Collecting Book

Art Colony Nurse

By Jane Converse, ©1969

It was all so simple … in the beginning. Handsome young Dr. Larry Rhodes wanted a capable nurse; Eileen Bonham, R.N., had all the qualifications. Eileen wanted romance with marital possibilities; Larry had all the qualifications. Simple. Storybook perfect … until the day Eileen discovered the Bohemian art colony on the California coast and nothing seemed duller than life with a successful, hard-working doctor, nothing more exciting than a free-swinging affair with a flamboyant artist. Suddenly Eileen found herself torn between the man and career she’d always dreamed of—and a thrilling, carefree adventure she’d never dared to imagine.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:

“Nobody bothered to warn me you were beautiful.”

REVIEW:

Eileen Bonham has taken a break from nursing in Los Angeles to spend a few weeks at her parents’ house in northern California, though her parents keep hoping she’ll stay for good. There are no good job prospects to keep her there, however, until local GP Dr. Larry Rhodes advertises for an office nurse. On the interview, she finds him hunky but a bit somber for her taste. Nonetheless she takes the job—well, after she learns Dr. Rhodes is single. After weeks at work, though, she becomes increasingly disenchanted, busy and interesting though the job may be, because Larry hasn’t asked her out yet.

In addition, she soon sees a side of him that she doesn’t particularly care for, when a family of hippies brings in their young son, who has fallen from a tree. Dr. Rhodes, disgusted with the young parents’ lifestyle, terrifies them by painting a horrific description of the lockjaw that will almost certainly ensue, he says, if young Tad Shearer hasn’t gotten his vaccinations. After a few calls to the boy’s pediatrician, it’s found that he’s up to date, but man! What a bummer! Eileen is not impressed with Larry’s deliberate cruelty to the parents, and when they do go out to dinner for the first time, they get into a heated discussion about whether the Shearers have any right to have children, since they are not financially stable and live in an art colony of dubious reputation and plumbing. The date, needless to say, is a fiasco, and Eileen decides that Larry is a rigid square who thinks that only an orderly life is worth living.

Curiously, however, Eileen, chides herself for having “fallen in love with a man whose basic thinking was so at odds with her own,” and she continues to believe that she loves him, even though through many of the ensuing pages it is quite clear that she doesn’t like him one bit. She’s hoping that “some restricting bonds inside him would break, he would sweep her into his arms, and she would reach to the warm, relaxed core of a human being named Larry Rhodes who had only been pretending he was made of wood.” It seems imprudent to wait around hoping that someone you dislike will suddenly change into someone you do like, but maybe that’s just me.

Also curiously, Eileen deliberately decides to do something that would piss off the good doctor: hang out with the Shearers at the art colony. There she meets another irritating ass, Nick Hamilton. Tall and handsome, he has a tendency to sport dandyish outfits such as a white Nehru jacket trimmed with gold braid, tightly fitted black Edwardian trousers, and gray suede boots. Spotting an unattached female with a steady paycheck, Nick proceeds to woo the gullible Eileen. Though she spends many ensuing evenings canoodling with Nick on a picnic blanket in the hills, she is still having Larry over for dinner on occasion despite the fact that she dreads his boring conversation, and again, she chastises herself that “this was the man she was supposedly in love with.” So when Nick announces to the entire colony that the pair are engaged—without having consulted Eileen—“it seemed right, somehow,” and she goes along with it. Really, not one thing in this woman’s love life makes any sense to me at all.

Eventually she tells off Larry, letting him know what a straitlaced dullard he is and that his condescending attitude toward the artists is appalling. Unexpectedly, Larry seems to take her words to heart and soon is inviting her to carnivals and otherwise trying to be less stultifying. She instantly warms to him, but decides that it’s “important to let him know that she liked him (loved him?) for himself, for what he was, and not only for what he was trying, in the hope of winning her approval, to be.” When she’s just spent the last five chapters sneering at how tiresome he is? Then, when Larry proposes, she accepts—now to quickly call it off with Nick before Larry finds out!

It’s just not to be, however, because a tapestry weaver whom Nick threw over for Eileen attempts suicide, and when Larry is called out to save the woman, Eileen’s double engagement comes to light. Eileen has written her letter of resignation to the doctor and is about to clear town when Mrs. Shearer comes to her in the middle of the night—there’s an outbreak of hepatitis at the art colony! Eileen rushes out to the encampment, leaving word with Larry’s love-sick secretary to let him know what’s going on. Needless to say, the jealous secretary fails to pass on the message, leaving Eileen to manage copious infectious bodily fluids alone for almost a day before the situation is revealed. Then the two are working side by side for almost a week to cure everyone, and when it’s over, Larry has a new-found appreciation for the hippies and the art they produce, and for Eileen as well, so she gets her man in the end, after all.

I never understood Eileen’s feelings for either Larry or Nick, so it’s difficult to find any satisfaction with this book. The artist colony and the hippies are a fun bit of cultural time-travel—their vocabularly in particular—and of course the title of this book is pretty superior, so there may be some reason to pick it up. But if you’re looking for a satisfying story, you will not find it in this art colony.

Nurse on Nightmare Island

By Lois Eby, ©1966
Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti

Helen Barris was a conscientious nurse. When she surmised from his letters that Dr. Harvey Jenkins, the world-famous physicist who had been her patient at the hospital, was on the verge of a relapse, she went immediately to Morago Island, the ancient pirate hideout where he was recuperating. She knew her mission of mercy would be incredibly difficult. She couldn’t know that before the weird affair was over, lives would be lost—and her own life would be magically changed by an overpowering romance.

GRADE: D

REVIEW:

The very fact that I was unable to find one single sentence in 222 pages that I felt worthy of sharing as a Best Quote says quite a bit about Nurse on Nightmare Island. The island wasn’t actually a nightmare, and truth be told, the book doesn’t really qualify as a nightmare, either; it’s more of a complete snooze. But with the aid of a sharp pin, I managed to keep myself awake for most of it, so here we go: Nurse Helen Barris has been convinced by a series of letters from former patient and physicist Harvey Jenkins that he is hallucinating a six-year-old boy Tony, who is the exact age and has the same name as his own dead son! So she takes what appears to be an endless vacation and jets to Moraga Island in the Antilles to attempt to lure Dr. Jenkins back to the hospital. But when she arrives, it turns out that there actually is a six-year-old boy named Tony living on the island! Like every other situation in this book, a whole lot of angst and pages turn out to be a non-issue.

Now that she’s found that Jenks is actually sane, she spends her days posing as a model while he paints portraits of her with tropical flowers in her hair. Oh, and she gets a job as a nanny to the boy, who has been kidnapped from his mother, Cecily, and her second husband, Rupert Manning, by his father, Philip La Rorsch. Philip owns most of the island, and tells Helen that he kidnapped Tony only because Rupert dangled the boy over a balcony five flights up, which he learned from the boy’s nurse, Janna, who went with Cecily and Tony after the divorce and yet remained loyal to Philip. Got all that?

Cecily arrives on the island claiming that Philip has tried to murder her three times—but she will risk her life to be near her boy, because she’s so devoted to him. She turns up at lunch and drags the painter and his model off for a picnic—where a poisonous snake is found, and killed, and assumed to have been planted there solely to murder Cecily. There’s a lot of to-doing about the dead snake when Cecily’s lawyer sends three men to obtain it as evidence of Philip’s evil deeds, but it has gone missing from the spot where it was buried after its untimely demise. Cecily is convinced that this is because Helen told Philip of the incident and he absconded with the late reptile. If all this sounds like a fairly entertaining scenario, let me disabuse you of that idea: This whole affair just comes off as labored and dull.

This isn’t the only attempt on Cecily’s life; we also get to witness her tumble from her hotel balcony after the rail has been vandalized, but she is not badly injured because she manages to grab some vines on her descent. Helen witnesses this incident and then spends a day caring for Cecily, who campaigns mightily for Helen’s alliance. But Helen is torn about who to believe. Philip, who glowers and shouts a lot, tells her that Cecily is staging the whole thing so as to coerce him into giving her a big divorce settlement. Helen’s boyfriend, a real estate venturer and gadabout named Doug whom she met on the island, is convinced that Philip is the bad guy, but Helen is trying to remain impartial. Doug is waiting for his business partner to turn up so they can seal a deal to buy land for a new hotel. When that’s done with, he wants to run off with Helen, because he feels she is in mortal danger living in Philip’s house. But she’s not sure about marrying Doug. While three dates don’t seem like all that much to base your decision to spend the rest of your life with someone, that’s not Helen’s real worry—she is concerned about what will happen to Tony if she leaves.

Adding to the tortuous plot is the fact that Tony’s nurse Janna, who also fears she is going to be killed, has holed herself up in a locked room in a cave under the island. Helen is trying to get Janna to come out, and when she finally gets into Janna’s room, the nanny’s wrists have been slashed, and Helen is concerned that it wasn’t a suicide attempt but a murder attempt! Fortunately, Helen’s fast actions save Janna’s life, and she’s so speedy about it that she still has time to pack Cecily and Tony off with Doug and his newly arrived business partner on Doug’s boat and then impersonate Cecily at a meeting on a cliff that evening with someone whom she assumes will be the murderous Philip.

It turns out that it wasn’t really Philip who was trying to kill Cecily, but the plot was so transparent that I was not at all surprised at the ending—except by the last few pages, when Helen, recuperating at Philip’s house after the real killer finally succeeds in offing Cecily and in bashing Helen unconscious, declares that Philip has been tortured for years by his suspicion that someone poisoned his mother, driving her mad and inspiring her to dig up this tree on the patio with her bare hands just before she died babbling about Heaven and death. Helen has uncovered the secret behind all that in a book about trees—I am not kidding—and now that she’s clued Philip in, he “was whole again,” and did you also pick up on the fact that he is now also, conveniently, a widow, and so free to marry again? Again, this may sound amusing in synopsis, but in Lois Eby’s leaden prose, it’s only inane.

This book poses as a Gothic story, but the house is not much of a character in this book and is, in fact, “a warm house, a loving house.” In addition to posing as Gothic, the book also wants to be a mystery and a romance—and it ends up zero for three. The writing is so perfunctory and uninteresting that I cannot begin to imagine what made the publishers think it deserved more than 200 pages. The plot is contrived and confusing, yet nonetheless manages to be completely predictable. We would actually be better off if the book was spectacularly bad, because an epic fail would at least engender some strong emotion—but the only emotion this book gave me was a mild bewilderment.