Second Year Nurse

By Margaret McCulloch, ©1957
Cover illustration by Ethel Gold 

From the window by her patient’s bed, Jan looked down on the entrance to the nurses’ home. As she watched, a familiar green car swung around the drive. A moment later Dorinda came briskly down the front steps and took her place beside the driver. “Dr. Bartholomew, the young surgeon, wasn’t it?” the patient asked. “I didn’t recognize the nurse.” So this was what the other nurses had been trying to tell her. Dorinda—her own roommate—was dating Hank Bartholomew too!

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“I guess it’s all a part of growing up. Learning to like what you’re doing—instead of always doing what you like.” 

“‘Washington’s Birthday is such fun,’ she told Jan when she invited her. ‘All the cute little hatchets and cherries and things.’”

REVIEW: 
I’ve been thinking about the difference between VNRNs that are written for a teenage audience compared to those intended for adults. This is the third that I can recall having reviewed (see also Candy Stripers and Mary Adams Student Nurse), and they do generally seem more superficial, unsophisticated, and condescending than the grown-up variety, and the heroine never actually ends up with a fiancé, much less a serious boyfriend. And so I waded through Second Year Nurse, which needed its 222 pages to introduce us to at least 75 different characters (I lost count), many of them patients with stories only casually touched on before moving on to the next paragraph. Even patients who we are told affect our eponymous nursing student Jan Russell deeply, such as a young woman with an infant son and husband who dies inexplicably before her thyroidectomy, we receive in just a couple paragraphs, turning the page on them with no real experience of Jan’s feelings or any lingering effects of the tragedy.

Though most of the book is about the many, many other students and patients Jan encounters, she also has a few boyfriends. Her high school steady, Randy, dumps her early on when she leaves for nursing school: After she insists, “I’m crazy about my nursing and I’m going right on with it,” he snarls, “Go on back to your bellhopping and bedmaking! You might even catch yourself a medic. That’s all nurses go in training for.” So between hospital shifts and classes, she accepts a few dates with Dr. Hank Bartholomew. Though “it was still hard for Jan to call him Hank,” she decides that “recently there’d been an increasing depth in their relationship. Not that there’d been any mention of marriage,” we are told, because that’s usually what happens after the third date. Well, I could be wrong on that point because soon Dr. Bartholomew is dating her roommate Dorinda, the daughter of a wealthy woman who serves on the hospital board of trustees—not that that has anything to do with it—and eight pages after what is apparently Dorinda’s first date with the doctor, she is sporting an engagement ring, so maybe there is something to it after all.

Jan also has about three dates with Bruce Baird, who works in the lab and also as a janitor to earn money to put himself through medical school—and he’s hoping to become a general practitioner like Jan’s father had been. But he is usually pretty busy, so she doesn’t see him much. Then, toward the end of the book, Randy’s mother is seriously ill and Jan assists in caring for her, so now Randy decides maybe nursing isn’t so bad, after all. “I think it’s a marvelous thing for a girl to do,” he admits. “I was awfully dumb.” Which man will Jan end up with? Well, like I mentioned at the start, these teen books don’t really give you much of a love story to close the book on, so on the last page all we see is Jan is running down the stairs happily for her next date.

I’m not really sure what the focus of this story is, because it doesn’t offer many details about actual nursing, nor does it give you a romance. Essentially stopping in the middle, the book gives us no resolution to Jan’s plans for her career or her love life, and 222 pages is a lot to spend on a story that goes nowhere. I can only conclude from my admittedly small sample that teen readers weren’t taken very seriously in the 1950s and 1960s—I understand that attitude is what in part what inspired the Woodstock era—so I can’t recommend that an intelligent adult such as yourself spend your time with a book that doesn’t respect its readers.

A Nurse for Dr. Sterling

By Ruth MacLeod, ©1962

Young and idealistic Janet Raleigh, fresh out of an exclusive school, found herself bored by the shallow pleasures of high society. Seeking something to fill her life and give it meaning, she chose nursing as her career. To her amazement she found that her wealth and background created an unexpected barrier. The doctor she loved doubted her sincerity and patronized her; her supervisor questioned her conduct and humiliated her; and then came the brutal attack that put her very life in danger.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“I hurt so! Kiss me and make it well!”

“Please, nurse … I’m going to die! Give me just one kiss to take with me—”

“Janet, you don’t want to be a nurse! You’ll have to do awful things! As a nurse you’d have to make hundreds of beds, and bathe all sorts of dirty people, empty bedpans and emesis basis, and listen to people whine about their aches and pains!”

REVIEW:
Imagine my horror when, arriving at the house we’d rented for a long weekend of walking in the apple orchard and reading on the couch, I discovered I had left my nurse novels at home! What to do, what to do? Well, thankfully this is the era of the e-book, and I was actually able to find a handful of actual nurse e-novels out there, including—imagine my surprise!—The Nurse Novel Megapack of four novels, including three I hadn’t read yet (actually, I knocked off two of them over the weekend, so now I’ve just one left). Coming soon, a blog page listing other nurse e-books, should you happen to find yourself in a similar horrifying predicament, dear reader!

Anyway, A Nurse for Dr. Sterling is a curious choice for a curated selection of nurse novels, because it in my opinion crosses over the line of true VNRN just a smidge. The problem here is that most of the  book is told from the point of view of Dr. David Sterling; nurse Janet Raleigh anchors only about a third of it, despite what the back-cover blurb suggests (and in this case, the blurb errs on a number of points, so beware!). When we meet him, Dr. Sterling is fleeing a malpractice suit he’d lost—he had not diagnosed a terminal brain cancer in a man who had demonstrated few vague symptoms, so though it wasn’t really his fault, most of his patients had left him and he’d fled town and the blot on his reputation to come to Las Lomas, California, an actual town on Monterey Bay.

He’s been hired by his old acquaintance Dr. Graham Burns, who had dumped his excellent, dependable, strong, smart wife Mildred, who had supported him during his up-and-coming years, for a young vixen half his age. Mildred’s gone on without him and is now superintendent of nurses, while Coralee is making passes at David from about the first minute they meet. David is determined not to wreck the marriage of his old friend and his second chance, but Coralee is a very determined young lady!

What’s interesting about her as a character, however, is that she has an awful voice, and we are reminded of this repeatedly, “a tone that had neither resonance nor depth. If he had heard her first on the telephone, David thought, he’d have pictured her as a dull, drab, dishwater blonde, probably chewing gum.” Mildred, on the other hand, “wasn’t a beautiful woman, but her personality made looks unimportant,” while Coralee seems to be the opposite. “I think she’s beautiful,” David admits of Coralee, “and would be even more so if her voice matched. As a person, however, I wouldn’t stack her up against Mildred at all.” It’s an unusual take in a VNRN, that personality outweighs looks; where will this come out in the end?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we learn about Janet Raleigh, a nursing student who has left her privileged background because “I want to do something important, she thought; not just to keep occupied, but to make my life count for something.” Under the withering eye of Nurse Daisy Andrews, a 40-year-old spinster battle axe who does not deserve her name (or the nickname Dizzy, which the girls have given her, tee hee!), however, Janet is losing her resolve, as Nurse Andrews bawls Janet out in front of the doctors on numerous occasions (but winning her the sympathy and interest of one Dr. David Sterling, so it isn’t all bad!). One day poor Janet is given the difficult task of bathing the most difficult patient on the ward, 19-year-old Archie Crane, who is not recovering from his burst appendix eight weeks ago. He refuses to cooperate with the sponge bath until Janet kisses him, which she does only after he has wrapped himself around her and refused to let go.

The bastard tells another nurse of his exploits, and Janet is bawled out yet again by Nurse Andrews. She’s ready to quit, until wise Mildred asks Janet to write down all the reasons she wanted to become a nurse and why now she wants to quit—and when one page is full of scribbling and the other has only Nurse Andrews’ name on it, Janet is ready to get with the program. Mildred sends her on her way with some kindly advice: As a student nurse, even if her superior is unfair, “in respect for her professional knowledge and standing, you follow her orders meticulously, listen carefully to all she says, refraining from comment or retort if you don’t agree. You accept her criticism gracefully, knowing it’s for your own benefit eventually.” Initially I was a little bothered that the bully was going to triumph, but I should have trusted Mildred—two weeks later, she demotes Nurse Andrews from head nurse to assist in the OR. (Of course, we astute VNRN readers see the writing on the wall with this move!)

On the lam from Coralee, David asks Janet to go out with him, and she agrees. “Janet was an easy girl to be with, David reflected. She didn’t make demands, and was at ease in any social situation. It’s her poise that makes her so darned attractive, he thought, watching her.” Soon the pair are seeing each other almost every night, but that doesn’t stop Coralee, who literally chases David around the golf course when every shot she hits lands 10 feet from David’s ball. The woman could have out-whacked Louise Suggs (a neglected golf giant who beat Sam Snead on a par-three course in 1961, correctly arguing that what they lacked in driving distance, women could make up in the short game). When he turns down her forty-ninth pass in the sand trap of the 14^th hole, Coralee almost slugs David in the head with her niblick, but Graham saves her from becoming a murderess by dropping with what appears to be a heart attack. Dr. David Sterling knows better, however, and diagnoses a cardiac tumor, and never mind how ridiculously rare those are, because he’s already correctly diagnosed masher Archie Crane with a liver abscess. 

In the interim, David cannot commit to Janet, so she foolishly accepts a date with Archie, and her date with Archie goes horribly awry when he proves that his behavior in the hospital was, far from an aberration, just the tip of the iceberg when he drives her to Rocky Dell Park and assaults her, eventually pushing her off a cliff after he’d thrown her to the ground and she’d bashed him on the head with a rock. Knocked unconscious, she comes to only to find he’s fled the scene, leaving her to flag down a passing car to get home. She’s two hours late for curfew at the nurse’s dorm, and there’s Nurse Andrews, all full of slut-shaming. To the high credit of all her friends, everyone who hears the story wants Janet to call the police, but she resists—and then it turns out she’s suffering a subdural hematoma and needs immediate brain surgery! The surgeons, of whom David of course is one, are scrubbed and boring holes in Janet’s skull when Graham drops of another attack, and David steps up and completes the surgery. Does he get any thanks? Well, Janet’s grateful, but Nurse Andrews is livid because David is not a brain surgeon! In revenge, she’s ready to testify on behalf of Archie Crane in the assault trial, pulling out what she calls David’s affair with Coralee—what this has to do with the assault is beyond me—as it’s her opinion that Janet asked to be attacked at the park after her scandalous behavoir, being attacked at the hospital. But she’ll withhold her testimony if Janet agrees to resign—that’s one hell of a grudge!

But before Andrews has the chance to crush the pair like little bugs, Graham finally agrees to exploratory cardiac surgery if David will do it, as it seems he can do anything except the dishes. Andrews is assisting in the surgery, and—you guessed it—hands David the wrong drug when Graham’s blood pressure tanks. David manages to pull Graham away from the Grim Reaper with open-heart massage, and Andrews flies out of the OR and commits suicide in the scrub room, injecting her own heart with the same incorrect drug she’d handed David, one of the more spectacular VNRN flame-outs I’ve ever witnessed. So everyone’s reputation is saved, and now it’s just for David to come to his senses and propose to Janet. Also for Graham to come out of surgery to find that Coralee has left him and that Mildred, bless her, will take the louse back. So happy endings for all.

This book has strong women characters in Mildred and Janet, women whose character is more important than their looks; Coralee, who wins big in the latter department, is the loser in the end. I did appreciate her dramatic presence, though, as I did Nurse Andrews. I also found some wisdom in the book, in the advise that Mildred gives Janet about accepting criticism, and also in passages in which it’s suggested that Archie is faking his illness: “I believe it’s a mistake,” David says, “to ascribe illness to neurosis before every physical source is thoroughly checked,” which is a maxim still very true today and of which I’ve needed to remind myself on occasion. But while it has a lot to recommend it, I just didn’t love this book—my beef with it being that it’s mostly about David Sterling, and the writing, though it had some interesting ideas, just didn’t sparkle enough to make an A-grade book. It’s worth a read, though, so if you have the chance to spend the afternoon with David Sterling’s nurse, take it.

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

Lesley Bowen M.D.

By Marjorie Norrell, ©1965

Lesley was blessed with exceptional beauty. But was it such a blessing, when it meant that although she only wanted to become a good doctor, few people would take her seriously—while the woman-hating Doctor Mark Crossman seemed actively to resent her?

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“‘Me?’ she ejaculated, startled and without any regard to grammar.”

“He sounds to be treating me like a fever.”

“Leave the doctoring and suchlike to the men. You’ll have to deal with sights and situations no young woman should have to face, things from which it should be the duty of her husband to shield her.”

“In real life you have to make your own happy ending.”

REVIEW:

Gosh, being beautiful sure is rough! Poor Lesley Bowen M.D. knows all about it, the sad thing, and she is not at all abashed to whine about it for many, many pages at the start of her eponymous story. “I take my problem with me,” she explains. “I’m not being vain … it’s just my face. It causes trouble for me wherever I go.” Indeed, right there in Chapter One, it’s getting out of hand, causing her best friend’s fiancé to grab her in the doctors’ sitting room to profess his undying love. But Lesley knows better: “It’s not me he’s interested in, it’s just my face.” So, coming to the end of her residency at the hospital, she interviews to become a partner in the three-doctor GP office in northern England.

She only meets one of the partners, Frank Elland, because the other one, Mark Crossman, is away putting his father’s estate to rights. She has a lot of anxiety on her part about whether Mark will approve of her hire—he has a tragic past in which his beautiful doctor fiancée dumped him for a rich man, so he’s sworn never to have anything to do with women ever again! But she and Frank hit it off so well that she accepts the post.

She and Mark hit it off too, only in a more literal way, when she inadvertently backs into his car at a rest stop on her move to the new job. They don’t introduce themselves during their chilly encounter, so she’s not aware he’s her new partner. But then, he is so rude and unforgiving, she naturally “felt strangely drawn to this man …. He was a real man, a man’s man, the kind you could depend on in any sort of a crisis.” Lesley spends a lot of time thinking about this stranger: “If I’d met him any place else I’d have liked him a lot,” she decides. That’s quite a big leap to make after only two pages of frosty, clipped exchanges, but VNRN heroines are not known for their discriminating choices in men.

You will be shocked to find out that when they do finally meet, it does not go well. And it certainly doesn’t help that she looks just like his ex-fiancée! Mark is so “infuriating” in his behavior that Lesley almost feels sorry for him: “It was so painfully obvious that he did not know how to make his point without being unbearably rude.” Fortunately, Lesley’s previous infatuation with the man when he was a stranger drops completely, and we have about 70 pages of quiet routine, with Lesley going about her day-to-day, living a peaceful life in her rose-covered cottage with a fond elderly housekeeper who sets out cookies and hot malted milk for her at the end of a long day. Can I sign up for that?

Lesley tends to her patients and has dinner a lot with the local young lord, Damian Neerman, who is a race car driver and engineer who swears that Lesley is going to marry him right after these two big races he’s got coming up with a prototype car he’s working on. She’s not interested in him romantically, but spends enough time with him that Mark, even as he slowly warms to Lesley’s intelligent, hard-working competency—in spite of her wretched face—mistakes their friendship for something more. Damian, of course, isn’t satisfied with a platonic relationship, and attacks her in his car on a drive home from dinner, and after that incident, Lesley avoids being alone with him and won’t get in a car with him at all, feeling “safer” that way. Some friend.

Everything wraps up fairly predictably, complete with car crash and house fire, but the rapprochement at the end is remarkable in that in Mark’s (you knew it would be him) embrace, “there was no violence, no force behind it, just a gentle, compelling pressure.” A sad statement that an overt lack of pain in a pass is a novelty. We are treated to The Kiss, and manage to avoid a discussion of Lesley quitting her job—again, Mark proves his worth when he paints a picture of her continuing to work alongside him in clinic. He even tells her that she’s “sufficient unto yourself,” though he admits, “I’m not … I need you most of all.” 

If Lesley has an irritating tendency to go on about her face and Mark after the accident, these annoyances stop altogether after the first third of the book, and on the whole it is a lovely, relaxed stroll with an intelligent, dedicated young woman leading a charming life as she makes the rounds of her rural patients. All it lacks is a female friend to trade quips with, but even without her, Lesley Bowen makes for a gentle afternoon, especially if you can’t be in a country cottage with hot malted milk and cookies yourself.

Nurse Landon's Challenge

Adelaide Humphries, ©1952

“You’re spoiled, a snob—in short, the sort of girl who is not much use in the world.” That’s what Doctor Peter Hayes, the young surgeon at Lakefront Hospital, said to Kay Landon the first time they met. Nothing in Kay’s life as the pampered daughter of wealth had prepared her for this sternly dedicated man who was indifferent to her social background and didn’t seem to notice her vibrant attractiveness. She tried to forget his words in the whirl of pleasure provided by Nicky Fairchild. She even accepted a beautiful big solitaire from Nicky. It did no good. She had to show that arrogant young doctor that she was mor than just a lovely doll dressed by the world’s most expensive designers. So Kay Landon enrolled in one of the most difficult and demanding careers open to women. She started training to be a nurse—and a good one—at Lakefront Hospital.

GRADE: A

BEST QUOTE:
“The reason I hadn’t called you sooner,” Peter said, “was that this epidemic has kept me so busy.”

REVIEW:
Kay Landon is my kind of heroine. On the day that we meet her, Kay is “wearing a sheer sleeveless dress and a thoroughly bored expression on her lovely face.” Within three paragraphs she gets pulled over for speeding—and though she is contemplating harassing the cop and getting arrested, he just wants to commandeer her wheels to ferry people injured in a train crash to the hospital. So instead of to jail, she heads off to the accident scene, where an injured man and Dr. Peter Hayes are loaded into her car. He is curt and indifferent to her, so she skewers him with sarcasm, and he responds in the same tone: “You are spoiled, rather silly, something of a snob—in short, the sort of girl who is actually not much use in this present-day world.”

Immediately she decides to show him a thing or two. She’s going to become a nurse! “It would be a perfectly marvelous way to get even with him,” she thinks. She tells her boyfriend, the arrogant, “Apollo-like” clubber Nicky, about her decision, and he’s not wild about the idea. “Girls like you don’t go in for nursing,” he tells her. “You’re the sort of girl who has been waited on all her life. Not the sort to do menial tasks for other people. Rubbing old men’s backs with alcohol, emptying bedpans—Good lord, Kay, I won’t let you do it!”

But she goes anyway, though she’s not really wild about nursing. “Charity cases were apt to be unsavory; dirty old men, whiny old women, pitiful undernourished and unwanted children.” But she keeps hoping to run into a certain doctor—which she does, literally: She’s pushing a tray of sterile instruments to the OR when she turns a corner too fast, nearly running over the doctor and dumping the cart onto the floor. “Now look what you’ve made me do!” Kay snaps at him. But guess what—soon she begins to love nursing and how useful it makes her feel.

About halfway through the book she and Dr. Peter hook up, but since they’re not supposed to be dating—she’ll get kicked out of school if she’s caught with him—they don’t see much of each other, and when they do, they start squabbling. There’s another woman, of course. Peter is also pursuing Fern Wentworth, a former burlesque queen who married a wealthy man twice her age who then conveniently dropped dead. He’s hoping she’ll make a large donation for renovations to the hospital: “He wants the old wooden part torn down, thinks it’s a firetrap,” Fern tells Kay. (Does anyone besides me sense some foreshadowing here?)

This book is a fun read, and it really gives you a sense of the era it was written in. While Kay is avoiding Peter, she hangs out with the other nursing students, a great bunch of scrappy gals with colorful speech (“investigate the hock shops and get all the dope,” “She thought she looked like Mrs. Astorbilt, but she looked as though she belonged in a circus,” “You sound like a Communist!”). I appreciated the fact that this book actually takes characters (though not the leading ones) beyond the chaste kiss: “I saw you in that supply closet necking with that roughneck orderly, Birdie—the big one with the scarred face.” And Nicky’s reference to bedpans is the first time I’ve seen one of these books refer to the, shall we say, messier aspects of nursing. I appreciated the fact that Kay is a flawed individual, and even at the fiery conclusion when she is the hero, she does it reluctantly: “She had not especially wanted to do it. And at the end she had almost given up …. And she hadn’t felt brave at all.” The cover illustration may well be my favorite so far: her red convertible, the palm trees in the background, her arched eyebrow, her displeased expression. This book really has it all.