A Challenge to Nurse Honor

By Pauline Ash, ©1965

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

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

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

REVIEW:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nurse Nicole’s Decision

By Arlene Hale, ©1965

Also published as Private Duty for Nurse Scott

When Stella Bennett had a stroke, Nicole Scott, R.N., rushed to nurse her old friend back to health. So absorbed did Nicole become in her patient, that she began to forget her problems with Mark, her fiancé. But other complications arose in the person of two new men—the handsome nephew of her patient and the mysterious ranch manager, Lee Whitney. Suddenly all these various matters came to a head—and Nicole was forced to make the most important—and what turned out to be the most endearing—decision of her life.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“Nurses get sassier every day. Used to be they all but bowed down when a doctor came into the room. Ah, those good old days!”

“I take temperatures much better than I cook.”

REVIEW:

Nurse Nicole Scott, like many VNRN heroines, is engaged. You will not be shocked, therefore, when you deduce on the second page that this arrangement is not likely to come off as planned. Mark Foster runs a hardware store, “but right now every penny was going to pay off the mortgage he had taken in order to remodel and restock. Because of this, he didn’t feel marriage was in order. ‘My wife will not work,’ Mark said emphatically.” So when author Arlene Hale tells us two pages later, “All was not as rosy as it should have been,” we were already online with Bed, Bath and Beyond to cancel that wedding gift. Page after page of their incompatibilities—he loves baseball, she does not; he is shy, she is outgoing; he’s lazy, she likes activity—are trotted out to hammer home the obvious point. Nicole continues with the charade, however, because “if you’re not careful, you’ll end up like Lorena,” her helpful mother says, holding up Nicole’s quiet, baseball-loving homebody sister Lorena, who has reached the shocking age of 25 “and no beaus,” mom says, that ignorant silly, since everyone knows the plural of beau is beaux.

But fate intervenes when Stella Bennett has a stroke and requires round-the-clock nursing care in her home. Stella’s nephew Corbin Bennett III, an old school chum of Nicole’s, comes home to help care for his aunt. A profligate, drifting young man, he nonetheless is one of the few such young men who deeply cares for his rich dowager aunt, and spends hours each day talking to her, helping with her physical therapy, and making her laugh. And a fair amount of time trying to woo Nicole, who is unimpressed with Corbin’s flighty ways. Mark, too, is not happy to see Corbin again, but to such a degree that it’s clear there’s some dark history between the two, and Mark is remaining secretive on the subject. “Let’s just say I can’t stand him and let it go at that,” he snarls, and Corbin for once has nothing to add.

While Nicole is busy caring for Stella 24/7, she asks Lorena to keep Mark company, and then when she has a day off, she heads down the road to the ranch that’s owned by Stella but managed by hunky cowboy Lee Whitney, who also drops by daily to have pleasant chats with the invalid. And maybe the nurse, too. Before long, he’s gently kissing Nicole, and she’s returning the favor, having dinner with him at his house. “How comfortable she had been there. It was as if she need be no one but her true self. She had relaxed as she hadn’t relaxed in a long time. With Mark it was sometimes like walking a tightrope. What a pleasant change Lee had been!” Yet she’s still talking about her impending marriage to Mark. That young man is not helping; after talking on the phone with Nicole’s sister and realizing that “somehow with Lorena, he could be more himself than with anyone else,” he immediately decides to rush over and propose to Nicole. Along with his declaration of love—oh, wait, rather his declaration that “I decided I’ve had enough. I don’t see why we should wait. Let’s get married,” burbles the impetuous fool—he insists that if she wants the ring, she must quit working. “I will not have you working. I want you home. Where a wife should be. You should be willing to give this up for me!” Uh, okay, she stutters, and though she does bring up his own very long hours at the hardware store, before she can get to the point he literally shuts her down—“We won’t say anything more, okay?”—and that’s the end of that. (Lee, on the other hand, is outraged when Nicole tells him of Mark’s demand: “Nursing isn’t just a job,” Lee says. “It’s a profession, a necessity, something so essential—” because we didn’t have enough hints about who the right man really was.)

Before her engagement party, Nicole finds a book of poetry on Lorena’s desk, all full of sappy odes to Mark, and now she knows that Lorena is in love with Mark, which for some reason bothers her more than the fact that she’s kissing Lee behind every closed door. Because no one can have an honest conversation with anyone, it takes a fall down the stairs that puts Lorena in the hospital with the usual coma to bring everything out: Days later, when Lorena finally wakes to see Mark sitting beside her, she says, “Hello, Mark, darling. I love you,” and goes back to sleep. In their joy that Lorena is getting better, Nicole tells Mark that Lorena is in love with him, and that he is in love with Lorena. Well, gosh, now that you mention it, he says, and Nicole runs off to find Lee. 

There’s not much to this story, just a straightforward telling of how when you throw a bunch of charged particles into a jar and shake it around a bit, eventually all the like molecules will find each other. But it’s not badly told, and gently glides along. Lee Whitney is definitely the most charismatic person in the book, a sexy, kind man who never grabs the woman and bruises her lips in an assault presented to us gullible maiden readers as a pass. Some parts of the story are maddening, like all the glaring highway signs screaming that Nicole is on the wrong road, which we realize on the second page, yet have to watch Nicole flounder for a hundred more pages until she starts to clue in. One odd side plot revolves around a woman named Elaine, whom Mark had been madly in love with before he knew Nicole, and whom Corbin had taken away from him. The two men even come to blows over it—Corbin knocks loser Mark down in two minutes flat—but neither man will discuss the reason for the fight with Nicole. Elaine’s name keeps coming up as both Mark and Nicole wonder if Mark will ever tell Nicole the story, but the last we hear of Elaine is Nicole’s resolution not to ask Mark any questions: “She would wait until Mark told her,” she decides. He never does. Interestingly, Lorena knows all about it, since, as the librarian, she knows all the town gossip, but she’s not going to enlighten Nicole, either. Is this supposed to be some metaphor for the deep understanding between Mark and Lorena’s souls that is missing in the relationship between Mark and Nicole? Because it only comes across as a major drama made out of a high school crush, and Mark’s persistent refusal to tell Nicole shows him up as an immature egocentric. It seems that poor Lorena is getting the worse end of the stick when she ends up with Mark, but at the dried-up age of 25, beggars can’t be choosers.

Nurse Kay

By Virginia Roberts
(pseud. Nell Marr Dean), ©1962

For Kay Fleming, nursing was a second career choice: she always wanted to be a doctor. And perhaps because it was second choice she was determined to be good at it. So when the man she loved, rugged young college football coach Duke Malone, was offered a job out of state and asked Kay to come with him, marry him, she refused. It would have meant giving up a chance to help organize the hospital’s new disaster unit. It would have meant going back on her “duty” … But was she being a dedicated nurse when she sent Duke away—or was she only being selfish? It was a question Kay couldn’t answer until a headline tragedy showed her the truth about herself …

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“I hike all the roads around here, and haven’t been kidnapped even once.”

“There’s just nothing that gives a woman that feminine, fragile air like a soufflé-light mohair sweater.”

“I’m glad you didn’t go through with your lofty ideas. Women doctors are awfully stuffy sometimes.”

“A vacation for me means I’ll have to build a whole new wardrobe.”

“Certainly, intelligent, educated women like you need to have careers. But they also need to make wifehood the main objective in their lives. Nothing can be more treasured than to be chosen by a man because he thinks you’re the most important woman in the world.”

REVIEW:
Kay Fleming is a nursing student, but she had really wanted to be a doctor. A lot is made of this early in the book, but I’m not sure why; it doesn’t really add anything to the story except show Kay up as a self-sacrificing martyr, since the reason she didn’t go to medical school is because (1) she never bothered to tell her parents that’s what she wanted to do and (2) she never bothered to find a way to finance medical school with or without her parents’ help. It does, however, give her a lot of reason to be angrily jealous of her sister, who did go to a fancy private university and throws a fancy wedding for 500 guests that costs $1,000 (tee hee!) and, by Kay’s constant reckoning, siphoned up all the money that could have been used for her own education had she only asked for it. (In the end, though, when Kay snarkily tells her parents of her thwarted dreams, they sell their drug store possibly to help finance a medical degree, and selfish Kay decides she’d rather stay in nursing school after all. So much for that plot thread.)

We follow Kay through her final year of school, during which she starts dating football coach Duke Malone. He is super hot and hunky, and the year flies by! At the end of it, Dr. James Martin offers Kay a job helping him set up a disaster unit. “Jim says every hospital should have a disaster unit—a field hospital—in case of a big disaster, or an enemy attack,” because “with all the big missile installations around here, it makes us a hot target for enemy bombings.” The problem comes when Duke is offered a job coaching for the big football team in Colorado, and he asks Kay to marry him and come with him. Kay, who is looking forward to her big project with Dr. Martin, does not leap into Duke’s arms and say yes, and he is not exactly understanding. “What does that hospital have to offer you that I don’t?” Um, a challenging and rewarding career and a salary, for starters, but Duke is not impressed. “I guess anything as important as that would put a stop to such an inconsequential thing as marriage, wouldn’t it!” Because it’s now or never with Duke; he must have learned about selfishness from his beloved.

Kay hopes that a day or two will help Duke come to a compromise: “Why couldn’t he be understanding and let her have just a little fling at her career before they seriously planned their marriage?” But Duke never bothers to contact Kay after that initial conversation, so when she tracks him down at the stadium, he starts in again. “You’re putting your career ahead of mine—ahead of me,” he says. “You think staying here, doing what any other nurse could do in your place, is more important.” Um, thanks, honey. She wants to tell him off, but instead decides, “One of them must act maturely,” so she asks him to give her a few months to finish her project, but he refuses to compromise. “Why compromise? You’re getting what you want,” he snarls, and off he goes to Colorado. Good riddance! thinks Kay. Or not, and instead pines for him constantly.

Unfortunately, shortly after Duke’s departure, the hospital administration decides to pull funding from the disaster center and give it instead to that cute pediatrician, so Kay is left without her big project or a man. But she continues to work at the hospital during the day and cry during the night, until finally Duke’s Colorado team comes to play the local university. Kay tries to see him again, but it’s no use—Duke persists in being a dick. As fate would have it, just as the big game is kicking off, there’s a landslide at the dam, and lots of workers are trapped and injured! Though the disaster unit is not functional, Dr. Martin has their plans at the ready, and he and Kay MacGyver supplies, personnel, and procedures to set up a triage hospital at the tragedy site, and Kay comes up with the brilliant idea to get the football teams to come help move all the dirt and rocks that can’t be moved by machinery without risking of injuring the workers buried in the rubble. Duke and the teams show up pronto, and soon the injured are being pulled from the mess and expertly treated at the field hospital.

The next day, Duke drops by her apartment. “It’s sad it took a disaster to bring us back together,” he says, and they go off to church because it’s Sunday, and their reunification “became even more treasured with the thought that people in love should share the rich privilege of worshiping together.” Over waffles after the service, they read in the paper that a rich philanthropist is funding the disaster unit after all, but without any discussion of how incredibly selfish and nasty Duke has been, or even whether they can reunite, Kay says, “they can get another nurse to help run the show,” and tells Duke she will marry him. That doesn’t mean, however, that she’s going to give up nursing altogether, because they have hospitals in Colorado, too, maybe. “Goodness, Duke, you don’t think you’re marrying one of those delicate little clinging-vine-type females! Heaven forbid! I’m not one of those homemakers who wants to do nothing but dust a tiny three-room apartment and die of boredom.” No, she’s just a clinging-vine-type who lets her man kick her around without a peep of protest. Now that she’s agreed to give up almost everything, he condescends to admit, “When I saw you working your heart out at that accident I knew how much your career meant to you. How important it was—how many lives you helped save. I felt selfish in ever suggesting that you give it up.” That’s the closest he gets to an apology, and he certainly doesn’t suggest that Kay stay in Arizona and finish the disaster unit before joining him in Colorado; no, that would be too much. So the book ends as Kay gaily decides to have a wedding just as huge and expensive as her sister’s, the wedding she was so contorted with rage and envy about early in the book. But Duke needn’t worry, she’s only quarterbacking “the first play, darling—our wedding. Then you’re the coach forever after.” And I’m off and running for the Pepto Bismol.

The problem here is that Kay is depicted as a strong, independent woman, but when it comes to the man, she always has to be a bigger person than he is, always give in first, always stifle her anger, always give up almost everything that’s important to her, while he acts like a spoiled brat and gets everything he wants. But after we’ve watched her squawk about not having gone to medical school, and her sister spending all her parents’ money, and then make an abrupt, completely oblivious about face, we know that this is not her first hypocrisy. The book is not badly written and is even humorous at times, but Kay’s fickleness is hard to overcome, souring what could have been a better book.

Nurse April

By Katherine McComb, ©1967

Maybe her kid brother was right, maybe April Bonner was a jinx. From her first day on the hospital staff as a full-fledged nurse, things began to happen. A mob rioted outside. A knife-waving fanatic invaded Emergency and seized April as a hostage. A baby was kidnaped from the nursery. Nurses’ training hadn’t prepared the tall, attractive redhead for anything quite like this. It also hadn’t prepared her for handsome young Dr. Ned Sparks, who didn’t mind if April became emotionally involved with him, though he seemed to be serious about someone else, but who warned her about becoming emotionally involved with any of her patients—a warning that came very close to being a tragic prophecy …

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“An R.N. in the family! A female who gives baths and bedpans to strange men—ugh!”

“What pretty girl doesn’t enjoy being stared at—or whistled at, for that matter?”

“You’re as pretty as a new stethoscope.”

“She knew he would be furious if he learned that Mrs. Norman had tried to shoot her, and later tried to wreck the car and kill them all.”

REVIEW:

I tell you, if you ever find out that April Bonner is a nurse at your hospital, pack your bags and run!! This “tall, lithe figure modeling a white nylon uniform, a small white cap perched smartly on her red-gold hair,” is a magnet for bad news, even for the ER, where she is sent her first day on the job. She gets a kid with an open tib-fib fracture after being hit by a car, a worker with chemical burns, and a gunshot victim whose treatment consists of stitching the bullet wounds closed. On her second day, there’s a mob rioting for never-specified concerns, and “mangled bodies” arrive in a constant stream. One of the rioters, looking for the leader of the gang, grabs April and holds a knife to her throat as Dr. Ned Sparks gives him a tour of every patient in the ED until he finds the leader’s corpse in the morgue. The man cries a bit, then pulls April out into the crowded street, where the mob is tear-gassed, but April is pulled to safety by Dr. Ned. Then, on her day off, Ned takes her to the beach, where he saves her from a rip tide that somehow manages to pull her out to sea when she tries to pick up a conch shell on the shore. And they almost get into a car crash on the way home. All this in just four days’ time.

One major source of excitement comes when a newborn is kidnapped after April puts him down for a nap, although April seems more upset about being blamed for the kidnapping than she is sympathetic for the frantic parents; she has “the tussle of her life” with the baby’s mother, who attempts to get out of bed to search the hospital for her missing son. But rest assured, April saves the day when she identifies the kidnapper after the police round up the usual suspects from their “list of women with mother complexes.” And we haven’t even scratched the surface of April’s fantastic exploits, either. There’s also a rollercoaster accident in which two teens fall from the car in front of April and both are killed (April pronounces one on scene and the other dies en route to the hospital); a car crash in which always-on-the-scene April pronounces three people dead and saves one from bleeding out by demanding a “clean white towel” (no other color will do, apparently) from one of the passengers and wrapping the patient’s head in it; a patient, driven crazy by an anonymous letter-writing campaign to make her think that April is trying to steal her husband, threatens April at gunpoint; and yet another car crash, this time with April actually in the car with the psychotic driver, after which April “hovered near death” from “a slight skull fracture and a few crushed ribs.” “Seems like you’re one of those people who always happen to be around wherever there’s trouble,” her brother Bob says, and he doesn’t know the half of it.

She’s also a magnet for the boys, and she is shocked that on her first day the interns are giving her “bold stares and wolf calls in the corridors,” and when she complains to Dr. Ned, he says, “I simply could not reprimand those interns for staring. I would probably have done the same thing myself.” It’s a horrible world the women in this book live in, where they are constantly judged on their appearance; one nurse is fired from her job because she “had a face as long as a donkey’s head, and ears as big,” and the nursing supervisor “went on with a chuckle, ‘the nurse would never take a beauty prize.’” Even April, speaking of her best friend Rita, says, “Rita arrived at April’s apartment in a tan pleated cotton dress that did nothing for her sallow complexion and only accentuated her large hips.” April saves another life when she takes charge and insists that Rita start “rolling on the floor to reduce your hips, and doing stooping exercises to flatten your tummy—and cutting out sweets. Then we’ll go shopping for some clothes with plain skirts, instead of those pleated things,” and she also dyes Rita’s hair and gives her weekly hairdos. And in no time flat Dr. Les Brown is proposing!

April is, unfortunately, a hypocrite. On the opening pages we hear about how April had, at the time of her own appendectomy, “caught a vision. She knew immediately, not what she wanted to be, but what she must be—a nurse. For three years she had dreamed of this moment, had worked toward it with all the strength of her young body and dedicated mind.” Yet once she’s clapped eyes on Dr. Ned, she’s ready to chuck it all: “She wanted only one thing—the love of one man. But she was slipping further and further away from that goal, as if the riptides of life were pulling her, dragging her under.” That may be true, but only because April is stupidly outraged when she tells Ned early on that he can’t be kissing her because he’s engaged to Eunice Frye, and he answers, “I’ve kissed a few pretty girls in my time, but I’ll swear on my Hippocratic oath that I’ve never asked one of them to marry me.” She immediately decides this means that he has decided he will never ask anyone to marry him, and again and again we’re reminded of her stupidity as she fumes along the lines of, “She had heard of men who could not tie themselves down to one woman, and he had practically admitted that he was one of them.” So if her constant snippy behavior to Dr. Ned leaves him disinterested, she only has herself to blame.

The writing here is choppy and comically bizarre, such as the description of one of April’s first ER patients: “It was a restaurant cook with three badly mangled fingers which had been caught in an electric meat grinder. Luckily, none had to be amputated.” As April’s adventures continue to pile up, the story seems increasingly outrageous; by the time the psycho patient pulled the revolver, I was giggling madly on the subway. April’s terrible dilemma over how to win Dr. Ned is solved by April herself after she comes out of her coma, when despite her broken ribs she flings her arms around his neck, pulls him close, and whispers, “I love you.” Her other terrible dilemma about having to quit her job after marriage—early on he’s monologuing, “I’m going to be head of my family, as well as breadwinner. That’s another trouble with these modern mothers. They bear a child, then turn it over to somebody—anybody—to bring it up while they take a job to make more money to buy more clothes, more automobiles, more household gadgets—things less important than the training of their child”—is solved when Ned decides to open a private office and magnanimously agrees to staff it with “Mrs. Ned Sparks.” Awww. Well, until Mrs. Ned Sparks becomes a mother. So overall, if you like the so-bad-it’s-good category, you should definitely add this strange volume to your library.

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. 

Dr. Barry’s Nurse

By Arlene Hale, ©1968

Betty Richards, R.N., was upset. Old Dr. Barry, her highly respected employer, was going to retire—and had planned on turning over his practice to his physician-son, Mike. But that wasn’t all. The old doctor was bound and determined to see Mike and Betty married! It was hate at first sight when they first met … but they soon realized that the elder Dr. Barry was dangerously ill. So, out of consideration for his health, they went through with the pretense of falling in love. Then—one dramatic afternoon—the curtain fell, once and for all, on the scene they’d performed so well.

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“All the doctors in the building ogle you. So you’re not such an innocent little lamb!”

“The intellectual types always had moods, it seemed.”

REVIEW:

Arlene Hale is not my favorite VNRN author; of the 20 books she’s written that I’ve been obliged to read, this is only the fifth to score in the B range (she’s never gotten an A). Here we have an example of her finer work: Dr. Barry’s Nurse is not a flashy story, but it is moderately interesting and doesn’t make you sorry you picked it up. A low bar, I know, but unfortunately that’s all we have to work with.

Betty Roberts is actually a fine character: strong, competent, hard-working, and intensely loyal to old Dr. Barry, who paid her way through nursing school after—you guessed it—her parents died, so that she could keep her house, and offered her a job after graduation. That must have been about five years ago because now she’s practically arthritic at 25, a dog’s age in VNRN terms. She’s paid off her debt to him, but he’s like a father to him—she even calls him Pappy—so she’s continued working for him out of her love and loyalty.

But Dr. Barry is bringing in his son Mike from Chicago, fresh out of his residency, to take over the business. Mike is not red-hot on the idea, and Betty, who’s met Mike in passing over the years, hasn’t been overly impressed with him, either, though it’s not clear why: “For reasons she couldn’t quite pin down, she was in no hurry to begin their association,” we learn before he’s even shown up. He blows into the office “like a cold wind off the Arctic,” snippy to the staff and even to patients who could use some reassurance. Betty tells her roommate that Mike is “a stiff-necked, arrogant, cold fish,” and he deserves it. “She could never, never like that man,” she decides, but we have heard that one before!

It soon comes out that Dr. Barry has been hiding a heart condition that has conveniently held itself in check these years until son Mike shows up, and now he’s clotting off his coronary arteries like it’s going out of style. As he’s going down for the third time, Mike tells Betty that they should pretend they are dating to make the old guy feel better. “We both know he could have a severe attack at any time and might not pull out of it. Why would it be wrong to pretend a little, for his sake?” She can think of a lot of reasons why it would be wrong to pretend a little, for his sake, and never exactly agrees to this crazy scheme, but she never says no when he drags her out to the gazebo and starts kissing her because Dr. Barry may be watching. “Make it look good,” he says, so she does—and berates herself endlessly afterward. “Why had she kissed him back so ardently? For Pappy’s sake or her own?” So when the ersatz couple visits Dr. Barry in the hospital after his fourth and final attack, he tells Mike he wants them to marry. “Now. It must be now!” Later that day Mike proposes, and Betty indignantly turns him down—and then realizes she’s in love with Mike after all, and decides she’s only turned him down because he does not love her. But back in Dr. Barry’s hospital room, she and Mike tell him that they are engaged. “Good. Good! That’s all I wanted to hear,” he says, and promptly drops dead. Mike tells Betty she doesn’t have to go through with it, that he’s leaving for Chicago, and she packs up her car to head out of town too. Guess what—they both end up back at Dr. Barry’s office, and you will never guess what happens there!

Though obvious from the start, this book isn’t a complete waste of time. There’s even some humor in it, such as when a would-be masher tells Betty, “I promise you an evening to remember,” and she answers, “That’s what I’m afraid of,” and ducks under his groping arms and out the lounge door. Or when Mike tells her she has “good common horse sense,” she says, “Well, that’s one thing I’ve never been accused of before.” (Though like those trailers on TV that give you every funny line in the film, there aren’t many more in the book.) There are a few curious side plots, like the patient who falls off the Ferris wheel and has amnesia, and her sort-of boyfriend who draws a comic strip is an interesting character. It is too long at 158 pages, and there’s not much new VNRN ground here (even the amnesiac patient is a well-worn old hat; see Doctor Down Under, Nurse Kathy, Nurse Deceived, Nurse with a Problem). But you could do worse, as Arlene Hale certainly has, so maybe we should just be content with that.

Doctor Napier’s Nurse

By Pauline Ash, © 1967

Catherine Hewson—Midge to her friends—and her cousin Derry, another Catherine Hewson, were to start their nursing careers on the same day, but at different hospitals, and Derry had suggested, for some purpose of her own, that they change places. But Midge was not at all sure that it was such a good idea …

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“Did you know there was a disgusting dummy that we pretend is a patient, and practice on it? It has all the lifelike etceteras, and I almost killed it with pneumonia yesterday by leaving it uncovered during a blanket bath.”

“Three other people sharing a secret, and it was a secret no longer.”

REVIEW:

I’ve been a little crabby with VNRNs lately; it seems every book I pick up is another dull rehash of the usual threadbare plotlines (looking at you, New Surgeon at St. Lucien’s, Nell Shannon, R.N., Dr. Holland’s Nurse, Staff Nurse Sally). So it was with great dismay that I realized two pages into Doctor Napier’s Nurse that I had actually read this book before, but had failed to write a review—and remembering little of it now, would have to read it again to be able to tell you something about it. I should have noticed, however, that this book is by Pauline Ash, who also gave us With Love from Dr. Lucien, a lovely book that earned an A- and a fond place for the author in my heart—with that knowledge I would have groaned less loudly, thereby not startling my travelling companions on the subway. In the end this book does not come up to Dr. Lucien, but is definitely not groan-worthy, and possibly even worth a second read.

Here we have the 19-year-old Catherine Hewson, called Midge, and her cousin of same name and age, called Derry. They are also both orphans—they have a surprising amount in common, this pair—and have been raised by formidable aunts Eleanor and Sapphira, who have decided that the young ladies will be packed off to nursing school: Midge to Tapley’s under Eleanor’s friend Dr. Blair Napier, and Derry to St. Augustine’s with Sapphira’s acquaintance Dr. Paul Pinder. Derry is a wily gal with a fondness for the lads that got her booted from her boarding school, and her plan to buck the yoke imposed on the cousins involves switching places with Midge. The  problem with this is that Midge is just not at all the sort of person who would sign up for such an obviously bad idea. But for the sake of the plot, she does, and regrets it mightily on every page that follows.

Both doctor-mentors have been alerted as to the natures of the incoming nursing students, so Dr. Napier is puzzled by Midge, who frequently “forgot she was supposed to be rather dim and frivolous, and settled in to help anyone who required her.” Turns out that despite her upper-class upbringing, “she was liking the life and the work more and more every day,” and soon comes to regret the fact that her little escapade is likely to undo her future career as a nurse. Dr. Napier also happens to be 28, and before long, “Midge faced the fact that she liked Dr. Napier. Liked him more than was sensible for a little P.T.S. nurse who was probably a good ten years his junior.” But because her plot with Derry involves a lot of sneaking out to see Derry so as to deliver mail she would have received and to head off aunts coming to visit, Midge is perennially in hot water with Dr. Napier, who soon insists that he drive her everywhere when she sets foot out of the hospital and is always lurking in his car outside any shop or pub she ventures into, and then glaring at her and crooking his finger at her to pull her in for a ticking off. Frankly, it’s pretty darned creepy.

To her credit, Midge is not impressed with his behavior, either. When he objects that she won’t call him by Blair, his first name—which does suit him, because he is frequently blaring at her—she says, “I can’t. Every time I see you, you’re looking like thunder. You just have to keep picking on me for something. I just can’t please you, can I?” She proceeds to tell him off, shaking with anger. But he can figure out that something is amiss—the girl that Aunt Eleanor told him smokes like a chimney chokes on the one he forces on her, and her work is too good for a young lady who is alleged to have no mind or interest in work or school. “I find it more and more difficult to believe that you are that sort of person at all,” he says. “It’s as if your good aunt is talking about someone else, a stranger. I just can’t understand it!”

She also quickly comes to despise Derry, who, having talked Midge into the stunt in order to further her relationship with a film star she’d pursued in boarding school—a fact that she had not previously revealed to Midge—now shows no inclination to help Midge out with the various entanglements she’s in over it, and in general demonstrates that she is really a horrible person. “Had Derry ever felt anything more deeply than the two words ‘I want’ could conjure up? Had Derry ever felt remorse or compassion for the people she had twisted, in trying to get her own way?” The aunts finally disclose that the way they’d decided to bring Derry to heel is “to get her married off. Someone nice and stolid and long-suffering, with plenty of money and only male relatives.” So the switch turns out to be beneficial in that regard, as Derry’s MD mentor Paul Pinder is 45, and apparently foolish enough to accept the wild Derry—the mystery is why she decides to accept him, and the fact that he is 26 years older than she is means both of the young women’s beaux are not men the reader can be easy with.

Most of the book is one series of near-misses and escapades that can be a bit confusing to follow and eventually just exhausting, given the constant state of high anxiety that Midge is in. Of course everything is sorted in the end, but it does involve a train crash when both Catherines are on board, and most unfortunately, our independent, hard-working, intelligent heroine agrees in the end to give up too much: “From now on, I take the weights. I shoulder the burdens. Right?” Dr. Napier insists. “I take all the responsibility, and make life easy for you. Agreed?” For her part, she foolishly agrees. But the writing is quite good, with bits like, “all of her chins wobbling in her anxiety” to keep us amused, so if the plot gets a bit too much at times, we can feel for our heroine and enjoy the book overall.