Disaster Area Nurse
By Arlene Hale
The thunder roared and crashed about them—but Nurse Lynn Lawrence felt that the wildness of the storm was rivaled by the frantic racing of her own thoughts. She cast a glance at her fiancé, Greg Avery. Beside him, huddled helplessly, was the pretty Dawn Evans. There was no doubt that Greg was paying a great deal of attention to comforting Dawn—too much, Lynn thought. But there was another in the group of flood-marooned strangers. He was handsome, and smiled at Lynn in a way that sent the heart fluttering. Surely things would right themselves once they got back to civilization. But in a disaster like this, a short time could lead to a broken-hearted eternity.
GRADE: C
BEST QUOTES:
“I’m not very hot for hardware.”
REVIEW:
I had assumed that Lynn Lawrence would be a public service nurse who manned the battle stations during a disaster, à la Disaster Nurse, but no, Lynn is actually just a nurse who gets caught in a disaster. She and her fiancé Greg Avery are taking a bus to Lynn’s rural home, where Greg is to finally meet her parents—and he is none too happy about it, either—when ferocious rains cause the rivers to flood, stranding Lynn, Greg, four other passengers, the bus driver, and a passing motorist at a nearby farmhouse. Completely surrounded by water, the motley crew tries to make the best of things. Well, not all of them: Greg is whining and crabby at the outset. Actually, Greg’s downfall is not entirely unsuspected, as he’s one of these boyfriends about whom few compliments can be paid even from the opening pages, where he is billed as intense, nervous, skeptical, impatient, and resentful. One can easily see why Lynn wants to marry him.
He’s not the only one who can’t keep it together: Poor little Dawn Evans spends most of her time shrieking or sobbing, and only Greg seems to be able to comfort her. When Dawn is unable to get to her bedroom alone, it’s Greg who accompanies her, while Lynn watches, “an alarm bell ringing in her head.” When Lynn follows them a few minutes later, she finds Greg holding the weeping Dawn in his arms, puts Dawn to bed with a glass of water and an aspirin, then hauls Greg off by the ear for a few words. He just seems pleased that she’s jealous. “Sometimes you’re so self-sufficient, I wonder what you can see in me,” he tells her. Uh oh.
Hypocrisy soon unfolds in spades when the motorist they’re stranded with, Marshall Davis, starts trotting around after Lynn, grabs her in the hallway and only lets go when Lynn insists—but soon he’s back, kissing her and telling her that he’s in love with her, which is certainly farther than Greg has gotten with Dawn. Though she feels “she was already throwing her pride to the winds where Greg was concerned, almost begging him to concentrate on her, to forget another woman,” at the same time when Marshall corners her again, “this time when he kissed her she was too tired to fight him.”
As this love quadrangle is unfolding, the 7-year-old daughter of the couple who live in the farmhouse, little Diane Wilson, has inconveniently decided this is the time to come down with appendicitis. Lynn attempts to “scatter the infection” with cold packs to the abdomen and the four remaining aspirins in the house (too bad she wasted one on the hysterical Dawn!), but those of us with a nodding acquaintance with modern medicine will not be surprised to learn this doesn’t work. Eventually Lynn, who has been keeping mum for some bizarre reason about the seriousness of Diane’s condition, confesses to Marshall how sick the child actually is, and Marshall sets about building a boat so as to go for help. Needless to say, his desperate voyage is made in the pitch black of night and involves encounters with large floating trees and a ducking or two, but soon a helicopter is landing in the back yard to take the girl off to the hospital. The next day the boats come to rescue them, and back in civilization, Lynn and Greg decide to end their engagement—but not to worry, by the time the day is over, there are two new ones to announce.
This book isn’t terrible, but the double standard Lynn operates under is just perplexing. I was sorry that our heroine, an outstanding surgical nurse (are there any other kind in a VNRN?), didn’t just do the appendectomy herself, like in Wings for Nurse Bennett, but our heroine isn’t that strong. The marooned-on-an-island plot has lots of promise—just ask any of the innumerable books, movies, and TV shows that have done well with it—but Arlene Hale is too pedantic to score any real success with it. The story unfolds automatically, with little suspense or excitement, so there’s really not much to be gained from reading it. With a title as fantastic as Disaster Area Nurse, the disappointment is all the worse.
Disaster Nurse
By Peggy O’More, ©1968Mina Anne was troubled. She had loved Paul ever since the accident that had brought him to Cutler Hospital. But—one thought turned her days into torment. How could she love a man and still despise his outlook on life? How could she marry a man who so violently disapproved of the job she was doing?
GRADE: C-
BEST QUOTES:
“Put two girls and a can opener in the kitchen, and you have a feast.”
“For a physician, you are really very uninformed in a certain field of diagnosis.”
REVIEW:
Mina Anne Richards is, in addition to one of the more awkwardly named VNRN heroines I’ve met, a public health nurse. She’s concerned about a population of migrant workers who are living without basic plumbing or running water, and now they’re about to be evicted from their squatting grounds, apparently because “the camp was a veritable breeding ground for communicable diseases.” You could say the same about hospitals and elementary schools, but whatever.
Mina Anne’s boyfriend, attorney C. Paul Parker, is pressing her to give up her job and marry him, but she’s not completely convinced. Paul is particularly earnest in his proposal because the president of a large company will give Paul’s firm his business but only if Paul marries Mr. Chalder’s daughter—a very peculiar arrangement in a number of ways—and Paul will be off the hook if he’s already married, he explains to Mina Anne. When she objects, he responds, “Once we’re married, I’ll be able to show you where your perspective is out of focus.” Curiously, Mina Anne neither flings a skillet at his head nor shoves him out the door, but continues to consider, no matter how tepidly, his proposal.
The book gives us a lot of back-and-forth between Mina Anne and Paul, and even some mildly interesting if dated debates about welfare—one poor family with only one pair of shoes between the two children refuses to accept welfare, and Mina Anne debates whether this is admirable or “false pride.” A casual dinner or two with Dr. Louis Marquand, her boss, and then, at the book’s halfway point, it begins to snow. When Mina Anne and her roommate Joan, trapped indoors for several days by the blizzard, begin to snap at each other, wise medico Mina Anne chalks it up to dehydration: “The department warned us of the possibility.”
But then, even worse, the weather warms, and now it’s raining. And raining. The river is rising, and Mina Anne sets out in her galoshes and mackintosh to rescue, well, pretty much everyone: a man with an infected cut on his arm, a farmer and his family, a cattle rancher and his family, the entire migrant camp, a woman having a baby, a family trapped in a grove of trees, Paul’s parents. Just when you think we’re going to have a minute for a sandwich and a nap, someone is tapping on Mina Anne’s shoulder again and she’s off in the chopper with Dr. Louie. Sixty-plus long pages later, it’s finally over, and suddenly Paul has fallen madly for roommate Joan, whose “love would be an ever-burning searchlight on the roiled waters.” Even worse, a marginal character takes Mina Anne in his arms out of nowhere, and she agrees to allow him “to take care of her, not let her take care of him,” if you think you can take it.
Peggy O’More Blocklinger, whose work we have seen before under the pen name Jeanne Bowman, is not my favorite author, which should not surprise the regulars. In Disaster Nurse, she manages to do a little better than usual, which is still, clearly, not all that great. Her condescending psychobabble is slightly less prevalent, but we’re regularly treated to bon mots such as, “Premonitions are usually based on logical deductions distorted by emotions,” “Paul’s poverty was restricted vision,” and “This time I am thinking of our state inventory tax, of merchants buying heavily for the Christmas trade and being stuck with merchandise and having to pay taxes on what the weather kept them from selling.”
O’More’s main theme about poor migrant workers could hold some interest, but instead of making her points by showing them through her story, she hectors us with long pedantic lectures. When Joan ponders why the migrant families don’t take more pride in their admittedly temporary homes, instead letting them get so run down, Mina Anne climbs up on her soapbox: “I think it is an inner rebellion at their status. They can’t pinpoint the cause; it’s too ephemeral, ever-changing. So they rebel against their fellow man.” Then Joan jumps on the bandwagon: “They believe not: ‘The world owes me a living’ but rather, ‘The world owes me the right to earn a living.’ And when they can’t earn it, they don’t blame an impersonal escalating automation coinciding with population explosion; they blame those who have managed to maintain at least the appearance of economic stability.” Thanks, Professors, for elucidating these contemporary sociopychological tensions. I feel so much better now.
I’ve never met a Peggy O’More book I could recommend—unless it was so catastrophically bad that it could be worth a peek, like slowing down when you drive past a car accident (I’m looking at you, Conflict for Nurse Elsa). This book is neither good nor bad enough to bother with, however, so you’re best leaving this disaster to fend for itself.
Copyright © C-buk2016
