Nurse on Terror Island

By Doris Knight, ©1967

A darkly handsome man of wealth, a young pop singer of international fame, a fiancé four thousand miles away, a beguiling 8 year old boy … all these helped to complicate the life of pretty Nurse Avril Andrews. She had received her nurse’s cap only a few hours before and was on her way to Orestes Island to care for young Domingo, the ward of the handsome and powerful Ramon Orestes. She hardly expected to become the fiancée of two men and find herself in love with a third, and then lose her heart completely to the convalescing little Domingo. Neither was she prepared to face the terror which gripped the entire population of the island. She found herself being drawn inevitably into the web of fear …

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“Are you still shaky from the shark episode?” 

REVIEW:
It is staggering how many people are drawn in by the eight-year-old Domingo Montes, a foundling left in a church doorway and raised by a nanny in London but for some reason flown to Mexico City to undergo an orthopedic surgery to lengthen a leg left shortened by polio. (A lot of good that surgery did him, because he is completely forbidden to use the leg, or even get out of bed very often.) In Mexico he is recovering under the care of Avril Andrews, who is just about to graduate from nursing school. She, too, is a Brit, and had decided to take the last year of her training in Mexico, much to the chagrin of her fiancé Derek, who is “tired of playing second fiddle to her nursing career,” but at the same time doesn’t seem all that interested in actually proceeding with the wedding. 

Domingo is going to spend his convalescence on Orestes Island, owned by Ramon Orestes—well, all except a pesky ten acres, on which some meddling oil company has located a few gushers. The ten acres, Ramon has discovered, belong to Domingo, though Ramon cannot figure out how Domingo came to own them, much less give permission for oil companies to start drilling (actually Ramon showed less interest in this question than I did), and neither will we! But the kind-hearted man has adopted Domingo and is bringing him to the island for more unclear reasons, though he had not seen Domingo since the boy was three. This kind gesture surely has nothing to do with the fact that Ramon is intent on owning every square inch of the island—though it supports a goodly population of natives, so it’s not clear to me how that works—and preventing the oil companies from having at the island, because “I wish to bar the outside world from wiping out their childlike happiness in small things,” he explains to Avril, who finds this attitude only “somewhat paternal, somewhat overbearing.” And Avril will be going with Ramon and Domingo as nurse, though since the poor boy spends most of his life in bed under the supervision of the nanny, it’s not clear what the point of having her along is—until we arrive at the island and Ramon tells all the locals that he is engaged to Avril.

Well, this is news to her, and why he felt this ploy was even necessary is yet another unexplained mystery, because all we learn is that the islanders “want a queen! If he did not promise them a bride, he might lose the respect of his people.” So Avril goes along with it somewhat reluctantly, but more so when she discovers that world-famous pop star Sunny Martin, whom she had met very briefly when he ducked under her restaurant table in Mexico City to escape hordes of screaming girls who were chasing him, has also turned up on the island. He, too, has some unexplained devotion to Domingo, and Avril starts to wonder if he is the boy’s father—but again, even if he were, how would he know this was the boy left on the church steps so long ago? And if he’s so devoted to the boy, why did he, also a British national, come to Mexico City to see him, when he might have done so a few months earlier with much greater convenience in London? This book is indeed full of endless mysteries.

Then a witch doctor named Donna Santos decides she also wants possession of the poor kid, to train to be a witch doctor too. She’s thought to be nearly 100 years old, so why has she suddenly become interested in taking on a protégé who is not likely to have reached puberty when she kicks the bucket, and why is she picking out Domingo for her pupil? She’s even threatened to toss a deadly hurricane onto the island if Ramon does not hand over Domingo to her—oh, and he has to marry Avril tomorrow to boot, just because. Avril refuses to go along with it now that Sunny has shown up, though he is sneaking in through the window to kiss her and arranging secret rendezvous, again for no coherent reason; he tells Avril, “I had a fancy to come early, unexpectedly, and nose around a bit.” He seems to be looking for Domingo’s birth certificate, but since this involves talking to a lot of locals, his presence on the island is hardly a secret—and he’s tipped off by a mysterious woman in a church who tells him to look in Guadalajara, and then she’s gone, never identified, never explained.

Meanwhile Ramon is desperate for Avril to go through with the wedding because if she doesn’t, the superstitious locals will freak right out! They’ll lose their heads so completely that the havoc would be worse than any hurricane that might or might not strike the island! Another question is that why, if none of the main characters believe in voodoo, they all jump to do Donna’s bidding—and why all her detailed predictions come true.

There are more bizarre coincidences and plot twists to endure—including a shark attack, foiled bizarrely by Sunny, who saves the day in a manner barely survives being chased by teenaged girls—before this complete jumble of a book comes to a strange close, with Ramon leaving the island and vowing to return “with the woman he loved”—and we’re not sure who that might be, unless he’s referring to a woman he married 18 years previously who had abandoned him shortly after their marriage and whom he’d divorced but nevertheless has been fruitlessly trying to track down ever since—yet another extraneous, unexplained plot twist. 

Terror Island gets its name from two previous hurricanes—both “inflicted” by Donna on the island for someone’s misdeed; the woman’s ability to predict the weather could have made her a lot of money as a storm forecaster, because she’s not actually a witch, but what if she actually is? The book can’t seem to decide—but I can think of a number of descriptives that would suit the island better, like Bewildering or Insane or Weird, as unfortunately “terror” is much too strong an emotion to be incited by this book; at most I’d say I was perplexed. The bizarreness of this book isn’t even amusingly daffy, like some (Harbor Nurse and Nurse at the Fair spring to mind) VNRNs I’ve experienced. I’m left to wonder if a title like Nurse on Hot Mess Island would have sold more copies?

Harbor Nurse

By Arlene J . Fitzgerald, ©1964

Lovely Dawn Darwell had worked hard to perfect her skills as a nurse. But she found her job in Dr. Phil Beeman’s swank society practice strangely unsatisfying. So when struggling young Dr. Rave Canfield begged her to assist him in the remote fishing village called Moon Bay, she accepted. Even though it meant testing her skills in a make-do rural clinic, and separation from her socially prominent and wealthy fiancé …

GRADE: D

BEST QUOTES:

“I hope Dr. Canfield doesn’t turn out to be some old man whose hands are so shaky he can no longer control the scalpel—or, worse yet, some scoundrel abortionist who’s come here to hide.”

“She swallowed hard, trying to dislodge the lump of apprehension that clogged her esophagus.”

“‘I wish things had turned out for Gus,’ she told him, remembering the man who lay dead in emergency.”

“Without warning, the moment that Dr. Canfield had held her tight, his heart throbbing beneath her own, with violent life, beside Gus Lardo’s death bed, was fresh in her mind. It was moments like that, she thought, that gave life its deeper meaning.”

“Every good nurse had to learn to control her emotions, no matter whether they stemmed from that first, sinking feeling of horror that gripped her at the sight of a hopelessly mangled body, or from the magnetism that could attract her to a member of the opposite sex.”

“Belle needed a man. It was obvious in every twitch of the exotic girl’s well rounded hips.”

REVIEW:

Who in the world would name the hero of their novel Rave? Well, the same author who picked Key and Stag in past works (that would be Northwest Nurse and Daredevil Nurse, respectively), and who here has given us a spectacular offering truly worthy of one of our perennial Worst Authors: Previously slipping to the number five spot in 2020, with this appalling novel she is likely squeak past horror show Jeanne Bowman for second place come next year’s VNRN awards. Tune in next January to see if she lives up to the promise of this novel!

Though I’m not sure it’s worth the time, I can give you a quick rundown of the plot’s lowlights: Nurse Dawn Darwell is engaged to the quintessential society MD, Dr. Phil Beeman of San Francisco. We are told that “she was in love with the guy—after a fashion,” which means, if appearances are anything, not at all. “She felt hardly anything at all for Phil. He was just there, someone to be taken for granted, like the office furniture.” When she drives the office lab technician back to her home town on the harbor to recover from mono, she meets the local doc, Rave Canfield (whom Phil amusingly refers to as Rage Cantle), and is instantly smitten with his “indefinable magnetism that few men possessed.” So impressed is she that her first glance into the depths of his blue eyes “caused the muscles over her solar plexus to contract suddenly in a little spasm of sheer animal delight.” Her frank lust only grows from there: “She was overwhelmingly aware of the long, hard, alive length of his big body, warm against hers,” and “she watched him go, aware of the powerful flexing of muscle along the length of his lean thighs.” Hubba, hubba! It takes her all of ten minutes after she returns to the posh office of Dr. Beeman before she gives notice. Though she’s had not one nice thing to say about Phil, on her way out the door of his clinic, she thinks “that it wasn’t very wise of her to risk losing Phil like this.” Still she walks out, saying, “I’ll drop you a card. Until then, goodbye, Phil.”

Back she goes to Moon Bay to work for Dr. Rave (and send Phil perfumed letters, probably not mentioning her major crush). “It made no difference to her what romantic attachments Dr. Canfield might have. She hadn’t come to this small fishing won to land herself a handsome husband.” I’m not sure who she thinks she’s fooling, but it’s not us! Life in Moon Bay is so much more thrilling than Dr. Beeman’s office: On her first day she was “glad for the urgency that filled her every moment at the clinic,” such as when she weighed a pregnant woman and then set out equipment Dr. Rave would need to take out some wire skin sutures (wire skin sutures?).

But we needn’t quibble, because soon there are adventures galore, such as the two babies that are born (one of which Dawn delivers solo, the other she brings back to life while Rave saves the mother from hemorrhaging to death), the local vagrant who has treated his brewing appendicitis with a packet of powder he’s found in the gullet of a dead fish on the beach and overdoses on cocaine (I kid you not!), a woman dying of cancer who is helped into the grim reaper’s arms with more cocaine by her wannabe son-in-law, several daring sea rescues by Dawn and Rave during major storms, and we haven’t even started on Rave’s plans to get the government to build a seafood research center in town, which will surely boost its economic prospects. Seafood research, you ask? Apparently it’s super important, because Russia and China have already gotten a jump on the U.S. with their own seafood research centers, but with the resources of Moon Bay, soon America will be great again! And as far as Dawn’s personal ambitions go, it’s not long before Dr. Rave pulls her into his arms and kisses her, literally a second after she’s registered that the patient on the table before them has died. “His hard, square mouth captured her red lips in a kiss that sent her heart racing, driving out the death chill that had infiltrated the small room.” What a romantic fool, that Rave Canfield!

Although my research has turned up nothing, I cannot believe that Arlene J. Fitzgerald is not the pen name of Adelaide Rowe, who also infuriated as Adelaide Humphries and especially as Kathleen Harris. All the hallmarks are there, and uncork the Pepto Bismol, because I’m going to recite them for you: First we have our heroine’s serious thoracic disease to contend with, as she suffers from “a little twinge of pride trembling behind her sternum,” “a feeling of urgency and excitement throbbed through her thoracic mediastinum,” “impatient throbbing behind her sternum,” “sharp pain sliced suddenly behind her sternum,” “a jagged little stab of fear penetrated behind her sternum,” and “a strange commotion in her mediastinal region,” to name just a few of Dawn’s alarming symptoms. I was also having a strange commotion, but it was located more in my epigastric region. (See, if you dare, Nurse Nolan’s Private Duty, written as Kathleen Harris.)

We are reminded at least 13 times that Dawn has violet eyes, and pretty much every part of Dawn—including hips, skirts, chin, and nose—is described as pert, God help us. Dawn is lucky to possess a magical quality called “firm, nurse’s discipline,” which allows her to do many, many things, including ignore her pounding heart (thanks, Dr. Rave), force down the feeling of horror that comes over her while rescuing a fisherman out of the ocean, and zipline out to a fishing boat during a hurricane to help amputate the leg of a fisherman who was attacked by a shark. (I’ll wait until you stop laughing.) If they could bottle firm nurse’s discipline, the world’s problems would be solved.

Her FND also bestows her with the ability to manage her feelings like a surgeon: she cauterizes, snips, slices through, and sears off negative feelings with “quick, mental cautery” or “a firm, mental scalpel” on at least eight occasions, not to mention the “firm mental clamps” (Dawn is big into firmness) she applies to her thoughts on at least three more. Author Fitzgerald does not limit surgery to emotions but also gives us pages of snip-by-snip description of several surgeries (not the circumcision, however), but for all their detail they’re not very accurate, at least by today’s standards, such as when Dawn enumerates a patient’s symptoms in great clinical detail, decides that the patient has “cocainism,” and treats him with “gentle slapping.” Hard to believe, but this treatment proves not very effective.

As hot as Dr. Rave is, Dawn is apparently quite a bombshell herself, and we are treated to her “slim, rounded body” “clad only in panties and bra” as she scrubs up for surgery—not sure how exactly she’s going to get her scrubs on now that her hands are clean, but we’ll let sterile technique slide for the sake of a cheap voyeuristic thrill. Some of these mentions of her body are laughably incongruous, such as when she runs up the beach, “savoring the salty breeze that grazed her full, red mouth.” (We met similar silly lust for both hero and heroine in Young Nurse Rayburn.)

The upside of this book is that it gives you so many laugh-out-loud moments (much to the increasing irritation of your teenaged son, tragically kicked out of college and imprisoned in the house by coronavirus). The prose is over the top, such as in: “The gale-churned expanse of water beyond the tiny town writhed in a morass of undisciplined, white-capped waves that pounded the long dock, and the stretch of debris-littered beach.” The pity is that this passage only hints at Ms. Fitzgerald’s deep passion for commas, which are liberally sprinkled across every page like glitter after a princess-themed birthday party. There are glimmers of a good plot here, but the writing is so lazy and repetitive that it completely crowds out what little of genuine interest that could be found here. Though this book nears so-bad-it’s-good status, you’ll need all your firm nurse’s discipline to put a firm mental clamp on the strange commotion in your gut if you decide to wade into this harbor. 

Nurse Farley’s Decision

By Teresa Holloway, ©1959

 

Auburn-haired Susan Farley had brilliantly graduated from her long, difficult nurse’s training. Now, at big, modern St. Patrick’s she was practicing the profession she loved. One day Susan was assigned the traction case in Room 212 in the Orthopedic wing. Oliver Cox, she saw, was a handsome older man accustomed to wealth and power. Grateful for Susan’s skillful nursing, Cox offered to endow St. Patrick’s with a cancer clinic. But there was a string attached to his gift—in exchange he wanted Susan for his wife. Susan was faced with an overwhelming decision. As Oliver Cox’s wife she might be instrumental in finding the cure for the deadly killer. But—what of the profession for which she had so proudly trained and dedicated herself?

 

GRADE: B-

 

BEST QUOTES:

“Circles under blue eyes are danger signals.”

 

“She put her cheek on one of the thin hands, the one without the needle.”

 

“What in the world am I going to do about my complexion? Jimmy hates pimply girls, and he’s taking me to Seminole Club tomorrow night.”

 

“Years of people’s lives went into the training of these hands beneath that brilliant light. Mothers’ lives—teaching gentleness and a desire to serve; fathers’ lives, dedicated to earning the money to make knowledge within their grasp.”

 

“She’s pretty enough to hang on the wall.”

 

“Because it was midsummer, Arch Curtis survived his battle with the tiger shark.”

 

“All the ‘womanly docility’ the Sister in charge of the conduct class had stressed, flew out of the window.”

 

REVIEW:

Fear not, readers, Susan Farley is not, as falsely advertised on the back cover blurb above, asked to prostitute herself to fund a cancer lab. I don’t quite know what to think when the cover describes a book completely unlike the one I actually read, but in this case I must confess I was relieved, because it sounded horrid.

 

In actuality, Susan Farley is trying to decide whether she should take a job at Dr. Mitchell’s office, which pays more and will enable her to fund her younger sister’s college education, or stick with hospital nursing, which she really loves. This “decision,” however, is removed from her when her father tells her that she should take the hospital job and they’ll find the money for Grace’s education somewhere else. When she goes to ask for the job in surgery, however, she’s told that it’s been filled, and she’s convinced that Dr. Mitchell—who is, in fact, chief of staff—has blackballed her from the position. She takes a job in orthopedics instead, but only after she jumps into the pier to save a young woman—too late, as it happens—who has just given birth to a baby boy, and the ensuing publicity, her photo landing on the front page and all, gives her a little leverage to make some demands.

 

At the hospital, she works along side Dr. Archibald Curtis, who makes her little heart go pitter-pat whenever she sees him, and they are good friends but nothing more—“until he himself changed the color of their relationship,” because it’s just not possible for a decent young woman to make a pass. When she catches him talking to a young candy-striper in a pink dress, however, she falls all to pieces, especially after a date with Arch at the beach during which she rescues him from a tiger shark and brings him home to her house and puts on a pink dress, which apparently is going to remind him of this young woman. “In her hurry to get some hot food ready for Arch when he was ready for it, she had chosen the one dress she shouldn’t have. Unfortunately there was no time to change it. Susan was out of sorts all evening. Arch, bewildered, went home early.”

 

The incident with the shark ends up in the newspaper—making it twice in the past week Susan’s landed on the front page—and Arch is convinced Susan is a publicity hound who took the story to the paper herself. She is mortified: “No man wanted to be pulled out of the water by a girl,” she thinks, as the fellows apparently prefer death to such a dishonor. “What can I do to ease the hurt this story is going to cause Arch? The other fellows are going to rib him about being both shark bait and woman bait—I can just hear them.” Eventually it’s revealed that sister Grace is the one who spilled the beans, to a cute boy who works for the newspaper. So that’s the end of that little escapade.

 

More little stories pile into the book—a woman with a lip cancer was operated on by Dr. Mitchell but now has a horrible scar and lost her husband because of it, the dead woman’s boy is being raised in the hospital, wealthy patient Oliver Cox agrees to fund a cancer center because of Susan’s fervent interest in that particular disease, it is proposed that the orphaned baby be raised by the hospital, Susan notices a skin cancer on Dr. Mitchell’s nose. At the dinner that brings together the head honchos to talk about the cancer center, Susan is the only woman—invited by Oliver Cox—but Arch gets jealous and snubs her, so she just walks out of the dinner without saying goodbye to anyone, including her date, and climbs into the red Thunderbird belonging to the young candy striper, who immediately drives off the road and is nearly killed, except Susan is there to apply pressure to the head wound in the ambulance all the way to the hospital. Really, if you were hoping for a quiet evening at home, you’d better stay away from Susan Farley.

 

At the end of the book, Susan out of the blue decides that what with the car accident and all, she’s “getting some kind of sense knocked into my head.” It was probably just a concussion, but she gets up the next morning and goes to work anyway. What she meant by sense, apparently, is that she decides that her younger sister is not the spoiled pet she’d thought she was, and that “I’ve had the attitude, all along, that St. Patrick’s was mighty lucky to have a chance at the services of the dedicated Susan Farley, R.N.” I’m not sure that it follows that her attitude about working in surgery was wrong: Shouldn’t you fight for what you want, and have some healthy egotism about a job you’re good at? Then she decides that the woman’s bad lip scar doesn’t mean she should think less of Dr. Mitchell, that “a man doesn’t build up that large a practice without doing a lot of good to a lot of people. Of course he’s bound to make mistakes. Everyone does.” She exhorts Arch, who has been offered the chance to join the chief of staff’s practice, to give the matter careful thought rather than dismissing it outright, and blames the woman with the scar for not asking to have it fixed—and it turns out that Arch already has, though I’m not sure what his participation in this woman’s story is supposed to signify. All these little revelations, with no actual obvious difference between the character at the beginning of the book and the one at the end, are apparently what passes for “growth”: “It wasn’t only the big, sprawling hospital that was growing. Somehow, it impelled them all to grow along with it,” Susan says on the last page, in a thoroughly anticlimactic ending. Declaring something doesn’t make it so; remember Dick Cheney and the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?

 

Overall this is not a terrible book, and the character of Oliver Cox is very well drawn, as is the party that he takes Susan to. But it can seem like a collection of bizarre incidents and extraneous details such as this one: When Susan discovers that she’s put on a pink dress and can’t change it, she stands in the middle of the big kitchen and makes chopping gestures of anger while holding a messy egg beater and splatters egg all over the linoleum, which Grace had just cleaned that morning since the cleaning woman hadn’t been able to get to it and it was Grace’s day to clean the floors, so Grace is fussing at Susan about the mess while cleaning it up with a damp sponge. Did we really need to know all that minute detail? It just makes me feel puzzled and expectant that something down the road will turn up to give this overdrawn moment some relevance, but it never happens. I think Teresa Holloway has the potential to put together a fine book, because some of the details in this story are very nicely sketched, but she really needs some help on plots, because without a good linear thread, you’re just left with a few pretty paragraphs and a lot of head scratching.

Surfing Nurse

By Diana Douglas
(pseud. Richard Wilkes-Hunter), ©1971
Cover illustration by Allan Kass

“Too good to be true!” was how Nurse Kara Simmon felt about her temporary assignment away from St. Mark’s. For she was on Surfari with the American Surfing Team as team nurse and as top competitor in the World Championships in Australia. And now this halcyon dream is abruptly shattered as she finds herself pulled by conflicting desires more turbulent and dangerous than the pounding surf … Caught between two men—brothers in name only. Surgeon/surfer Paul Denning, blond, handsome, coolly professional—who seems more interested in her skills than in herself as a woman. And Ross, the professional surfer—wild, headstrong, his animal magnetism undeniable… In conflict between the same, familiar world of nursing and an exciting new world of the professional surfer’s endless summers on the beaches of the world.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“Kara had won wolf whistles and applause herself when she walked into the South Sea Lounge with Ross. The spontaneity of that had made her feel good.”

“Let’s make this last dance really Hawaiian! The rest of you make a circle and undulate!”

“You don’t even know me yet. How can you when we haven’t even kissed?”

“She must stop him soon now, she knew. But for a moment still she could thrill to the male warmth pressing against her. Moments like this were few when you were a nurse, she remembered. Too often there was sickness and pain, grief and death. And those things built up tensions inside you.”

“These days everyone has doubts. It’s a symptom of the times.”

“They’re good guys, but they exaggerate like Texans.”

“It would be too much to look like you do and be able to cook like that too.”

“Some of the surfers were taking photos of an odd-looking building on the foreshore of Sydney harbor. It looked like something from science fiction, shaped like huge, streamlined orchestral shells in an intriguing pattern. One of the reporters who joined them at the rail explained that it was an opera house and something of a national joke with Australians. It had been years since the building began and nobody seemed to know when, if ever, it would be completed.”

REVIEW:
To call this a nurse novel is a bit of a stretch. True, Kara Simmon is a registered nurse with a job at St. Marks Hospital in Los Angeles, and theoretically she’s the official nurse to—as well as a member of—a contingent of American surfers, but she doesn’t really do any nursing in this book. Mostly she’s catching a wave. She won the California state women’s surfing title this past summer, which gives her the right to enter a world title competition in Australia. Her surfing mentor, Paul Denning, just happens to be a surgeon at St. Marks. He’s the son of the founder of Denning surfboards, and actually dropped out of his internship twice to pursue surfing, but then decided to return to medicine. He’s the one who coached Kara to her surprising win in California, and the relationship is “an odd sort of intimacy into which sex did not intrude.” It’s not often you meet a VNRN that dares to use the word sex, but maybe that’s because this book was written by a man.

Paul’s younger brother Ross is also entered in the competition, and as the book opens, the American team is on a cruise ship steaming to Australia. Paul has had to remain back in the states practicing medicine, which is lucky for Ross and his enormous ego: “If Paul Denning was with us on this surfari, Paul Denning would win it,” she’s told by one of the other surfers. Ross isn’t likely to win the competition for Kara’s affections, either, the poor conceited sap. He’s convinced Kara is going to tumble for him any second and pursues her relentlessly, much to her annoyance. But when he finally catches up with her one night, he tells her that if she wins this competition, she could make a lot of money and travel the world endorsing Denning surfboards—and she needs his help as a coach to win. She tells him she’s not going to quit nursing, but she agrees to accept his coaching. Only then does he put the moves on her, which she curiously goes along with. I continue to be amazed at the number of women in these novels who kiss men they don’t like.

When the surfing team finally arrives in Australia, Ross takes her out to the beaches and teaches her that she has to maximize her scoring points with each wave. That night, at a beach party, a totally plastered Ross decides to try night surfing, though all the other surfers warn him of the danger. While out in the surf, he is attacked by a shark, which “fastened into his thigh and torn off a long strip of flesh all the way down to his heel.” Ew! Kara applies pressure to the femoral artery until the ambulance arrives, Ross is whisked into surgery, and his life is saved, though his surfing career is over. The never-mentioned upside to this is that he is now spared from ever having to compete directly with his brother in a surfing competition, and so can live on as a champion in his own mind.

The next day, Kara and the rest of the team is back surfing at the beach, the callous dudes. Later she tries to call Paul, but guess what! He’s quit the hospital and is on his way to Australia! He arrives a day later, and Kara quickly persuades him to take Ross’s spot on the team: “Then, and only then, will you really know to which world you belong.” He also takes over Ross’s place as Kara’s coach: “Don’t try any last-minute gimmicks, no matter what Ross tells you,” he advises her. “Surf your own natural style.” During her heat at big competition, she follows his advice—until her last wave, when she hangs five, whatever that means. She knows Paul wouldn’t like that, but thinks Ross would—“Ross was inclined to showboat that way himself.” She wins the heat by just one point, and now she’s in the finals. “She was tempted to try a left break, but memory of the chance she took hanging five drove it from her mind. It was better to stay with her natural style, surfing safely and as well as she could,” just like Paul advised her to do. So what is she doing with her next wave? Why, breaking left, of course. “Don’t ask me why I did that, Paul,” she says as she steps out of the surf onto the beach.

You can predict how this book is going to end in the first chapter. Apart from the shark attack, which takes a long time to unfold, not much happens in this book. It spends a lot of time surfing, but the jargon is so thick that it’s not really enjoyable to a non-surfer: “She set herself and took off, then saw Nerida dropping in on her right. Kara found herself turning instinctively left. She saw the danger at once: a fast right break with a toppling crest rushing toward her along the wall. Flat water ahead! She went into a tight bottom turn. The velocity she had built up steaming across that smooth wall turned her in the beginning of the flaky white—she was steaming back halfway up the face going right now. She was stoking in a glorious long slide ahead of the crest breaking well behind her. Coming out of it at the foot of the wall way right, she flipped out in a backhand turn and rode white water in to the beach.” Whatever that means. Oddly, the book allows Kara to win by following Ross’s advice, not Paul’s, but it’s Paul that she’s in love with and Paul’s lifestyle as a healthcare professional that she is completely devoted to. In the end, I’m just confused by what this book is trying to tell me, both in its message and its surfing descriptions. I wish I’d watched “Gidget” instead.