Collecting Book

Nurse on Paradise Isle

Gently bending palm trees, an untouched island paradise—it all seemed so perfect when pretty Nurse Leslie Sheridan accepted her first assignment. She was to be the only medical attendant to a construction project on an isolated island near Tahiti. But the swaying palms only camouflaged the rampant tensions of the island. Even with a temperament to match her red hair, Nurse Leslie found she was no match for roughneck contruction workers and revenge-seeking natives. But the peril most unbearable for the young nurse was the threat of losing to a native beauty her new found love for big Jim Cobalt, the construction boss. Would the irony of the island named Paradise forever haunt her dreams of love and duty?

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:

“Sometimes she wished that he were not so fircely masculine. Such rugged vigor was like a magnet to a woman … and she was a woman.”

“Sweetheart, I could hardly keep my mind on the blueprints from seeing you priss around in that fluffy white uniform.”

REVIEW:

Leslie Sheridan has left her job at Bayshore Hospital in San Francisco to take a temporary position on a remote island—named Coral Reef Island, by the way, not Paradise Island—where construction on a new hotel, the Tongahiti, is underway. The Tongahiti will be the island’s first hotel, transforming it into a tourist mecca, much to disloyal Leslie’s dismay, and she’ll be tending to any construction workers injured on the job as well as any islanders who might need her assistance. But construction boss Jim Cobalt is none to happy about her arrival because, as he snaps at her, “I’m going to have to keep an eye glued to every workman on the job who’s got a wandering eye. Frankly, you’re just too darned pretty.” Leslie just laughs this off and goes for a swim.

And goes about establishing herself not just as a good nurse but really, owing to the fact that she has the most medical training on the island (there’s also a local nurse who is a smart, comptetent professional, but apparently not as schooled as Leslie), more of a nurse practitioner. She befriends many of the locals, all except one—Luva, “the half-breed” daughter of an American and a local island woman, who is “something like a wild animal—one who’ll never be tamed.” Luva was educated at an English school in Fiji, where she picked up “a slight French accent,” but despite the fact that she is one of the very few islanders with a formal education, she is the only character in the book who can’t put together a grammatically correct sentence: “They lewk for you een your clinic, mademoiselle. Or ees you always at Jeem Cobalt’s quarters?” Luva is hankering in a big way for Jeem, but it’s a doomed affair—her half-Polynesian heritage means she could never return to the U.S. as his wife: “He would have to give up his friends and his family, and be an outcast.” And if they had children, “they would be part Polynesian and part American. That would be the real tragedy.” In the meantime, though, while he’s on Coral Reef Island, Luva can hang all over Jim and make Leslie see green. But not for long—soon she and Jim are smooching on the beach at a luau and dating seriously.

But this is not enough for dopey Leslie, because Jim Cobalt “never had told her right out that he loved her,” and he hasn’t proposed marriage in the months she has been seeing him. What else could that mean except that “he had made love to her and now that the season’s end had come, he was going to say goodbye as easily as the wind veers.” So she offers her resignation to the owner of the hotel, effective as of the hotel’s opening night, now just a week or two away. Will she actually have an honest conversation with “the only man she wanted to love her,” or will she “go on pretending” that she doesn’t care about him? Well, there’s nothing like a disaster to bring two people together—in this case, the hotel burning down, which we foresaw from Chapter 1, when the local nurse tells Leslie that the locals resent the hotel “immensely”: “When the hotel is built and people swarm like flies over their small kingdom, their resentment might erupt, like a volcano.” It turns out that ole Jim was keeping a secret from Leslie: the fact that he was married, though his divorce just came through three days ago, and it was this that prevented him from telling her that he loved her—though leaving him completely free, apparently, to fool around with her all summer. (And lest we worry for Jim’s virginity, he tells her that he and his wife never “lived together.”) “Oh, Jim, you should have told me the truth,” declares the hypocritical Leslie, and they walk off into the sunset, “their backs to the smoldering ashes of the Tongahiti.”

This is a throwaway book, curious only for its stereotypical prejudice against the “indolent and shiftless” natives, though it is odd that the only native character who is neither dignified nor honest is Luva—perhaps it’s the taint of her American blood that makes her so scheming and ignorant. Leslie has some admirable qualities, and is in general a strong and capable character—except when it comes to her boyfriend, which is just irritating. The book leaves a few loose ends, like what is going to happen to the hotel—and the island along with it—not to mention the local nurse, in love with a white man she can never marry (though Jim and Leslie nonchalantly agree that “she will die of a broken heart”). Really, there’s not much to say about this book, which I guess is the most telling fact of all.

Arctic Nurse

By Dorothy Dowdell, ©1966
Cover illustration by Allan Kass

When beautiful, dark-haired Lori Waters came home to Alaska, she was escaping the memory of heartbreak. She had fallen in love with young Dr. Cliff Randolph, handsome, brilliant, and devil-may-care. But she had lost him, and now she desperately plunged into the excitement and challenge of her work as head nurse on difficult, peril-filled medical missions to distant Alaskan villages. Then, one day, the new doctor arrived. As he descended from the airplane, Lori felt her heart skip a beat, then start throbbing violently. It was Cliff—who now said he loved her. But could she believe him, with his mocking smile and ironic gaze? Could she trust this man who had once so cruelly betrayed her?

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“As they drove back to the Littner home, she half-wished that Bob would carry her off like a cave man and end the matter once and for all.”

REVIEW:
Lori Waters is a bit unusual in VNRNs in that she is biracial, half Indian and half white. She was “raised white” by her mother, but her Indian heritage manifests itself in an ivory amulet around her neck that she spends a lot of time fondling throughout the book. She lives in Fairbanks, Alaska, with her grandfather, Chief Whitewaters, who is college-educated and holds an important position with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. (Her parents are, as is common amongst VNRN heroines, dead; her mother died of cancer when Lori was in nursing school and her father was killed in the Korean War.) She works as the nurse on a series of clinics run in the remote areas around Fairbanks, which she reaches by plane with doctor and pilot Bob Littner. She is crucial to these missions because her grandfather taught her many Indian languages, so she can converse with the natives.

Bob is a childhood friend of Lori’s who is increasingly putting the pressure on her to marry him. She feels very torn about this: She thinks he would make a great husband, but her heart’s not in it. You see, when she was in training in Seattle, she fell madly in love with upper-crust Dr. Clifford Randolph. He dated her for a year—but after one hot and heavy date, she returned to the nurse’s dorm to find a newspaper left anonymously on her pillow with an announcement of Cliff’s engagement to a society princess. Now, a year later, she’s still not over him.

So when one of the usual Alaskan MDs is away for the summer and a new doc from Seattle arrives to take his place, you should not be at all surprised to find that it is Dr. Randolph who steps off the plane. He tells Lori that his engagement ended last week by mutual consent—“it was one of those deals where we had always known each other,” Cliff tells her, describing, curiously, the same situation as Lori and Bob’s. Upon finding himself single, he has made tracks to Alaska to see her. Indeed, he soon proposes to Lori, and though she is a bit wary of him, she accepts. This means that she is going to have to leave Alaska for Seattle, perhaps never to see her grandfather again. Chief Whitewaters is vehemently against the marriage because, as he tells Lori, “Only you can carry out my dream to better the lot of our people.” Although, since Lori is planning to quit working “for good” when she marries, I’m not really sure how much of a difference Lori is going to make.

It’s the usual formula, with Bob begging Lori to reconsider and moping around a lot, even coming to blows with Cliff, until Lori is finally persuaded that Cliff is—duh—the wrong man. This occurs when there is a major earthquake in the north, coincidentally occurring the day before Lori and Cliff are to fly to Hawaii to meet up with his family and get married. Lori, Cliff, and Bob fly off to the hinterlands, where they spend 24 hours patching people up. But then Cliff, increasingly anxious about the fact that further delay will make him and Lori late for the party his mother has arranged for them in Honolulu, arranges for them to fly with a batch of wounded patients on a Red Cross plane to Fairbanks, where they can catch their jet to Hawaii. Lori, aghast that Cliff would rank his own personal interests first during a major disaster, puts him on the Red Cross plane, alone. “I guess I’m far more Indian than I realize,” she tells him. “I can’t go off and leave them.”

When the disaster is laid to rest and they’re back in Fairbanks, Lori and Bob are having coffee in the hospital—the VNRN romantic equivalent of a candlelight bistro in Paris—when she tells him, “I guess I’m not in love with Cliff after all,” and suddenly Bob is making her eyes light up in a new way. It’s a bit perplexing and way too pat, given the earlier descriptions of how she cried her eyes out for a year after Cliff dumped her and her hand-wringing about how, though Bob is otherwise so perfect for her, she does not love him. But I shouldn’t have been surprised; this entire book is perfunctory and automatic, with little of interest to keep the pages turning.