Collecting Book

No Escape from Love

Linda Harland, R.N., fled from Boston’s Riverview Hospital when an emotional holocaust threatened to engulf her. Dr. Greg Arnold, the man she secretly loved, had announced his engagement to another woman. For self-preservation, Linda had to give up nursing and the life she knew in the States, and accept an invitation to visit her father, a mining engineer, in Liberia, West Africa. With much to remember and much to forget, Linda threw herself into a new life on this strange continent and even let herself enjoy the attentions of wealthy playboy, Chris Osborne, and young medical researcher, Dr. Paul Arnold. With them, Linda suddenly became conscious of herself as a desired and desiring woman, only it was the wrong time, the wrong place, and the wrong man! Linda found there was no escape from her solemn pledge as a nurse and no escape from love, no matter how fast she ran, nor how far she went.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“Jet lag is one of the hazards of the space age we happen to be living in.”

“You’ll probably be changing your name any day. Pretty girls, I’ve noticed, are allergic to single harness.”

“Don’t tell me you’re a nurse? How dumb can I get? I should have recognized the symptoms: patience, fortitude, interest in medical shop talk.”

“I’m sure you have any number of good qualities. Of course, you do like to shock people, but that seems to be the thing nowadays. It’s a kind of emotional sickness, I suppose.”

“I never drink anything stronger than bourbon.”

“She managed to convey with her eyes a scathing indictment that no proper Bostonian would dream of putting into words.”

“Is it you—or am I on one of those LSD trips?”

“Nurses were strictly for healing, not feeling.”

“The medico who can fool a staff nurse is yet to be born.”

“How could any man in his right mind let a wonderful girl like you escape? If he’d had the sense of a half-wit, he’d have locked you up.”

“I have no notion of freaking out.”

“She resisted a housewifely impulse to straighten out the mess of papers and close the desk drawer, fearful of displacing something vital to Research.”

“Already we’ve shared just about everything from witchcraft to war, not to mention a tropical rainy season.”

REVIEW:

Linda Harlan has been working with Dr. Greg Arnold for two years, and the pair were an unstoppable team—but entirely platonic, much to her chagrin. When he suddenly announces his engagement to a society woman, Linda feels there is no choice but for her to flee this “emotional holocaust” (a term that seems a bit hyperbolic, given that her relationship with Dr. Arnold would remain completely unchanged if he did marry this other woman). So she reaches out to her estranged father, now living in Liberia, and when he invites her to visit him and his second wife and stepdaughter, she quits her job and hops a plane. There, despite the ubiquitous shortage of nurses, she prefers to spend her days in a social whirl among the wealthy white set of West Africa, despite the urging of Dr. Paul Raymond, a young medico intent on saving the world from tropical diseases. So she flits from party to party and decorates the house for the Christmas holidays.

What takes me one paragraph to relay fills more than half the book, so if you choose to begin at Chapter Nine you won’t have missed much. At this point, Dr. Arnold writes to Linda to let her know that his wedding has been cancelled, and subsequent missives start building up to what Linda feels certain will be a marriage proposal. How she feels about this is unclear: She puts the letters in a box and thinks about all the promises she’s made to various people, chiefly to Paul Raymond to work for a few months in his very rural clinic.

Maybe you should start at Chapter Ten, in which Linda heads off into the bush. Once at the clinic, she works hard caring for sick natives and in the research lab with Paul. Months pass. It rains a lot. OK, so let’s make it Chapter Eleven, where Paul tells Linda he’s in love with her. Then they bicker for the rest of the chapter. There’s an incident with a woman who is convinced that her baby is hexed, and Linda is excessively worried about this thorny problem, which smacks not lightly of racist overtones, eventually insulting the native aide with a patronizing tirade, but the baby is fine, and Linda is sorry afterward that she was cross and hateful. You might want to skip that part, too.

In Chapter Twelve we learn that “trouble hovered over the rainforests.” An unexplained civil war breaks out, seemingly triggered by nothing but the weather. And Paul is pissed! “Wouldn’t you just know they’d drum up a ruckus at a time like this, right when I’m on the verge of coming up with something important? I no more than start making plans of my own when bedlam breaks loose, and I’ve got to start grubbing all over again,” he grouses to Linda. Those Africans are just so darned inconsiderate!

In the last chapter, Linda freshens her makeup and goes to the lab to watch a midnight dance with Paul, but it’s so frightening that “the most dedicated Peeping Tom was reduced to goose pimples.” Linda, therefore, winds up with her face pressed to Paul’s shirt, and marriage is proposed. In the ensuing two pages, the fates of men and countries are summarily wrapped into neat bundles, perfect for the upcoming Christmas wedding! And that’s the end!

The other VNRN of Ms. Hall’s we’ve toured, Redheaded Nurse, was a simple yet sweet little book. This one, I am sorry to say, is more dumb and less enjoyable. It feels as if it were a chore to write, because it certainly is a bit of a grind to read. The characters are flat and have little importance to the story; in fact, major events such as war seem to have little importance either. The writing can be campy at times, but that alone is not reason enough to venture past the horrifying cover illustration. Add the tinge of racism (though not as egregious in this little book as it is in some VNRNs), and this book is best left on the shelf.

Hockey Star Nurse

Cover illustration by Allan Kass

Lovely, dark-haired Tina Grahame, private nurse to wealthy Mrs. Derwent, was enjoying having her patient’s two handsome, eligible sons in love with her. Rugged, headstrong Terry Derwent showed his open admiration for Tina despite his involvement with a society girl. A star hockey player, Terry reveled in the adulation and glamor that went with being a sports star. He was delighted to find that Tina understood the strong hold the game had on him, for her own brother was an internationally famous hockey player. But it was Shane, Terry’s younger brother, a dedicated doctor, to whom Tina found herself turning more and more. In Tina’s perplexed heart the score for the rivals in love was tied. Gentle, considerate Shane was obviously in love with her—and they shared the special world of medicine. But Terry was not a man whose kiss she could easily forget …

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:

“My experience of nurses is that they’re always ravenous and cost a fortune to feed.”

“If I marry I’d want my woman to be a wife, not a nurse.”

“The human male has certain instinctive, but very definite, ideas about such things as ownership when it concerns a favorite girl.”

“It was not a way-out place, though some of the dancers wore hippie clothes.”

REVIEW:

This is the tenth book by Diana Douglas, aka Richard Wilkes-Hunter, we’ve discussed in these virtual pages. I wish I could say that his productivity was in any way an indication of talent, but no. I read his books mostly so that I will be done with them sooner.

In this relatively benign little number, Tina Grahame is not, in fact, a hockey star. Which you are surely not shocked to learn, because, as we are told early on, “It’s not a game for girls.” She did play a bit when she was younger, to help the boys fill up the sides, but “grew out of it”—she wasn’t pushed, she jumped. Her brother, however, went on to become a famous goalie for a Canadian hockey team, so maybe the book’s title should be Hockey Star’s Nurse Sister.

Tina hires on at the home of Senator Derwent to care for his wife, who has no first name and multiple sclerosis. Living at the house, she spends a lot of time with the Derwent sons, Terry and Shane. Terry has decided to try out for a professional hockey team, and being the sister of a hockey star makes her knowledgeable enough to pass judgment on Terry’s playing, which is weak. Besides, he gets into fights on the ice, and is even sent to the penalty box for fighting! “It hasn’t happened all that often in league games I’ve seen,” Tina sneers at Terry. But soon Terry comes around, starts playing better and quits fighting, and scores a few game-winning goals. Still, Tina is not impressed, and finds Terry rude, supercilious, conceited, and horrid, among other poor qualities. “I hate you, Terry Derwent,” she thinks, which is all but a guarantee she’ll end up kissing him at some point in the book, if not out-and-out marrying him.

Meanwhile, the other Derwent son Shane went to Harvard Medical School and is doing his residency at Massachusetts General Hospital. “Poor Shane is a plodder,” moans his mother, who clearly has no favorites. Tina likes Shane, but early on they have a conversation in which each of them discusses how they would not want their spouse to be a doctor or a nurse. Which is all but a guarantee she’ll end up kissing him at some point in the book, if not out-and-out marrying him. Indeed, as she walks along Tremont Street in Boston on her day off (wandering into the movie “Love Story,” not realizing what it was about, “midway through the movie she began wishing she’d skipped the film,” and walking out before it was over), she decides that she is falling in love with Shane, “despite her hang-ups about marrying a doctor.”

Nonetheless, she accepts a date with Terry, and smooches him good in his car afterward. He tries to tell her that he’s falling in love with her, but she obtusely pretends she doesn’t understand what he’s saying, the tease. Then June’s disease relapses, and she becomes increasingly sick, demanding more and more of Tina’s time, so our nurse hasn’t any time for breaking hearts. Eventually June succumbs to her disease—another big surprise you will hate me for revealing—and Tina leaves the Derwent estate, heading home for a well-deserved vacation. And to watch the playoff game between Terry’s team and her brother’s. During the game, the camera pans to one brother’s surprise fiancée, a woman he had previously stated he would never marry, so all there is left to do is wait for the other brother to pop in and declare his troth, and this book is all wrapped up. And not a moment too soon. While not as out-and-out horrifying as the majority of this author’s books, Hockey Star Nurse is perfunctory and dull, and the only reason to read it is to be horrified by the dated attitudes about women and the utter disregard for a patient’s rights; June dies not ever knowing what disease she had. Probably not the best reasons to read a book, but that’s all I have to offer you.