is Jacky’s nurse friend Bridget, who fortunately has to recover from her own stomach troubles in the bed next to Jacky, so we have lots of time to appreciate her sense of humor. Bridget is the kind of pal who, looking down on her cafeteria tray, quips, “When I came off-duty I was hungry enough to eat a dead dog, but I didn’t think I’d have to.” Pretty much everything she says is equally glorious. Initially disappointed with Jacky’s looks, I was quickly won over with her spunk and her ability to stand up for herself, even when facing dragons like Dr. Broderick. I even liked Dr. Broderick, who really was mostly respectful of Jacky, and at one point he berates himself for his hand in the charade that was Jacky’s engagement to Guy in a way that felt honest: “Fool, fool, fool! He had not even tried—not raised a hand to stop her falling into Guy’s grasp. He’d shown too much darn self-sacrifice, too much nobility; in fact, he’d been a stuffed shirt.” The question of who clubbed Jacky over the head is a bit of unnecessary detour for the plot, though it’s not badly done, and I was left wondering until the end, and the reveal offered some interesting insights into minor characters. And the writing! So witty, so amusing, so enjoyable! Writing this good is rare enough that it must be celebrated, and I am happy to pop a cork for Norrey Ford and this lovely book.

Nurse Morgan Sees It Through

Book 4 of 4
By Rubie Saunders, ©1971 

When Broadway star Valerie Vale’s daughter entered City Hospital, the little girl became the center of her own personal drama—one that seemed doomed to end in tragedy. Marilyn Morgan was the child’s nurse, and assigned to the case was handsome, ultra-eligible Dr. Ed Clark. Desperately involved in a professional struggle to stabilize, did Ed and Marilyn realized they were growing deeply involved—with each other?

GRADE: C 

BEST QUOTES:
“A good aide was worth her weight in gold.”

“Isn’t she beautiful? Look at that groovy pants suit.”

“If Patty was worried about her appearance, she would be all right.”

“Oh, will this beautiful nurse and I ever be free at the same time? I might as well drink myself into a stupor and forget her.”

“I mean—how can you propose to a beautiful girl with half the hospital breathing down your neck?”

“If you’re ever going to have your own apartment, the first thing you absolutely have to have is a good recipe for meatloaf.”

“Hey, when you stop talking, you must be getting serious.”

REVIEW:
In this, the last in the series about nurse Marilyn Morgan, we pick up essentially the same book we’ve read the last three times. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing: Marilyn and her sassy roommate, fellow nurse Marcia Goldstein, work, party, date, and hang out at their swinging bachelorette pad two blocks from City Hospital, which means that doctors and nurses are always dropping by. Here we have back again Marilyn’s old standby, Dr. Matt Evans,  who had disappeared off to Chicago for an internship in Nurse Morgan’s Triumph, but pops up here without a word about his time in the Windy City, or what his current job in the hospital is. Poor Matt is always trying to take Marilyn out, but on his one weekend off, an emergency comes up and he has to work after all—clearing the deck for super-cute Dr. Ed Clark, who is researching leukemia at City Hospital and is the hospital’s most eligible bachelor. But Marilyn just doesn’t feel like she’s ready to get married, even in her fourth book. “Your trouble is that you’ve always dated so many men at once that you don’t have time to concentrate on any one of them,” says Marcia, probably a little jealous. She shouldn’t be, though—it can be really hard work fending off the gentlemen! “He was kissing her again, and Marilyn’s thoughts were racing. If she made him stop, he would start talking about marriage. He had often in the past, and Marilyn knew he was ready at any time. But as for herself, she wasn’t sure at all.” 

At work, Marilyn has a lot going on, too. Jeff Cross, a young boy from her old Harlem neighborhood, has been bitten by a stray dog and required surgery—and may need rabies shots as well if the dog starts frothing at the mouth in the next six weeks, which it may well do, since it’s allowed to run free in the New York City park. The boy’s father is adamantly opposed to rabies shots on the grounds that they would be very painful—never mind how distressing death by rabies would be, a point no one thinks to bring up—and it’s Marilyn’s job to convince dad to go through with it. Then there’s the new nurse’s aide to break in, and giggling Patty, who spends more time on her hair and makeup than she does on her job, gives little Jeff some orange juice the morning of his surgery, which might have killed him if the anesthesiologist hadn’t caught it in time! Lastly, there’s ten-year-old Pamela Frini, whose mother Valerie Vane is a famous actress, who has been diagnosed with leukemia, and Marilyn is assigned to be the child’s nurse. At the time of this book, some leukemia patients “have lived for five years or more,” the nursing supervisor explains. Some are even “long-term survivors … who have the disease and live with it for over eleven years.” Oh boy!

The upside is that while caring for Pamela, she is working alongside Ed, and what a dreamboat! Eventually they start dating, and that’s fun! They go to a gala party for the debut of the musical that Valerie Vane is starring in—as a lion tamer, in fact—and they stay out until sunup, even though she has to work the evening shift that day, which seems like a bad idea to me! They head home only to find that Marcia, who’s been on vacation in Florida with her parents, is home a day early—sporting an engagement ring! The two women are instantly rendered insane, fleeing to the kitchen and leaving poor Ed to cool his heels in the living room and wonder, “What ever gets into females at the sight of an engagement ring?” Eventually he realizes they’ve forgotten he’s alive, and as they chatter in raptures in the other room, he slinks out of the apartment, and that, believe it or not, is the end of the book.

It’s a strange and very anticlimactic conclusion to the four-book Marilyn Morgan RN series. As frequently as we hear Marilyn say she’s not ready for marriage, it’s peculiar that we end the series with her virtual orgasm over her friend’s engagement, which is something of a mixed message. I’ve been mulling over the question of whether the heroine needs to be engaged at the end of the book to qualify as a VNRN, and I’m leaning toward no. Dating is certainly romance, and does not need to end in marriage to be such. The problem here is that there’s not much dating, either. We’re also denied the enjoyment of lifestyle scenarios that Rubie Saunders usually gives us in these novels, because what we do see is infrequent and unenthusiastic, and Marcia—frequently the life of the party in these novels—is packed off to Florida for about half the book. I don’t need to see Marilyn wind up her series with a ring on her finger, but I did expect her to go out with a bang, and I am disappointed to see her fade away with the whimper we have here.

Marilyn Morgan books:
1. Marilyn Morgan, R.N.
2. Nurse Morgan’s Triumph
3. Marilyn Morgan, Cruise Nurse
4. Nurse Morgan Sees It Through

Obstetrical Nurse

By Jane Converse, ©1972
Cover illustration by Allan Kass 

“I love you, Lon. I’m never going to stop loving you!” Nurse Marguerite Lowell longed to say it to Dr. Lon Webster. Longed to kindle a response in his heart. Working so closely with him, Marguerite found her attraction to the handsome young doctor growing stronger each day. And more hopeless, for Lon made no secret of his infatuation with the hospital’s provocative blond receptionist. When Dr. Warren Leash, Chief of Obstetrics, proposed, Marguerite felt caught in an emotional trap. Warran was a man she deeply admired—but could she love him? Should she fight for the man she wanted—or settle for a sensible marriage? The turmoil in her heart grew, until a fateful event brought Marguerite winthin reach of the love she had always dreamed of …

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“‘Stay cool,’ she murmured. ‘It’s only a man.’” 

“While he was looking at Hallie, I was looking at you. You weren’t exactly green with envy. Just sort of a pale chartreuse.”

“Now I know what they do with the leftover ether at your hospital, Lonnie. They serve it up in highballs once a year.”

REVIEW:
Dr. Lon Webster is the object of Nurse Marguerite Lowell’s deepest desires. The problem is that Dr. Lon is handsome, but “he’s a permanent adolescent, and he’s dull. Oh, and he’s righteous. A self-centered baby,” says Marguerite’s fabulous roommate, Nurse Joan McAfee. And worst of all, “he barely knew that Marguerite existed.” Instead, he’s fawning over the beautiful but dumb 19-year-old hospital receptionist, Hallie Davis. What a prince. 

Goaded by Joan, Marguerite decides to start dating Chief of Obstetrics Dr. Warren Leash, who actually is—kiss of death—a nice guy. “One look and you knew there wasn’t a shred of dishonesty in the man. She could relax with him as easily as she relaxed with Joan McAfee and there was never any need to be anyone but herself.” Of course, this means he is fatally doomed to be uninteresting to our heroine. But after Warren kisses her for the first time, he sort of proposes, and she sort of doesn’t say no, so now everyone in the hospital takes them to be engaged. “There was no turning back now,” thinks Marguerite the dope, “yet she couldn’t honestly say that she was in love with the man she was going to marry.”

For his part, Lon is about announce his engagement to Hallie at a big hospital gala, but Lon’s brother Brian turns up, and Hallie is transfixed. And why wouldn’t she be? The man is essentially dressed like a pirate, with striped pants, a transparent black shirt with a ruffled jabot, a wide tangerine sash, and a single gold hoop earring. Hallie gets Lon to postpone the announcement, and wouldn’t you know it? On the night of a big obstetrical emergency at the hospital, Lon learns that Hallie has eloped with his brother, and the loser is so distraught that he flees the hospital, leaving Warren and Marguerite to cope with all the dropping babies single-handedly. Lon then spends pages moaning and weeping, gnashing his teeth and pulling his hair—such attractive behavoir that Marguerite finally decides she’s going to break off her engagement with Warren and go back to moping over her unrequited love for Lon. “Disgusted?” snorts Joan, when Marguerite tells her of the plan. “Not because you’re being rotten to Dr. Leash, not because your conscience hurt—oh, no! But because Lonnie Webster’s little playmate ran off with his kid brother. Wow! You can go back to making a tragic figure of yourself again. Brooding around the house, staying home every night like somebody’s old-maid aunt.” I told you Joan is terrific!

Marguerite, however, in addition to be incredibly selfish and stupid, is also nearly as conceited as Dr. Lon. When she hears that her and Joan’s landlord, Rick, has started hanging around more with Joan, she thinks, “What if he’s using her companionship as an excuse to hang around the cottage because of me?” Every man must be in love with her—every man, that is, except Lon. It’s not hard to come to the conclusion that Marguerite doesn’t deserve Warren. Lon spends his days in a melodramatic misery, always with Marguerite’s sympathetic ear—and still shows no interest in her. Warren, however, lays it out straight and tells Lon that he barely knew Hallie, they were not likely to succeed as a couple, and if his infatuation with his own “sob story” continues to interfere with his work, he’s going to be fired. “Lon needs so much understanding,” Marguerite tells Warren, inexplicably defending the big baby. “Someone’s got to make him feel secure again. He’s got to feel that someone loves him.” Who might that be?

Warren again proves how much better than Lon he is by realizing that Marguerite is in love with Lon and letting her out of the engagement. But he’s going to wait for her, “because I think you’re going to wake up some day and realize that you’re infatuated with a man who hasn’t grown up yet,” he says, but frankly I wonder why Warren doesn’t realize that a woman who could fall in love with a self-centered ass like Lon should be avoided like COVID-19. Not even Marguerite can explain it: “She saw both men clearly now, as, perhaps, she had always seen them. The trouble was that the contrast between them didn’t make any difference; common sense and love seemed to have no connection with each other.” Frankly, I don’t believe that to be true. You can be attracted to people who are not right for you, but they do have some quality that attracts you. As we are given him, Lon has absolutely none.

Nine months whiz by and Hallie turns up again very pregnant, with a sob story about how Brian dumped her after forcing her to do LSD numerous times. The most interesting part of the book is that when Hallie’s baby is born—not that we didn’t see this coming—the baby has anencephaly: “sound in body and limb. But the head looked as though a scupltor had run out of clay, leaving the top portion unenclosed and incomplete. That the tiny brain was not fully formed went without saying.” Of course, anencephaly is not caused by LSD use, it’s caused by folic acid deficiency (which is why they started putting it in bread in 1998). Curiously, it’s Lon’s self-centered wailing over this baby that finally brings Marguerite to her senses, because “I wouldn’t want to lean on a man who falls apart every time the going gets rough,” she tells Lon.

In her misery after the baby’s birth—and quick death—Hallie spills a lot of beans, including that she had left Brian for a partying crowd though he had begged her to live clean for the baby, and that she thinks Lon is “a dull, boring clod!” Hallie gets news that Brian has been drowned, but Marguerite somehow misses this bulletin, and when she goes to Warren gleaming with new-found love for him, he tells her that she’s just saying that because now Lon and Hallie are free to marry, “so here’s your second-best standby, right?” Her response is to basically yell at him for several pages—no tears, no apologies, no acknowledgement that Warren is completely right to feel suspicious. Weeks go by, and finally Lon makes a pass at Marguerite, and she tells him to grow up. She instantly reports this to Warren, who remains noncommittal, and Marguerite pitches a tantrum that seems eerily familiar—perhaps picked up as a successful technique utilized to much success by her hero Lon—slams a dish, and tells Warren, “I love you! I’m sick of apologizing because it took me so long to know it,” though we have seen her apologize not once. That’s all it takes, though, and as the curtain draws closed, Marguerite and Warren are making out on the couch.

Jane Converse has an awful habit of endowing the nurse’s friend with bad looks, and then pointing them out every time the woman enters the room. Such is Joan, a straight-shooting, funny, intelligent, “incomparable gem”—in fact, it’s not hard to like her a lot more than our heroine—but she’s described as “a frizzy-haired, pie-faced, sawed-off, roly-poly clown.” As her relationship with landlord Rick develops, we cringe for poor Joan: He repeatedly insults her, such as when “he used his free hand to swat Joan on her seat. ‘You had the flame up too high, dodo! It’s bad enough you’re not a gorgeous blonde. I can’t even teach you to cook.’” At least twice on every page, Rick is insulting her in every possible way—calling her “tubby,” “stupid,” “broad on the beam”—but that’s OK, because “behind Rick’s insults and criticisms was an underlying affection,” and Joan just smiles and giggles, Marguerite thinks it’s “good to see people so happy, so at ease with each other,” and I’m developing a stomach ache. Meanwhile, of course, Marguerite is as self-centered and stupid as the man she spends most of the book moping after, and you close the book thinking that she and Lon rather deserved each other, and feeling sorry for poor Warren. Jane Converse can write reasonably well, but here the characters are mostly such annoying one-note wonders who never stop whining, so the story does not move along as crisply as some of her stories. Honestly, there’s not much here to appreciate, so put aside this dullard and pick up one of Jane’s better titles, like the classic Surf Safari Nurse. At least that book has some life to it, and a shark attack to boot!

Wrong Doctor John

By Kate Starr, ©1966

It could have been very confusing to have two members of the staff at the Eye Clinic with the same name—John Hardin; one a doctor, the other a surgeon. But Nurse Emma Brown at least had no difficulty in choosing between them.

GRADE: A

BEST QUOTES:

“To be really on your toes you needed setbacks.”

“Knowledge is a good thing. It should help you graduate.”

REVIEW:

The premise of this book is that there are two doctors named John Harding, both of whom work at the dilapidated, overrun eye clinic. “Don’t let its squalor deceive you; only on the outside is Eye Clinic an eyesore,” the senior nurse tells a flock of fledgling nurses, which includes our heroine, Emma Brown. For on the inside, the eye clinic offers the best care for eye diseases in Australia. This Emma quickly discovers after she is sent—to her horror—to work at the eye clinic, because the great senior John Harding, looking out the window after a difficult night, sees Emma, also just off her night shift, running across the lawn, her red hair flying, and asks that she be transferred to his clinic. Creepy as that is, off she goes, and upon arrival she cannot even get into the building, it is so full of people. Eventually she elbows her way in and stumbles around for a while, usually directed by the helpful patients who know the confusing maze of hallways a lot better than she does, until she’s put to work sorting patients, who must sit in rows according to who’s next. “Emma, frustrated, feeling that her two and a half years of training, a good part of it most uplifting and impressive, had prepared her for something better than the collecting of tickets, shot Sister Morrow an indignant look.” It’s a humorous scene, in which she is forced to bully the knitters and chatters and the deaf Mr. Al Croker into order. Then she moves on to eye exercises, made more challenging by young Malcolm, an eye clinic veteran who always pretends that his eyes have gotten stuck in the crossed position until Emma pinches him back to normal.

On her first day she meets young John Harding—called Dr. John, compared to the senior Mr. John, a convention you will understand if you’ve read a few Harlequin (i.e. British) VNRNs; senior MDs in the UK are called Mister. Young Dr. John calls her Blackie because of her black stockings—a bit of a joke since her last name is Brown and most people call her Brownie—and she calls him, mostly to herself, wrong Dr. John, because as soon as she meets Mr. (senior) John Harding she is smitten with the great man.

The old clinic is to be abandoned soon because a new modern clinic is being built nearby. Senior/Right Mr. John takes her on a tour of the new facility, interested as he is in this bright, light, lively creature. On the tour, however, she discovers that “something was very wrong” with Mr. Harding. As the book trots along, we hear a lot about Mr. John’s sadness, about “something in the great man that grieved her because it grieved him.” It seems to involve a very beautiful woman named Kristin who hangs around the clinic, lecture halls, anywhere Mr. John might turn up, so she can turn her tear-filled  gaze upon him.

Meanwhile, Emma develops a chummy friendship with Dr. John, who is always teasing her but also on occasion sincere as he earnestly learns all he can from the great doctor, assisting in surgery: “Well—I’ll at least hand something,” he hopes of his first day as surgical assist. The pair skewer each other amusingly, as well as pick each other up, and in the end, they head into the outback as a mobile clinic to treat Maori people without other access to medical care.

You can guess where at least one of these threads is headed, but it really doesn’t matter—this rollicking, enjoyable book has a marvelous sense of humor and some lovely writing; it had me at the first sentence. “It was a postcard sort of morning, a fresh, bright morning that brings wholeness and sanity flooding reassuringly back to a slightly threadbare, rather crazy world.” With writing this good you needn’t worry so much about plotting, though this book’s story moves along nicely. Emma is a feisty gal who, if brought into the eye clinic on a creepy whim, never deserves it, always standing on her own two feet and refusing to be a patsy even to Mr. John. If she does suffer from a clearly foolish crush on Mr. John, she always has Dr. John to ridicule her for it, and we all know how a hopeless crush feels; the characters are so well drawn that we can empathize with their foibles rather than sneer. So in the end, if Dr. John was wrong, this book is absolutely right.

Paper Halo

By Kate Norway, pseud. Olive Norton, ©1970

Cover illustration by Bern Smith

Nurse Toffy [sic] collected men-friends easily, while her friend Nurse Clare was shy and fastidious. It was unfortunate that, because of a misunderstanding, the one man who attracted her gained the very opposite impression of Clare—and disapproved of her accordingly.

GRADE: A

BEST QUOTES:

“That’s the trouble with men: you have to watch what you ask for, because they’re only too ready to be little gentlemen and supply it.”

“I smiled at the front-row patients to show them I had them well in mind. Two of them smiled back; the rest went on studying my shoes in that disconcerting way they have.”

“I’d long since learned not to be surprised at the speed with which the grapevine assimilated facts, like an insect-eating plant gobbling up its prey.”

REVIEW:

I started this book and then had to put it down for a bit when I went on a long hiking vacation, and when I came back to it I couldn’t remember much of it, so I started over. How lucky for me that this is such a truly superlative book!

Nurse Clare Kennedy has actually been out of school for enough years that she has amassed a truly impressive body of experience. We watch her expertly staff a busy clinic and serve in a role more like that of a PA in the ED, making diagnoses, suturing wounds, and initiating treatment plans with complete skill, accuracy, and aplomb.

The only issue she has is that she is not impressed with the opposite sex. She’s had a couple of run-ins early on with boys who assaulted her in the name of love, and it’s left her pretty cool. Her roommate, Torfy, who is a more freewheeling type, tries to explain that kissing boys is perfectly acceptable, a hobby indulged in by “ordinary people. Like you and me, for example. Just people who enjoy petting in cars, that’s all. And a lot of perfectly ordinary and quite nice people do, you know. In fact they always did.” Clare is not buying it, however, especially after she is mauled again after the big nurse’s dance. “I’m not odd,” she tells Torfy, who clearly thinks otherwise. “But I just don’t want them to take it for granted that if I’m nice to them it means I want them to paw me.”

The only man she’s ever had eyes for, and the only gentleman she’s ever met, is Dr. Neil Sargent, who escorts Clare home after the big dance. But after their one brief drive, she doesn’t see him again for years. When they do next meet, he’s popping down to the ED to see a patient she’s requested help for from the covering doc—not realizing it’s her old heartthrob—just as Dr. Kenyon Fiske is pinning her down for her fourth assault. Clare manages to beat Ken away, but Neil, walking in as it is transpiring, thinks she’s pushing the doctor away because she’s embarrassed at having been caught in the clinch. He then looks with suspicion—a little too much, methinks—on her every interaction with anyone of the male persuasion. Clare’s a friendly person, too, so there’s always a copper sitting down to a cuppa in the ED after he’s hauled in an assault victim, or a resident to have lunch with at the end of a long night shift.

You know how it’s going to play out, and it does delightfully. The writing here is sharp, as in, “Sister folded away her smile,” and, “She slid a look at Torfy.” It’s written in the first person, and has a very amusing sense of humor, so at first I thought this book must have been written by the Marjorie Lewty, who gave us the excellent Town Nurse—Country Nurse, and though this book could be a sister to Lewty’s, it is a different author, but one who also penned another winner, Factory Nurse. I appreciated the realism of the hospital setting, such as when Clare “switched on the kettle and fetched the milk from the blood fridge”; the nurses I’ve known do enjoy serving popcorn in a bedpan. Clare is easily one of the most intelligent heroines I’ve ever met, and this book was sweet, smart, and much too short. Olive Norton has firmly established herself on my list of best VNRN authors, and I look forward to more of her books.

Nurse Willow’s Ward

By Jan Tempest 
(pseud. Irene Mossop Swatridge), ©1965

When two devoted sisters love the same man, there is bound to be unhappiness; especially in a case like this, where young Dr. Fyncham couldn’t make up his mind between Willow, the competent nurse, and Rose, the sweet, shy home girl. Probably it was just as well for all concerned that a more forceful character took a hand in the game.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:

“She wished desperately that the conventions didn’t insist that a girl must wait for a man to voice his intentions toward her.”

“Why must sons be so hopelessly obtuse where their mothers are concerned?”

“Never try to be arch or playful. You just haven’t the figure for it.”

“When a girl appears to make it obvious that she has no time for a certain man, that man can be sure she is interested in him.”

“You don’t grovel. You couldn’t. It would spoil the perfect creases in your trousers.”

“Why don’t you kiss more and argue less?”

REVIEW:

Nurse Willow Madderley is one an interestingly named family that includes sisters Anchusa, Saffron, and Rose, plus their father. On the opening page, we are attending the reception of sister Saffron, who just having been “safely” married, all but ceases to exist to the family and will barely be mentioned for the remainder of the book. The Madderleys have moved to town recently because their father got into trouble by telling fortunes and was denounced as a fraud. So here they are, trying to keep a low profile in this small English town.

At the reception, we are trailing along behind Nurse Willow, dancing with Dr. Howard Fyncham, who “had a weakness for attractive girls,” but “there was no future in any of his flirtations. His mother saw to that.” Willow has unfortunately succumbed to Howard’s superficial charms; though she seems aware of the shallows of his character, she is still unable to resist him. Howard is also jerking along Willow’s sister Rose, who serves mainly as unpaid maid and companion to his whining barnacle of a mother, crippled by what sounds like rheumatoid arthritis. Willow feels that her major handicap in winning Howard for herself is that she is “too large altogether,” but she would do better to focus on her inclination to be nasty. When the dance is interrupted by a 13-year-old apparent vagabond seeking help for her little brother Perry, who has been pinned under a farm truck, Willow and Howard rush off to assist—Willow making snide remarks to Patty, who immediately nails Willow and calls her “bossy and conceited and horrid.” Willow immediately proves the last charge by worrying more about her dress than the child squashed into the mud: “She didn’t intend to ruin the first new evening gown she had bought for two years.”

Meeting Patty and Perry’s older brother March Carrick-Carre, “a large, raw-boned, ungainly looking man with close-cropped, bristling, fiery-red hair,” she immediately lays into him for not having fetched a blanket, and her meanness is chalked up to an “outraged maternal instinct,” which is pretty hard to swallow after witnessing her rude condescension to Patty on the ride over. “Would March offer to pay for the damage to her slippers, stockings and evening gown?” she fumes “caustically” through gritted teeth as she helps carry Perry down a dirt road on a stretcher. Back at the hospital she cares for young Perry on the night shift, who has not endeared himself to the rest of the staff because he is angry and suspicious—it seems both his parents died after being admitted to a hospital, so he is convinced he is going to die there as well. March, who it turns out has been repeatedly denied access to his brother during the day, climbs in through the window to see Perry, and Willow fights some more with him, bringing up—yet again—her ruined party clothes. “What’s a ruined frock compared with your inward glow of virtue?” he counters, and though he offers to pay for her dress, she surprisingly declines, after all her fussing about it. March is quickly revealed as a funny, straightforward, affectionate man who doesn’t deserve the nasty Willow; he and Perry decide that she’s less of a willow and more of a horse chestnut, or possibly a copper beech. When he calls her handsome, capable and durable, she snaps that the words sound like an advertisement for a household appliance. “You would be quite a valuable appliance in any household, I imagine. You grow on one,” he answers coolly. Love will clearly ensue, sealed by the additional fact that he’s much bigger than even the towering Willow. “I dare say some fellows would call you a hefty armful, but you’re just right for me. Care to experiment?” he asks her. If Willow does resist, I find it hard not to love this guy.

Instead, Willow continues to pine for Howard, who increasingly demonstrates that he is a limp, exploitative, unfeeling ass when he allows Rose to spend hours a day caring for his mother, neglecting her duties as housekeeper of her own family, without even a word of thanks. “I don’t like to feel that we’re imposing on her good nature,” he says to Willow, who seems to have caught some of March’s honesty and replies, “You are, of course.” So in a moment of weakness Howard proposes to Rose, but then goes crawling off to Willow to try to get her to help him out of it, now that he’s had time to think about the qualities he wants in a wife, who could “do so much to lighten her husband’s burdens. It was amazingly difficult to get a competent secretary to answer the telephone, keep accounts, and help in the surgery,” and a nurse like Willow, “who was so crisp, astringent and undemanding,” would be ideal. During this pathetic interview, Willow is “quivering with anticipation” in the hope that he will declare himself to her, regardless of how abominably he’s treated her sister. “‘This is it,’ she had thought eagerly. ‘Hold tight, girl! Dreams do sometimes come true…’” After a number of horrible excuses about why he should dump Rose, he’s about to tell Willow that she’s the one he wants—and it seems she’s horrid enough that she might accept—when March barges in to deflate them both. “Have I interrupted a tender moment? Good! Doctors and nurses are better apart in their private lives. Who wants to go around in a perpetually hygienic and sterile atmosphere?” he laughs. He is way too good for Willow, but seems stuck on her anyway.

Speaking of stuck, Howard seems to be—true to his slimy character he refuses to give Rose a ring or ask her to name the day she will make him the happiest of men. Eventually the weasel works his way around to telling Rose that “they” have made a mistake, ending their secret engagement—and her indentured servitude to his mother—though later he lies to his mother and says that it was Rose who broke it off. His cruel treatment of Rose finally wakes Willow to his true nature, and here her ability to make nasty comments is put to good use as Howard tries to worm back into Willow’s good graces when it turns out that his mother wants Rose back. “If he wanted Rose to take him on again, he must do his own groveling,” she decides. Rose, for her part, is standing firm for once: “Howard had tried her too far and she couldn’t forget it.” But, alas, eventually she does, when Howard pleads—not hard enough—that she was always the only one for him. March also triumphs over Willow’s stubbornness—in part because he shows up at the hospital just in time to help after the hospital has caught on fire and she’s trying to shepherd all the pediatric patients down the slippery fire escape.

There is a lot more to this excellent, brimming book than just the stories of Willow and Rose; sister Anchusa has her own excellent story line, as does a former girlfriend of March’s. Many of the characters in this book are just delightful, particularly March, Patty, and Willow’s father. Only Willow is a slightly  bitter pill, though she improves over time. The writing is amusing and campy, and it’s easy to become immersed in this comfortable world, so addictively drawn that it feels like you’re visiting a real neighborhood. My only disappointments were that Howard won in the end with little comeuppance for his manipulative, spineless character, and that Willow too doesn’t really regret her earlier poor behavior, or seem to learn from it or evolve. But in the setting of this charming story, these flaws are minor and should not keep you from Jan Tempest’s delightful book.

Marilyn Morgan, R.N.

Book 1 of 4
By Rubie Saunders, ©1969

Marilynn Morgan was thrilled with her job at City Hospital. Despite her parents’ objections, nursing was the career she wanted—and she had absolutely no intention of rushing headlong for the label of “wife.” But there was Sam, dependable and eager to tie her down … and Henri, wealthy and offering luxury she had never dreamed of … and Bill, full of fun and family plans for the future … and Matt—Matt, especially Matt … Suddenly Marilyn was forced to face the most important question of her life. Would she ever find a man who understood the proud longings of her heart? Or was sacrificing her career to be the going price for love?

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:

“That boy is the greatest reason for birth control in the world!”

“He doesn’t mind spending money on a girl, but he expects a reward, so watch out for yourself in the clinches!”

“Linda is our local beauty queen all right. But we like her even if she does make the rest of us look downright plain.”

“I am in great demand to bring a little romance into the drab lives of the nurses who toil in this hospital You are lucky, Miss Morgan, I will be able to take you to dinner on Saturday night.”

REVIEW:

This novel is a first for me, in the almost 350 VNRNs I’ve read—it’s the first one that ever mentioned birth control. Well, OK, it’s also the first one in which the heroine is Black (and only the third Black nurse or doctor as a main character; see also The New Nurses and Homecoming Nurse). And where the staff is a virtual UN—Marilyn’s roommate is Jewish, there are multiple Black doctors, a Filipina nurse—who knew every healthcare professional in the 1960s wasn’t white? The issue of race, then, is not completely ignored: “She was glad to see other Negro nurses and doctors going about their duties. ‘At least being a Negro isn’t going to be a problem,’ she muttered to herself.” But for the most part it is not discussed.

Marilyn, born and raised in Harlem, lives with her parents, who feel that “nursing isn’t a fit job for a lady,” and that since they helped pay for college, they had the right to choose her career for her, which she stubbornly resisted. “Why couldn’t you be a teacher like we wanted?” shouts her father. “No, Miss High-and-Mighty had to have her own way and be a nurse washing naked men and all!” Needless to say, she’s chafing at the constant criticism from her father, as well as her mother’s alarm that Marilyn is not living the life of a nun. The fact is that she’s kind of a swinger, dating four different men fairly regularly. There’s Sam, the guy from home, who insists they go out only for Chinese food, and he “wasn’t thrilled about her career. … He seemed to feel that a woman’s place was in the home, or maybe he felt she didn’t have the brains or the guts to be a nurse.” Marilyn’s mom is assiduously working to marry the pair, but Marilyn is really sick of Chinese and Sam’s rigid attitudes, so she is trying hard to keep him at arm’s length—while dating (and kissing) him regularly. She’s also got a Haitian doctor who wants to marry her and stash her away in his Port-au-Prince estate, but he is also going nowhere fast except back to Haiti, alone. Then there are two Black doctors from the hospital, Bill and Matt, to round out the quartet. It’s a wonder Marilyn gets any sleep at all!

Eventually the parental hovering becomes too much for Marilyn, so she moves in with the wise-cracking Marcia Goldstein, and their apartment soon becomes a wild bachelorette pad, with numerous docs dropping by for drinks, dancing, and dates with the gals. And so we spend most of our time following the nurses at work, enjoying their frequent joking, tagging along on their dates. Marilyn is an enjoyable young lady who knows what she wants and stands up for herself—“If Marilyn wasn’t a lady she would have belted him in the mouth,” we are told at one point, which won her a permanent spot in my heart. Her only character flaw is that she continues to date men she even actively dislikes—“I’d do anything to get out of the house!” she explains when questioned by the rightfully dubious Marcia. At work, Marilyn is in high demand to care for the more obstreperous patients because she refuses to be cowed. “I’m the boss here and you’d better do what I say. Now keep quiet,” she tells the business tycoon recovering from a heart attack. She insists throughout the book that she’s not ready to get married, and cools it off with a couple of her beaux when she starts to feel she’s becoming too fond of them. She and Marcia throw lots of house parties, and go home for the winter holidays—and really that’s about all there is to this book. She doesn’t even wind up with a serious boyfriend, much less a fiancé. But there’s more than enough here to make for a really good book. The humor persists throughout, not so much as one-liners, but built up, and Marilyn is an admirable and feisty gal to pal around with for 120 pages.

There are four more books in the Marilyn Morgan series that I’m aware of, but they are hard to come by—my copy of this book was sent to me by a blog reader (thanks, friend!), but the other books in the series are running upwards of $80 on the internet, if you can find them at all. It’s my usual practice to post reviews of all the books in a series at once, but since it may be a while before I can track down the remaining books in this series, I’m breaking tradition and posting this one solo. But I will most certainly keep looking for them—the consistent humor, Marilyn’s enviable lifestyle and unusual fortitude for a VNRN heroine are rare and enjoyable qualities. It’s a pleasure to meet a nurse like Marilyn Morgan.

Marilyn Morgan books:
1. Marilyn Morgan, R.N.
2. Nurse Morgan’s Triumph
3. Marilyn Morgan, Cruise Nurse
4. Nurse Morgan Sees It Through

Nurse Hilary’s Holiday Task

By Jan Haye, ©1964

Cover illustration by JH (Jack Harman?)

Nurse Hilary Hope, just recovered from an attack of pneumonia, took the job of accompanying Lady Vesper to Auvergne, in France, as her nurse. There she met her ladyship’s doctor, Raoul de la Rue, to whom she was attracted despite herself, for theirs was by no means an amicable relationship.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:

“She wasn’t in love with any of the doctors or students at the hospital, as many of her fellows were, and none of the boys in her home village interested her more than as friends and occasional companions She sometimes wondered if she was abnormal in this respect; perhaps she was undersexed.”

“I’ve had better kisses from my Labrador.”

“That red-headed nurse on Maternity was suspended on being caught in the linen-cupboard with a doctor, who shall remain nameless. Remember, kiddo, it’s the woman who always pays in our profession. Never look at a doctor unless he’s proposed to you in front of witnesses. They’re a dangerous breed, and so darned attractive.”

“No young woman cares to be fully understood by a member of the opposite sex. Like an iceberg she shows only an eighth of herself above the surface.”

“‘I thought being in love would be a wonderful experience,’ she half groaned. ‘It’s going to be awful.’”

“I knew there was something sadly wrong with her, and as she’s had all her injections it could only  be love.”

REVIEW:

The title of this book confused me—if she’s on holiday, why does she have a task?—so if you are also in need of clarification, let me explain: Nurse Hilary Hope, having just gotten over pneumonia and being told that if she goes back to work in the hospital she will likely get it a second time and become so debilitated that she will never be able to work again, has taken an easy private-duty gig that passes as a vacation. So her “holiday task” is really a reference to her less-than-demanding job that brings her to the French countryside, sort of a working vacation.

Lady Caroline Vesper likes to surround herself with people with alliterative names, such as her son, Verian Vesper, and her doctor, the gloriously named Raoul de la Rue. So our steadfast heroine, Hilary Hope, is a clear choice to accompany her to her manor in Auvergne, where Lady V will recover after a heart attack caused by overdoing it in the setting of unspecified congenital heart defect. Lady Vesper is a catty snob, and makes it a practice to “annihilate nurses as some people annihilate bugs.” Well, we’ll see about that! Because Hilary may not be in perfect health herself, but she is completely sound of mind and spine, and very admirably acquits herself as one who will not be pushed around. She forcefully but gently gets the upper hand on Lady Vesper—talcum-powder massages go a long way toward that end—and indeed on everyone in the household.

Lady Vesper has decided to push Hilary on her son Verian, who has fallen in love with an unsuitable village girl, in the hope that such an affair will make Verian forget this wench, just as she understands that Hilary’s lowly station in life will keep Verian from marrying Hilary. They’re snobs, remember? Indeed, Verian tells Hilary, “Don’t misunderstand me, I like girls of your class. I really do. They’re intelligent and useful.” So her early crush on the man is instantly, well, crushed. However she is big enough that she continues to be friends with him, unfortunately in that weird VNRN way in which women who have no interest in a man allow him to kiss her from time to time—usually just as Raoul de la Rue is walking in the door.

Raoul is handsome, of course, patrician and, unfortunately, 12 years her senior. When they first work together to deliver a local baby, she spars smartly with him, calling him out on his sexist assumption that the baby will be a boy, using the pronoun “she” at every reference to the baby. It turns out to be a boy after all, but she doesn’t give in: “It’s a lovely baby,” she says, “and that’s really all any mother wants. Sex is unimportant except to certain mediaeval-minded males.” Raoul appreciates her repartee, and tells her, “When I feel like a fight I will send for you again, eh?”

And so the book meanders down the wide country lane that you know it will, as Hilary finds that she’s in love with Raoul, initially thinking him indifferent to her—but on the night of Verian’s 21^st birthday party they have their rapprochement, and The Kiss, which just for laughs I will report dutifully for you: “He bent and took her lips, softly as thistledown and as firm as steel, and as they kissed and merged and drew apart and sighed there were bells and heavenly strings sighing in a celestial symphony that drowned all the normal sounds of the night and the artificial music that mere men created for less blessed beings’ cavortings.” What an odd coincidence—this is exactly what happens when I greet my husband after a long day at work!

Anyway, we’re still 40 pages from the end of the book so there’s a little misunderstanding in which Hilary is accused of stealing Lady Vesper’s jewels—I am pleased to tell you that at least some of the characters who have known Hilary best devoutly insist that she is innocent—but as suspect number one she is not allowed to leave the house, make phone calls, or tell Raoul what is going on, as Lady Vesper has sworn everyone to secrecy so as to avoid bad publicity. This means that when Raoul makes his visit to the house she must be formally professional in front of her patient and cannot walk him to his car, which makes him think she’s changed her mind …

Not to worry, duckies, it all comes to rights in the end, just as you knew it would. So despite this little blip and a profoundly hideous cover illustration (with all the money Harlequin made, why were they so cheap not to shell out for better cover artists? Instead of assembling a collection of what is hands-down the worst covers ever? Well, second-worst, after Valentine—ugh!), this turns out to be a quietly delightful book. The writing is sturdy and clean, frequently giving us comic exchanges that made me laugh out loud—particularly when the author introduces a pair of young American men and teases them mercilessly, giving them dialogue such as, “Hiya, honey!” and “You betcha!” There are lovely descriptions of the house, countryside, food, and wardrobe (I am not too proud to enjoy a yellow linen sleeveless dress with white box pleats). The characters are well-drawn, including the glorious sassy nursing school roommate, who appears seldom but makes a splash when she does. Hilary is an ideal heroine, intelligent and mostly sensible, not afraid to tell people off when they have it coming, someone who makes mistakes but learns from them. In short, while not a glamorous vamp, this book is an easy, soothing story, a cool, mint-sprigged gin and tonic on a sunny afternoon.

Nurse in Paris

By Renée Shann ©1964

Nurse Sara Farriday was no stranger to trouble. Hospital duty had made her familiar with all kinds of pain and suffering. But she was totally unprepeared when disaster struck at her own  heart. Her romance with Don had been beautiful. She had never dreamed anyone could fall so deeply in love. But now, abruptly, it was over … the engagement was broken. And Sara left the shattered pieces of her old life behind to try to find a new life and new hope in Paris, the city of dreams. At first, it seemed to be working. To her own surprise, she found herself falling in  love again—with the dashing and charming Jimmy. But another tragedy brought Don back into her life—and she was faced with an impossible choice…

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“‘Enter Florence Nightingale,’ he said, ‘only much more fetching. A great woman, Florence Nightingale, but no glamour-puss.’”

“‘Why do we poor blighters never get the pretty nurses? I suppose Matron’s scared one as good to look at as you would speed up the pulses. Mine’s racing, isn’t it?’”

“But who had tricked her and why? She began to consider fantastic possibilities. White slavery still existed in the world; unsuspecting girls still got tricked and sent to South America. Only a few months ago she had read a report about it.”

“‘Paris is full of strange people. I dare say London is too, but they seem stranger here.’”

“‘It’s quite a city.  A girl who keeps her nerve can have a lot of fun round here.’”

“For a man with a Colles fracture he looked remarkably perky.”

“‘A place like this makes you wonder why these people ever leave home. As soon as they get to Paris they nose out all the English restaurants, eat English food, never speak anything except English, read the English papers and go back at the end of a week thinking they’ve had a wonderful holiday abroad.’”

“‘The girl who was with him in the accident died a short time ago. Just as well, perhaps. She would have been much disfigured.’”

“He was in the hospital for a minor stomach ailment that only a man with a lot of money could afford to indulge so luxuriously.”

“‘The Princess is keeping your boy-friend Pablo warm for you.’”

“The driver took them across Paris with the usual Parisian disregard for life and law.”

REVIEW:

Sara Farriday is a 24-year-old British nurse engaged to a man she met while vacationing in Spain. She’s deliriously in love (though no one else seems to like the man much) and shopping for the dress she’ll wear to her wedding, which is to be in six weeks, when Don drops a bomb: They can’t get married in church because he was married before and got divorced. This is a blow, of course, surprisingly not because all the good alternative wedding venues are likely booked, but Sara quickly recovers. It’s only when a week later he confesses that his Mexican divorce is not legal in England so he can’t get married until he gets another divorce that she loses it and ends the relationship. It’s not clear why this is worse than a year’s worth of dishonesty about his past, but it appears to be due to the embarrassment of having to cancel the wedding and return all the gifts.

She’s so devastated that she can’t even work again, she says, because she’d have to tell her former manager that the wedding is off, which would be just too humiliating. Her mom, though, gets impatient with Sara’s silliness and makes an appointment for Sara to interview for a nursing job in Paris, which Sara is incapable of cancelling—again due to apparent misplaced embarrassment—so off she goes, even accepting the job because she’s unable to refuse. En route to Paris, Sara has the most tragedy-ridden one-hour flight ever: First the Arabic passenger across the aisle, who boards the plane in a completely sound state of health is stricken with a flu-like illness and actually dies after he’s tucked into the pilot’s bunk and Sara goes back to her seat to flirt with Jimmy Jordan, the man sitting next to her. Then the plane’s front wheel won’t unfold and the plane crashes on landing. It’s all OK, though, because Jimmy immediately stakes a claim as Sara’s boyfriend, and on their first date, this silly woman decides she could be falling in love with Jimmy. Even more curious about this date is the fact that on her way out the hospital door, whose mangled carcass is being pulled from the ambulance but Don’s? “Supposing he begged her again to marry  him. She couldn’t be indifferent to him despite all that had happened. Especially now he had had this dreadful accident …”

She finally has to care for poor Don, completely mummified in gauze, and in what was likely not intended to be a comic scene, when he sees her, “the tears rolled slowly and disappeared into the bandages.” In bed that night with fresh roses from Jimmy on her bedside table, it’s her turn to cry: “Which man was she in love with—Don or Jimmy?” My money says this flighty infant has no idea what love is.

When a previously well nurse dies of a flu-like illness, the penny does actually drop and Sara tells the hospital doctor about the sick man on the plane. Dr. Scully contacts the airport for a report: “One can’t be too careful. These nuclear bomb experiments could cause mutations in bacteria. We live in a  terrifying world, Farriday.” While Dr. Scully mulls treatment options, looking for an antibiotic effective against this virus (though by definition an antibiotic will not kill a virus), fickle Sara holds Don’s hand and calls him darling with alarming frequency, though she refuses to discuss marriage with him and bristles when the nurse matron tells her that she needs to marry Don to give him a reason for living, especially now that his leg’s been amputated. Unfortunately, Jimmy is bringing Sara home from a date when she’s met at the front door by the Matron, who urges Sara to go see her ailing “fiancé” immediately. Jimmy, rightfully livid, breaks up with Sara on the spot, and you will be shocked to hear that Sara makes absolutely no effort to reach out to Jimmy to explain the situation, because “no girl should run after any man.” In this case she should also be discouraged from action by a guilty conscience, though I am quite sure that she is not.

Then Jimmy comes down with the fatal flu, which is now rampaging through Paris, and Sara breaks a medical protocol by giving Jimmy, who is in the control arm of a trial of a medication that might cure it, the actual drug. He is immediately cured, but Sara is sacked, and stupidly refuses to take the pay that is due her. With nowhere else to go, she accepts an offer to be a private nurse for a rich former patient who had stared at her a lot. The man is now completely well, and Sara is somewhat concerned that he has immoral acts on his mind, but all he wants to do is drive her around town in his convertible and have her wave to his friends.

Eventually, though, he does propose, and tells her he’s booked tickets for them to go to London and meet her parents and get married. Horrid Sara decides she will accompany him to London—but “once she was safely back in London she would walk out on Monsieur Bruyarde without any pang of conscience.” Unfortunately she comes down with the flu on the way to the airport, and once there becomes too sick to walk, or to understand that Monsieur is being arrested, and then Jimmy mysteriously shows up to take her back to her old hospital, this time as a patient. When she’s well, she learns that the Monsieur had been hoping to pass Sara off as his dead wife, whom she resembled, so as to keep his wife’s money, which somehow he had not inherited. All that’s left is for her and Jimmy to reunite and we can end the book.

Renée Shann has in the past given us a couple decent reads (Ring for the Nurse and Student Nurse), and we can put Nurse in Paris up alongside them. The writing is regularly campy, with great lines such as “After a time Jimmy grew tired of contributing a solo performance as the life and soul of the party,” and we can laugh through comic scenes such as when Sara and her spirited roommate Lulu are driving around the Bois de Bologne at 4:00 am trying to find two of Lulu’s boyfriends who have decided to duel over her. Interestingly, Sara is something of an unlikeable character, too wishy-washy to decide which of her own boyfriends she really loves, too backward to clear up her misunderstanding with Jimmy or look for a job, immoral enough to cheat an employer out of a plane ticket to London. The plot is a little random, with quite a few unexplained loose ends, but in the end it’s a better-than-average book with enough joy in its pages to tide you over the rough spots, even if one of them happens to be the heroine.