Collecting Book

Queen’s Nurse

Whatever he wanted, Muir usually got! Even before she knew who he was, Jess Mawney learned that Muir Forester was unusually strong willed. Now she was practically living on the doorstep of this man—a man she might reasonably have hoped never to see again. But Jess soon changed her mind about him. She wished that Muir Forester wanted her in the same determined way that was making him fight for the love of the beautiful and delicate Liane.

GRADE: A-

REVIEW:

Queen’s nurse, it turns out, does not mean nurse to the Queen, but rather a district nurse. I was a little disappointed by that, hoping this might be some roaring bodice ripper of a nurse novel, but I have to say that was almost the only disappointment in store for me once I turned past the cover of Jane Arbor’s very neat little book. Jess Mawney, age 24, is leaving the city to practice amongst the country folk—but first she must attend the auction of her recently deceased father’s estate. He had instructed in his will that everything be sold and the proceeds given to Jess, which was mostly fine with her, except there is one piece of furniture she had wanted to keep and now is forced to bid, along with the public at large, for the right to own it.

Enter the uppity rich gentleman, who is stuck with a flat just outside the auction house. While he waits for his car to be fixed, he is regaled by the mechanic of the story of the new orphan with no resources other than the proceeds from this auction and her work as a nurse. So he grandly strolls in and instantly recognizes the 17th century Welsh dresser as the only item of quality, bidding relentlessly on it—far outstripping Jess’s meager pocketbook—until he has won. After the auction, she attempts to buy it from him, but apparently this is a shameless thing to do, and he rudely brushes her off.

Imagine their surprise when, ensconced in her new position weeks later, Jess calls on the housekeeper of local squire, who has twisted her ankle—and they meet again! Muir Forester is a Mr. Rochester type, alternating kind and cold, but he and Jess soon become friends. Even more so because an orphaned young woman, Liane Hart, is a lonely waif who has been taken in by him, and wants very much to be Jess’s friend. Liane’s dead father was a very good friend of Muir’s, and Liane believes that Muir intends to marry her, despite the fact that she is not in love with him and 15 years his junior. In fact, after the housekeeper’s son, Peter, arrives home from the war in Korea, Liane quickly tumbles for that young man instead. Jess, of course, has fallen in love with Muir, but is determined to keep it a secret, knowing of his deep love for Liane. Oh, what a tangled web we weave!

There are a few additional plot lines to keep us entertained: the local busybody who is determined to see Jess fail, the young woman who wants to be a veterinarian, Jess’s would-be suitor from the city who pops in now and again to roil the waters of true love, the explosion at the beet factory. But really it’s a fairly classic setup, with many obstacles in the way of our star-crossed lovers, and every fresh misunderstanding between them—which we clearly recognize as such—brings on a pained wince as we wonder how they are going to find their way out of this one. The only disappointment was the final scene, when the pair unwind all their errors of judgment and learn the truth, which was a bit anticlimactic in the telling. But no matter: Overall this was a very good story, with humor, a thoroughly admirable heroine, and good writing. If the love interest was a bit severe for my taste, the ending too bland, and the writing not campy enough to yield any nuggets for the Best Quotes section, these are minimal quibbles that I can easily forgive when the rest of the book is this enjoyable.

Young Doctor Kirkdene

Doctor Kirkdene had made it quite plain that as a rising young medic he considered domestic entanglements and distractions as hindrances. But Nurse Lindy couldn’t help hoping that in spite of all his theorizing he would eventually come to love her!

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“You mean, you actually make beds, wash patients, do dreadful terrifying dressings, watch gory operations without fainting?”

“Career women ought to marry docile men—otherwise they are heading for disaster.”

REVIEW:

Nurse Anne Linden—Lindy throughout this book—is hopelessly in love with Dr. Kirkdene, who has no first name and is just known as Kirk. But the man, gorgeous and self-confident, is a shameless cad: “His conquests were legion; hearts fell before him like nine-pins.” But one night Lindy, off in a back room for a sanctioned nap while on night duty (and how I wish such a humane break were more widespread), is followed by the flirtatious Kirk. No sooner has he planted a wet one on her when the door flings open and the night supervisor catches them in the clinch. As if that isn’t bad enough, word gets out that Kirk has left his post in the ED, and when an emergency came in, the nurse there was unable to find him and the patient survived only through her quick thinking.

With the two of them about to be tossed not just out on the street but to the metaphoric wolves, Kirk does what any enterprising, ambitious young man would do in similar circumstances: He lies, telling the head of the hospital that he had just proposed to Lindy when they were discovered. This makes everything all right and saves them both—but now they have to pretend they’re engaged.

And pretend they do, through an extensive 192 pages. Lindy is angry at the sham, secretly wishing it were real, watching Kirk with alternating fury at his coldly shameless ambition to nail a post at a new pediatrics ward and reverential awe at his complete and selfless devotion to his patients, to the point that he risks his career to help them. There are a few side plots, but this is essentially the book in a nutshell. It may seem simple—in truth, it is—but Elizabeth Hoy is enough of a storyteller to make this little story worth reading.

After Elizabeth Hoy’s outstanding Nurse Tennant, I went shopping for more of her books. Young Doctor Kirkdene does not live up to its superlative sister, but it’s certainly better than the other title I found, Doctor Garth. The writing is easy and charming, with occasional pretty phrases like, “Sensibly she reminded herself of these things, while her singing heart went its own wild way.” And few VNRN writers can make you feel so acutely the wretchedness of a young woman pining over an unrequited love—she pulls me back to miseries I haven’t experienced since high school. It must be admitted that the length of this book does get a bit tedious, and I found myself wishing the miserable pair could just have one honest conversation and put a quick end to it—indeed, the end, when that finally does occur, was a bit of a letdown. But all things considered, this is a rarity among VNRNs, a novel that actually hurts, and so I happily suggest you make an appointment at your earliest convenience with Young Doctor Kirkdene.

Nurse Carol

Carol Gabrielson, one of the prettiest student nurses at Riverview Memorial, was about to be graduated when Dr. Steve Barrett returned to the hospital to be resident physician—and her own boss. Steve had helped her through her first student days, and now that he was back, her world seemed wonderfully complete. At least it was until she learned he was to marry lovely Angela Ashby, daughter of the head of Riverview. Carol threw herself into her work with increased dedication, but despite her demanding job and the attentions of other attractive men, she couldn’t stop thinking about Steve—somehow he didn’t look like a man in love, but a man troubled by a dark secret …

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“I’m having a nervous breakdown, or perhaps I’m falling in love. The symptoms are similar, aren’t they?”

“Honey, your figure is something you read about in the ads.”

“If you weren’t so darn pretty, I’d be mad at you.”

“Maybe it looked that way, but she wasn’t trying the old trick of domesticity and good food to get a man away from another girl.”

“All women are alike when it comes to men. There’s only one.”

“You think coffee can solve all the problems of the universe.”

REVIEW:

Carol Gabrielson has such a cumbersome last name that the staff calls her “Miss G,” and one recurring joke is the string of patients who always manage to mangle it. The 1950s were such simple times; what would they have made of Zbigniew Brzezinski? But somehow Carol manages to stagger along under the weight of such a burden. She’s doing better at book’s open because her childhood friend, Dr. Steve Barrett, has come back to the hospital after a year’s absence, about which he will say nothing, and not only because no one, including his dear friend Carol, ever seems to have tried asking him where he was. She’s just graduated from the nursing school, and has started working as a private duty nurse because she wasn’t asked to join the staff, though everyone wanted her and is very upset that she wasn’t. It turns out that the chief of staff’s daughter, who is maneuvering to marry Steve and is jealous of his brotherly attentions to Carol, somehow managed to block her hire. It does make me concerned for the hospital’s future that they let a non-employee barely out of her teens make these sorts of decisions.

But Carol lands on her feet when she takes an apartment with fellow nurse Lora Breck, a mopey sort who appears unstable and is given to staring off into space and saying things like, “Love can—can make you go a little crazy.” We watch the young ladies renovate their new home into a pleasant retreat complete with a parakeet named Pip that sings songs and talks—he’s quite a parakeet! From here they set off for this job and that job, Carol all the while trying to fend off the wealthy, persistent cad Bill Lennox, who keeps insisting that she marry him. One of her patients is the difficult Mrs. Perrin, who after a few days of wearing Carol to rags takes a terrible turn. Her son Andrew is called in from San Francisco—and he turns out to have been Lora’s fiancé at one time, but Lora had broken the engagement because his domineering mother objected to the match. Though Andrew tries to win Lora back, Lora plans to marry another man she’s been seeing, a worthless check who is minutes away from being indicted on fraud charges.

Carol, meanwhile, is growing increasingly jealous of the catty Angela, who snubs Carol at every opportunity. The pair’s engagement is finally announced in the papers, and Carol is forced to admit to herself that—gasp!—she’s in love with Steve! But I shouldn’t poke too much fun, because here the “shocking” revelation that has been clear to us from page one actually plays out with sincerity and comes across as far less contrived as it does in most other VNRNs.

I need say no more about the plot, as it plays out predictably. Even the reason for Steve’s disappearance is something you probably guessed at. But if it is obvious, I was relieved to find that author M.M. Welch managed to find a different plot here, as the other two books I have read, Nurses Marry Doctors and Country Nurse, shared the same one. And it’s a pleasant read: There are the occasional witticisms along the way, such as when Steve asks Carol, “I suppose you’d call that—er, contraption on your head a hat, or wouldn’t you?” and she replies, “If it isn’t, somebody gypped me out of ten dollars and tax.” The gentle, amiable air of most VNRNs from the 1950s, including Ms. Welch’s prior two, pervades this book as well, and Carol’s comings and goings are enjoyable to watch. Even if it won’t land on the Best Novels list on January 1, 2015, you could do a lot worse than spend an afternoon with Nurse Carol.

Down East Nurse

Cover illustration by Martin Koenig

Lovely, city-bred Claudia Snowden came to Maine to nurse her aging aunt—isolated in a remote New England village. Expecting to find an old-fashioned doctor using outmoded methods, Claudia found herself working instead with young, handsome Dr. Adams—who was as dedicated as the top-notch physicians she had worked with in the city… so dedicated that Claudia apparently could not tear his attention away from his work to herself. Should she abandon all hope of ever reaching this aloof doctor and say yes to the man who really needed her?

GRADE: B+

REVIEW:

When we first meet Claudia Snowden, she’s standing in her rich great-aunt’s over-decorated living room in Reachwood, Maine, evaluating the contents for its monetary value (she doesn’t find it) and wondering, “Where was the Snowden money?” She’s been dispatched to this godforsaken backwoods to care for old Elizabeth Snowden, an aging spinster with pneumonia, by her widowed mother in the hope of securing a prominent position in the old bag’s will. But Claudia is not the best option for a special nurse. Upon graduating, she had decided that “she wanted no more of bedside nursing” and had gone to work for an upscale specialist where patients pass quickly through, and “there was no feeling of involvement of responsibility.” She is full of scorn for the country doctor who has not admitted Elizabeth to the hospital, particularly because “when she met a man for the first time, she took for granted that instantaneous spark of interest and admiration in his eyes”—and the look the good Dr. Adam Walker bestows upon Claudia is rather one of scorn. Indeed, he dresses her down for criticizing his treatment plan, telling her that “Miss Libby” has refused hospitalization.

So Claudia is stuck in Maine, caring for Aunt Elizabeth. The only friend she has in an unctuous unsuccessful self-proclaimed artist, Chase Carpenter, though “the challenge of capturing Dr. Walker’s interest still remained.” Chase is entertaining, but Claudia has her doubts about him: He leaves his two boys, ages 7 and 8, at home alone; he refuses to pay Dr. Walker’s bill when one of his sons was ill; he shows no compassion for the poor. But when he finally kisses her, she is “astonished” to find that she enjoyed it. “Had she fallen in love at last?” Uh, no, dear. That’s just your glands talking.

She’s certainly not impressed with the townsfolk, who, though they regularly drop by with a bucket of milk or a cold ham for Miss Libby, aren’t warm and embracing. Indeed, Claudia finds them taciturn and coldly aloof, narrow-minded and insular. So when Aunt Elizabeth is clearly on the mend, Claudia is about to blow town when Chase falls out of the loft where he paints and shatters his leg, requiring surgery. He refuses to go to the hospital, however, unless Claudia stays with him morning and night. To get him to go, she agrees, thereby cementing his idea that she is in love with him, loudly proclaiming to every patient and healthcare professional that Claudia is “his girl,” much to her chagrin. Oddly, however, she doesn’t seem able to correct him on that score. But at the short-staffed hospital she helps out when she’s not rubbing Chase’s back, and manages to make herself useful, even coming to feel attached to a few of the patients.

Then comes the unfolding of a commonplace plot: Adam is cold to Claudia because he thinks she’s engaged to Chase, and she can’t bring herself to tell him—or Chase—that she’s not. It’s one of the more idiotic turns, because it seems utterly ludicrous that she can’t just open her mouth and start talking. But the book is largely redeemed by the way it presents her gradual unbending into a less grasping and materialistic individual into a caring, conscientious professional and human being. I also appreciated that Adam is always depicted as an admirable person; his initial disdain for Claudia is well-deserved and we know it, so we are spared another VNRN convention that I cannot stand, the complete ass presented as a dreamboat. The ending hits a small rough patch, though, with a dark secret from Adam’s past revealed but never really resolved. If the writing gives us nothing for the Best Quotes category, it goes down easy, and overall this is a pleasant enough book.

Hurricane Nurse

Cover illustration by Harry Bennett

Betsy Stockwell had been taught in nurse’s training to maintain an impersonal attitude toward her patient. Only then could a nurse do her job efficiently. But when the patient was your own father, though, how could you be anything but deeply, personally involved? For Betsy’s father, the beloved Dr. Cal, had had a heart attack and after his treatment in the hospital it would be up to Betsy to see that he made a full recovery. Postponing her plans to marry young Doctor Paul Norbert, Betsy accompanies her father to Florida. They are met by a handsome young doctor who practices medicine with a cool competence that both amazes and infuriates Betsy. What is a man like Mark Everett doing in this Florida wilderness? As Betsy begins to learn the answer, she finds that her interest is more than a professional one …

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:

“Funny thing, how all you fellows beat your brains out and wear yourselves to a nub, trying to heal the human race of ills it’s not a bit anxious to lose. So why? The whole world’s about to go boom any day, so why bother to keep people strong and healthy?”

“A really top-notch nurse is half the battle in any operation.”

REVIEW:

In the first chapter, Nurse Betsy Stockwell is desperately in love with Dr. Paul Norbert, and they are planning to marry in a few months and move to northern Georgia, where Paul will become a small-town GP in order to pay off a school loan. But then Betsy’s father, surgeon Cal Stockwell, drops of a heart attack after finishing a complex kidney transplant, and has to go somewhere dull for six months to recover, and Betsy insists on going with him. Her separation from Paul is all devotion and sorrow: “I love you very much and couldn’t be untrue to you, ever, not even if I took lessons and tried for years and years,” Paul swears; for her part, Betsy vows, “It’s like that with me, forever and ever and until the day after!”

You’ll never guess what happens next. Upon arrival at Blue Heron Cay, Betsy meets Dr. Mark Everett, and the pair takes an instant and deep dislike to each other. This is, of course, a standard VNRN device, but to her credit, Ms. Gaddis meets this head-on. “Love and hate are such terribly strong emotions and only a hair’s breadth separates them,” explains Donna Pruitt, a young hussy who brazenly chases Mark, “and quite often when you think you hate somebody to pieces, you wake up some morning and realize you don’t hate him at all. In fact, you’re nuts about him!” (Betsy responds that it will be a cold day in hell when this happens, and Donna says what we’re all thinking—“Famous last words!”)

Betsy attempts to take Donna under her wing and educate the poor misinformed lass about the proper way to win a man: “You can’t win a man by pursuing him that way. Keep him guessing!” she says. Betsy belabors this philosophy through several chapters and repeated sermons: “I think you’re scaring the poor man half to death, going after him as shamelessly as you are. I have a hunch that he’s a man who likes to do the pursuing.” Donna remains blithely unmoved, and it is only Betsy who squirms as Donna links her arm through Mark’s.

Then the advertised hurricane strikes, and Betsy and Mark work tirelessly to operate on a four-year-old girl. In their fatigue afterward, Mark holds Betsy’s hand and calls her darling, but surely that’s the lateness of the hour talking! No, Mark insists, they’re in love and must marry, he says the following morning on the beach after the storm has blown itself out. Betsy trots out the specter of Paul, who is no longer described in the adulatory terms we’ve grown accustomed to. Now it’s all obligation: “Paul was counting on her. Depending on her,” she thinks. “She had given Paul her word, and she would live up to it as selflessly and surely as she had lived up to the Florence Nightingale oath.” Again, Ms. Gaddis seizes this metaphoric bull by the horns. “None of which is worth a damn, if you’re not in love with him,” Mark declares. “No man wants a wife who is secretly in love with another man. To go on with your marriage to him would be a wicked, outrageous thing.” But before he has time to carry the point with another smooch, who pulls up to the beach in a battered boat but Donna, and when Mark helps the petrified seadog ashore, Betsy is inanely convinced that Mark will marry Donna.

Suddenly Dr. Cal is well enough to leave the island, and Betsy bravely marches back to her job at the hospital, “as though she was walking toward some dreary future.” But she needn’t worry—before too long she catches Paul in the diet kitchen with another woman! She declares herself relieved to be free of Paul, but is still convinced that Mark is going to marry Donna, based on absolutely no evidence apart from Donna’s dogged ambition. Then Donna shows up in Atlanta, shopping for her bridal trousseau: She’s engaged, but—get this—to another man! Now, however, all Betsy’s lectures to Donna about “chasing” men come back to haunt her, and she tells her father that it would be “too humiliating” to tell Mark that she wants to marry him, after all. Furthermore, “her sense of duty” to a patient she is specialing, a wealthy teenager recovering from a drunk-driving accident, now makes it impossible to visit Mark; why she can’t telephone or write a letter is not explained.

But one evening she discovers that the old watchman has allowed her patient’s friends to sneak into the hospital. Totally out of character, Betsy explodes, telling Larry not just that she will have the watchman fired though he is unlikely to ever find another job again, given his advanced age and ignominious behavior, but also that the young father and husband that Larry smashed into was burned to death in the accident, a little fact that Larry’s parents had meant to keep from him. Larry becomes hysterical, and Betsy, with “icy coolness,” “without remorse that she had told him the truth,” shoots him up with a sedative that knocks him out for the rest of her night shift. “She was still blazingly angry at those spoiled brats who broke laws for thrills,” we are told, as if this somehow justifies her brutality. The next morning Larry’s mother lets Betsy go, but for reasons unrelated to her shocking unprofessionalism. This frees Betsy to fly to Blue Heron Cay, where she finds Mark roaming the beach and confesses, “I’m a shameless woman! I’m pursuing you relentlessly!” She tells him that “as soon as I could get myself fired by the patient I was tending, I came straight down here,” as if her scene with Larry was a deliberate, manipulative act meant to free her from her own responsibilities. Now, she decides, “from that moment on she would do whatever was his will.” I wonder what she will do when she decides that obligation is no longer convenient.

I was quite pleased with this book up until Betsy’s sudden transformation into a brutal enforcer of punishment to rule-breakers, even more troublesome when juxtaposed with her own “joyous” flouting of a social “rule” that she herself has repeatedly beaten Donna with. Betsy undergoes no reflection on her past attitudes that indicates any growth of character or explains such hypocrisy, and the scene of her unapologetically abusing Larry is actually shocking, offering nothing to the plot but a puzzling glimpse of cruelty in our heroine.

Until this point, however, this is a crackerjack book. We get sparkling characters like the quintessential sassy girlfriend, and Mark is a self-assured hero whose initial dislike of Betsy stems from her own snobbery of the island, not from the author’s wish to make him an ass one minute and devilishly attractive the next. The writing offers a self-awareness that is unusual in a VNRN and a welcome change, and we regularly meet enjoyable passages such as, “The boat moved like an elderly lady after a day’s hard shopping, determined to get home but not seeing the necessity of hurrying too much lest she wreck her dignity.” I will even dare to say that I found Mark and Betsy’s crucial scenes to be exciting, which is an extreme rarity in this genre. So though it has a serious flaw in the end, I can still heartily endorse this book as one of Ms. Gaddis’ best.

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.

Navy Nurse

Cover illustration by H. Kane

When lovely Nurse Pamela West was assigned to Lattimer Air Force Base to be part of the government’s space-training program, she realized that her new work would be both complex and demanding. Pam worked hand in hand with the first eight astronauts as they went through their rigorous training. The chief doctor on the base, tall handsome Steve Forrester was assisted by Sybil Paige, a very attractive young woman. Pam had a great deal of admiration for Dr. Forrester, but she was also aware of Sybil Paige’s hostility, although she could not understand it. Then someone warned her: “Don’t get involved with Steve Forrester. Others have and got nothing but trouble…”

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:

“Hey, angel, I’m ready to orbit anytime if heaven has gorgeous dolls like you waiting.”

“Whenever I stick a pin into you, I draw ice water instead of blood!”

“Other gals have made cow-eyes at the guy before—and got nothing but a hatful of trouble.”

“Delia looked wonderful—in spite of the fact that in a few weeks, the wife of the astronaut was due to ‘launch’ her third child.”

“She’s thirty-five, an old maid, and always will be.”

“His brief smile sent a glow of happiness through Pamela, from the top of her primly starched nurse’s cap down to the tips of her neatly shod feet.”

“I know I’m not supposed to burden him with my feminine foolishness.”

“It was good to have decisions made for her, she thought, as she snuggled down in the red leather bucket seat.”

REVIEW:

Pamela West is a lovely blonde from Connecticut when she lands at Lattimer Air Force Base, where she is to take up a new position packed with “the glamour and thrills of space nursing.” Not that she’ll actually be working in space, mind you—girls don’t go into outer space, silly!—but she’s assisting with some vague tests involving oscillators and G-force simulators on eight men who are being groomed for two spots on a spaceship that will soon be orbiting Earth.

She’s arrived with a broken heart, as her fiancé was killed in a plane crash, apparently just a month ago. But lo, upon arriving in Arizona, she meets Col. Dr. Steve Forrester, and meets up with Barney Steele, the man who talked her and Johnny out of eloping a week before his fatal crash and coincidentally is now one of the astronaut candidates. But she’s not had her first shower after arriving on base before “curious excitement stirred her. It wasn’t just that Steve was tall or handsome or competent and admirable in his profession. It was something chemical, perhaps—or something magical, induced by the spangled desert sky that reeled overhead.” And less than a week later, she decides she’s in love with the man—and is fighting for her career against the sabotage of Dr. Sybil Paige, the lady doctor who’s trying to get her own hooks into the doc. Steve does have something to say on the matter, however, and takes Pamela out on a horseback ride into the desert and kisses her. “What do you feel, Pam?” he asks her. “Is it what I feel, too?” It is, to be sure, but she tells him that she’s afraid that her involvement with him will jeopardize her career. He says he understands how she feels—and then, back at the base, gives her the cold shoulder for a week.

She’s upset, of course, and feels that she’s ruined her chances with Steve. But there’s Barney Steele to date in the meantime, even though she thinks of him only as a friend. Soon, however, he is blaring to the entire base that Pamela is “his girl,” and Steve is shooting Pamela cold looks. But out of the blue, he asks her to go on a picnic in the desert again, and this time, when he tells her, “I don’t want to take the chance on being rebuffed again,” the sly fox answers, “Try me.” Before he has the opportunity to do so, however, a jet plane crashes half a mile from them, and they have to hike up to the wreck to save the pilot. Steve has a bad leg, though, left over from an accident in his early Navy days, so it’s up to Barney Steele, flown in on the rescue helicopter, to climb down into the canyon to pull the man out. His heroics are somehow leaked to the press, along with the news that Pamela is his fiancée. So it’s back to fish eyes from Steve, and Pamela is sure she’s lost him for good now, because she couldn’t possibly go tell the man that it’s not true. “She wanted to tell him, but how could she do it in the face of his strange bitterness? She could hardly throw herself at him, could she? What value would he place on her love then?”

So she decides to request a transfer off the base and goes to Dr. Sybil Paige who, curiously, is in charge of such things. But at the last minute, Pamela, burning with inner patriotism, says that her work on the space mission is more important that her shattered little heart and tears up her transfer request. In the face of such devotion to career and man, Sybil admits that she has given up her quest to capture Steve—“Don’t be sorry,” she tells Pamela, “my work is enough for me. It will have to be, it seems”—and that’s all it takes for Pamela to chase Steve into the garden and fling herself at him, after all. Then it’s a quick proposal from Steve, accompanied by a little shared wonderment for their mission: “You and I, Pam, can help man in his final effort to break loose from the bonds of earth that have kept man a prisoner for so many, many ages!” Steve gushes. “Our part in it is small, but we can be useful, we can do what we can to help.”

This is easily one of the campiest books I have read in quite some time, and I laughed (or snorted) starting with the first sentence: “The hot desert sun, Pamela West thought, burned as relentlessly as the determination in each of the eight carefully chosen astronaut candidates.” And the gems keep popping up at regular intervals: “Clinging to past memories was selfish in the face of the excitement of conquering space,” “the singing in her heart could not be denied,” “it was too late for dreams.” But I just couldn’t bring myself to really like the book. Pamela does not win my respect for abandoning her feelings for her dead boyfriend so quickly—indeed, like most VNRN heroines, she decides that it wasn’t really true love at all—and likewise I cannot trust that her instant devotion to Steve after one week really is the be-all that she thinks it is. I’m not impressed, either, by her refusing to talk to Steve one minute and then rushing to him the next. And there are a lot of loose ends in the book—an astronaut’s wife virtually crippled by anxiety, the question of who leaked the story of Pamela’s alleged engagement to Barney to the press, a psychiatrist’s repeated requests that Pamela share with him her opinions on the fitness of the candidates for the mission—that are summarily abandoned as the next plot twist hoves over the hot desert horizon. I was surprised to find that Ruth Ives is the same author who brought us Congo Nurse, the first review I ever posted to this blog (while this review is my 201^st, if you’re counting), as I don’t recall much amusing in that book beyond the New York socialite arriving in Africa with an iron lung. But my impression of that book, that I couldn’t bring myself to care for the characters and found the ending to be too perfunctory, holds true for this one. The camp factor is off the charts in Navy Nurse, and this alone makes it worth reading, but it won’t be winning any VNRN awards.

Emergency Nurse

By Anne Lorraine, ©1955
Cover illustration by Jack Harman

Love and a career, ambition and security, often pull in different directions, and it is not easy for the young to sort out their claims. It was particularly difficult for Nurse Gina Delham, haunted as she was by the thought of her parents’ unhappy marriage. How was she to choose between the different paths set before her?

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“Nothing is more infectious than highly strung nerves, you know, and I want you to be a rock to your patients, not a nettle. Let them rest on you, rely upon you—and take good care they never get stung, either by your tongue or your brisk efficiency!”

“She’s a woman. Surely you can’t expect her to view mangled bodies with no more emotion than she would inspect a squashed insect? All women are highly strung, emotional is the word you use, I think.”

“Bless you, Gina. You’ve given me something to look forward to at last. Life has been pretty ghastly all round. But on Wednesday at seven-thirty life will begin again in all its old glory! We’ll have fun, my sweet—I’ll bring the chariot to the hospital gates, and mind you have shoes that fit well, for you won’t be home by midnight, and we don’t want any glass slippers left on the highway!”

REVIEW:

Gina Delham is our eponymous nurse working in the English version of the ED, the Casualty Department, which is headed by the aloof Dr. Simon Brayford. She’s been told by the Matron early on that she’s not a career nurse: “Like most girls, if the offer of marriage came along, and was sufficiently tempting, you would have no more hesitation in throwing over this work than a child offered a cream bun would hesitate to throw away a slice of bread and butter.” Gina wants desperately to be serious about her career, but she’s afraid that the Matron is right. Her heart throbs for Simon Brayford, but it’s a lost cause—or so she thinks—because “nurses are, to him, just so much necessary hospital equipment, about as absorbing as a jar of swabs, and not nearly as useful!”

But in spite of her professed admiration for the doctor, she can’t possibly tumble for him because he’s poor and driven and hopelessly devoted to his work, and her parents—you guessed it, killed in a car accident when she was younger—had been driven to hate each other, and the children that bound them together, by the deep poverty they could never escape. So she’s going to marry a rich man, like this here patient, Garrick Peters, who will lift her and her two younger siblings into the good life. Garrick, recovering from a serious car accident and instantly smitten with Gina, seems ready to oblige—a dozen roses with an unsigned card arrive at her door—and Gina is so confident of her future as Mrs. Garrick Peters that she snubs an unprecedented date with Simon. But at his discharge, Garrick is heard telling a woman who turns out to be his fiancée, the duplicitous cad, that he’ll be glad to leave his beautiful blonde nurse behind, saying “The poor kid is making a bit of a nuisance of herself.” Then it’s all over the hospital, her “humiliation, searing, soul-destroying,” that “she had loved him,” she of the frigid, money-grubbing heart.

But on the upside, now she’s free to take up an offer by Simon, who despite her disinterest in him, still wants her to be the chief nurse of the new Casualty Department he’s creating at Barneford Hospital. And she’s still free to continue her paradoxical crush on Simon: “If only the doctor would admit that she had some other use than as a competent ‘mate’ on the job!” she sighs. She seems to vacillate wildly in her points of view, one day wishing madly that Simon would notice her, then insisting tearfully that as God as her witness, she’ll never be hungry again! Mostly, to the reader’s growing boredom, the latter. There are, of course, the usual vague hints that Simon does have feelings for Gina, to which she, as a dense VNRN heroine, is completely oblivious.

Then, while out on an almost-date with Simon—coffee after an ambulance run—they bump into Garrick, who tells Gina that he loved her all along. Yippee! Except that Simon then tells her that he loves her too, and wants her to stay with him. “She must be strong now. […] No foolish heart must be allowed to persuade her to throw aside all her resolutions.” Simon, citing the growing success of Casualty, hires a young nurse he knew years ago, in a past that he never discusses (though she bites Gina’s head off when she says that with hands like his, he surely must have done some surgery at some point). Betty Newent is the most scatterbrained nurse ever, always dropping trays of pills and going to pieces when an accident victim is brought in—not the most logical choice for an ED nurse, but she and Simon are determined to whip her into a successful nurse, with Gina assisting at the lash. Gina, of course, instantly jumps to the conclusion that this is because Simon and Betty are planning to marry, though Betty seems mostly afraid of Simon and he seems mostly worried about her. With this leap of poor logic, Gina realizes that she herself is in love with Simon, and never did love Garrick. But she still can’t go quietly into that good heartbreak: “Simon represented everything against which she had turned herself, years before. He was everything that her husband must never be—a poor man, offering insecurity and constant striving.” It’s maddening, I tell you!

She’s going to soothe her aching heart with a heavy work schedule. “It’s the only way to forget things that have to be forgotten,” a maxim that she shares with both Simon and Betty, though it’s not clear to Gina why, if Simon and Betty are soon to be united in wedded bliss, they should both be so darned mopey. Then Garrick proposes and Gina accepts, even though they have a frank chat about the fact that she doesn’t love him. Simon makes a proposal of his own, that Gina come with him when he leaves Barneford Hospital to start a clinic back where he comes from. She responds by freaking out, yet again: “I’ve been afraid of poverty because of what it can do to people—and if I can’t have my family with me now, do you think I’d consider, for one moment, a job where I still could not have them with me? I want a real life, with security, and freedom, and fun—” So, curiously, when Garrick insists that Gina quit her job after they are married so she can better attend his frivolous and boring cocktail parties where, “hour after hour, the talk was only of frothy trivialities,” she tells Garrick that she will not give up her work.

That fight is tabled for the time being, as they are en route to see Gina’s younger brother and sister and gladden their hearts with promises of college and riding lessons. But lo, Alan doesn’t want to go to college and has arranged a position for himself at the local garage, and little Jennifer is working at the horse barns in exchange for riding lessons, so they’re all set, thank you very much. Then, as the final straw, Aunt Katie, who has raised the little Delhams, tells Gina that her parents really did love each other madly, and those fights that Gina overheard were just words of the moment: “They fought like cat and dog at times, but it was all good fun,” Katie tells her—ha, ha. It turns out that Katie, who had been in love with Gina’s father, had fostered the idea in Gina’s mind that her parents didn’t love their children or each other as a sort of nasty revenge. Katie has to tell Gina the truth now because Gina is marrying a man she doesn’t love, and Katie wants Gina to have the kind of love her parents had for each other. Curiously, Gina responds to this shocking revelation by flinging herself into Aunt Katie’s arms and having a good cry. I myself would have, at the very least, slapped Katie silly, but I’m funny about that sort of treachery.

So Gina decides she can’t marry Garrick after all. “He offered her fun as another man might offer her eternal devotion, and fun wasn’t enough for her. She wanted so much more from life; she would welcome hard work, idealism, sacrifice—anything which life with a man such as Simon might demand, which life with Simon must demand.” She is so dazed by this realization that she wanders as if senseless through town—which she tends to do after a crisis, such as when she overheard Garrick talking to his then-fiancée—and is run over by a bicyclist. Like any good nurse, she shrugs off the headache that becomes increasingly ferocious over the next few days. When she’s finally felled by the pain and the story of the accident comes out, she’s sent for tests and discovered to have a large clot on her brain, and only the most promising brain surgeon can help her—three guesses as to who this turns out to be!

As she’s lying in the hospital, she learns the truth of Simon’s past: He and Betty were engaged once, but she dumped him for his best friend, and then on their honeymoon the pair were in a car accident, and the groom injured and brought to Simon. But the young man died despite Simon’s best efforts, and Simon was obliged to flee the gossip that followed him, suggesting that he had deliberately allowed the man to die. Now he’s just trying to help Betty get back on her feet and get over her dead husband; the two feel only friendship for each other. Gina, seeing her clot as a golden opportunity for the man she loves, refuses to have anyone else do the surgery. Does she die on the table? Does Simon feel he can resume his brilliant career as a brain surgeon? Does Gina agree to marry Simon in the end? What do you think?

This book is a bit of a mess, with a lot of dead ends. The identity of the man who sent the roses—you can’t help but suspect that it was Simon, not Garrick as Gina assumed—is never revealed. Simon notes in passing that he has two adopted children who are “parked”—his word—with his sister, and whom he has never mentioned or visited in the months that make up the story. He says he loves these children, and loved their parents, who are now deceased, but this is all we ever find out about them. Several times Gina is accused as being overly demanding, and we are treated to a flashback in which her mother tells her, “You are so greedy, my dear—you make more demands on those you love than they can ever hope to meet.” Later on, a minor nurse character also tells Gina, “You demand so much of people that you scare them away from you.” But we have no evidence of this at all; rather, the opposite is true: Gina has a tendency to be so closed up that she suffers from not knowing what she herself wants, let alone making demands of others. So what’s that supposed to be about?

The endless waffling on Gina’s part about whether she should feel hurt that Simon doesn’t love her or pursue Garrick for his money becomes more than a little frustrating. Also, pretty much everyone in the book—Simon, Betty, Gina, Garrick, and even minor characters like the Matron and the hospital librarian—have secret pasts or past secrets that they allude to constantly, and usually tearfully, while refusing to discuss them outright. “Do we have to talk in riddles all the time?” Garrick asks Gina at one point (after she’s learned the truth about her parents’ relationship but is clearly not going to share this with her betrothed, just mawkishly presses their love letters to her cheek). It’s a really excellent question. This book would have been a whole lot shorter than 191 pages if anyone could have just had an honest conversation. And I might have liked it a bit better, and had more respect for Gina. As it happens, the only enjoyable character in the book is Garrick, who regularly drops foppish remarks like, “I’m Garrick Peters, remember? Your very dearest, most precious patient—who fell in love with you when in a state of deep unconsciousness on a marble slab.” But unfortunately, he doesn’t pop up enough to make the book worth the time, and none of the remaining characters are so attractive or interesting that you should spend an afternoon reading about them.

River Nurse

Cover illustration by Bern Smith

‘Helping Hands,’ in its quiet riverside backwater, must be the most unorthodox hospital in Australia, thought Maggie when she arrived there fresh from the clinical efficiency of Southern Cross Hospital. But she soon found that its methods—and its doctor—were none the less effective for all that.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“You’ve the main requirements needed of a button seller. You’re young and pretty.”

“Twenty-two wants action. It also, and Maggie admitted this rather ashamedly to herself, wants its own cash.”

“You have never understood the heart apart from what’s revealed to you through your wretched stethoscope!”

REVIEW:

There are plenty of Harlequin nurse novels out there, but I have to say that I generally don’t reach for them (in case you haven’t noticed). They’re long, for starters, and I don’t mean just the page count—I seldom find a VNRN of more than 126 pages (the standard length) that deserves to be. The covers are also generally fair to middling, so they don’t entice, either. But I had enjoyed another of Joyce Dingwell’s books—Nurse Smith, Cook—so I picked up River Nurse with less trepidation than some. And I found it worth the time, almost meriting 192 pages.

Maggie Chappy has just graduated from nursing school in Sidney, and she is a rare breed in that she graduated quite at the bottom of her class. (Which reminds me of the joke: What do you call someone who graduates at the bottom of their nursing class? A nurse. Ha! Ha!) Having made it through three years of school, the school matron tells her, “You are no longer a completely feckless, stupid, ignorant girl. My training has seen to that.” Phew! Yet she is now planning to abandon her promising career to move to a backwater town accessible only by river to keep house for her uncle, who raised her (she is yet another orphan nurse) and paid for her nursing school. The rub is that there is a convalescent hospital in that town, run by the sister of the nursing school matron, that needs a nurse. Fortunately for Maggie, when she arrives in Jonathan Town, she finds that her uncle, who has been doing nicely for himself for the past three years, is not interested in having her keep house for him, so off she is packed to the hospital.

She arrives on the same day as Dr. Jude Caulder, who has been sent to this godforsaken backwater for a three-month stint before he joins his father at a more prestigious practice in the city. He’s a grumpy Gus about it, and is X-ing off the days on his calendar before he gets to leave. He’s the only doctor in the house, and indeed the only white male in sight who is not a patient, so there’s really no question about who Maggie is going to fall for.

It’s a slow, meandering ride through three months of adventures with patients, livestock (Maggie delivers a calf in one sweet scene), administrators who want to close the place down, and even natural and man-made disasters (a flood and a hiking accident, respectively). The plot isn’t really the thing in this book; it’s more the gentle humor, the well-drawn characters, and the pleasant pacing that make this book worth reading. It’s not at all campy, or even really laugh-out-loud funny, but it is amusing. At one point Jude walks into a kitchen overflowing with comestibles for a party and delivers a short lecture on the role of saliva in digestion. Three pages later, it’s tea time, and “the pleasant business of starch-splitting ferments began … bother that man! … the morning teabegan.” This kind of simple pleasure pervades the book, even through to the ending, which is a reference to a long-running joke that what the hospital metes out best is tears—meaning sympathy—and sponge cake (Matron Dora is quite the baker). It won’t be the best, or the most memorable nurse novel you’ll read, but it’s definitely worth your time.

Country Nurse / Special Nurse

By Maud McCurdy Welch, ©1959

The grapevine in the hospital said all the nurses had a crush on young Dr. David Lorimer, but that he only returned the compliment for one, Cathy Linton. But did he? Though he had been her childhood playmate in Springvale, things were different now … and there was Patrice McDaniel, glamorous, a little wild, but sure of herself where David was concerned. And if David married her, one day he would inherit the directorship of the hospital from his father-in-law. What could Cathy offer him? It seemed out of the question. Yet that lovely summer day by the river when he had tried to kiss her … Meanwhile, work was exciting and far more important—there were other lives and hopes to think about. Roommate Jean Adair and her little Barby … Dear Aunt Dorie … Aunt Margaret, too, who wasn’t so dear … and who was the mysterious stranger who had been searching for Cathy?

This book was also published by Lancer Books
under the title "Special Nurse" in 1967.
The cover illustration is by Mort Engel.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:

“Almost any kind of marriage is better than none. I know, because I’m an old maid. You get married, honey, and have a home and babies, so that your heart won’t be empty like mine.”

REVIEW:

When Nurse Cathy Linton’s father, the local country GP, dies suddenly, he leaves her less than nothing—mean old Aunt Margaret, who has more money than God, turns up to console Cathy with papers showing that her father owed Margaret $10,000, which she expects Cathy to repay. Margaret also tells her that she’s to start a new job at Barrett Memorial Hospital in Memphis, 70 miles from her country home, at noon that day. So she packs—“We must hurry, Cathy,” says Margaret’s sister Dorie, “Margaret has a luncheon engagement”—and off she goes, the country mouse to the big city.

She’s given a bungalow on the hospital grounds, which she shares with Nurse Jean Adair, who is never home, mysteriously, and it’s two weeks before they actually cross paths. Cathy is lonely, of course, but the saving grace for her is that Dr. Daniel Lorimer, her childhood friend, is also working at Barrett. She hasn’t seen him in ten years; he left town when he was 17 and she was 13. She hears a lot of gossip about him from the other nurses, such as, “He keeps his heart in deep freeze. Just has no time for women.” Well, maybe one woman—he takes Cathy home to Springvale for a day and, after a swim in the river, tries to kiss her, but she slaps him hard! Because after all, he’s engaged to Patrice McDaniel, the daughter of the hospital chief! Which she knows for a fact because everyone at the hospital says so!

Meanwhile, Aunt Dorie, who never married, is growing weary of living on Aunt Margaret’s largess and under her thumb. What she wouldn’t give to have a job as a baby nurse! And as fate would have it, we have a baby who needs nursing—Jean’s baby Barby, almost three, is being cared for by Jean’s grandmother, but Gramma ain’t as spry as she used to be and keeps forgetting to feed the baby. And where’s the father? Well, it seems he lost his job and then disappeared, but Jean knows that Johnny really loves her and will come back some day, so can’t bring herself to file for divorce. So Dorie moves in with Gramma and Barby, and now Jean and her family are happy and well-fed.

It turns out the hospital gossip mill has something to say about Cathy, too, that she is engaged to Dr. Bob Kendall, whom she’s dated a couple of times but has no especial fondness for. Though she is shocked to hear such outrageous lies spread about her, when te same grapevine declares that the announcement of David’s engagement to Patrice is also imminent, she is totally crushed by the news. Then one night David catches Cathy out walking on the hospital grounds and tells her that a new hospital is opening in Springvale, and he’s been offered the job as head of it. He’s going to take it, of course, and he wants Cathy to marry him and come home and work there with him. But she can’t marry him, because she owes so much money to Aunt Margaret: “I can’t marry a man and let him shoulder such a debt,” she tells Jean—not David, of course, who is left completely in the dark as to why she’s turning him down. So when she hears the next day at the hospital that Patrice is marrying David, the stupid girl “believed Patrice was the girl David really loved.” Argh!

Not to worry, though; before too long, all the loose ends are swiftly tied up. Jean’s husband comes back; Mildred, Jean’s new roommate, finds out that the woman she saw her boyfriend with was his mother, who is in town to meet Mildred in anticipation of the couple’s engagement; a mysterious man who has been looking for Cathy since the beginning of the book (and doing a really poor job of it) turns up with a letter from Cathy’s dead father, which turns out to be a contract of sale of an invention he’d been working on that will earn her, his sole heir, $46,000.78. Now she can marry David—“then she told herself not to be absurd. Everyone said that Patrice was back in the picture now. Nearly all of the gossips were betting they’d get married.” It takes good old Jean to tell David the truth, and to get him to come back for one more try at setting stupid Cathy Linton straight. I wasn’t completely overjoyed when he succeeded.

During most of the last half of this book, I had the distinct impression that I’d read this book before. When I checked on the other book of Ms. Welch’s that I’d read, Nurses Marry Doctors, that déjà vu feeling became clear: It, too, has the same misunderstanding between the heroine and her intended, who thinks she’s going to marry the other doctor she’s been casually dating; the same young nurse caring for a baby without a father (in the other book, the baby was named Betsy, not Barby); the same nurses living in bungalows on the hospital grounds where they spend a lot of time strolling; even down to the same pleasant light sweetness that pervades the book. It’s not a bad read, but it’s not really satisfying—Aunt Margaret never gets a comeuppance, Cathy’s stupidity remains intact and unchastised at the end. The only faint hope for Cathy’s redemption lies in the fact that in the end, when he asks her if she loves him—“You couldn’t possibly have let such a ridiculous thing as a debt come between us, if you had”—she essentially proposes to him, saying, “I love you very much, David. I—want to marry you if you still want me.” But like I said, it’s only a faint hope, and I can’t imagine that anyone as susceptible to hospital gossip and as unable to communicate with her beloved as Nurse Cathy Linton is going to remain happy for long.