Nightingale Nurses and Nightingale Sisters

The Nightingale Sisters: (Nightingales 2)

About the Book:

To the student nurses at The Nightingale hospital, the ward sisters are heartless and frightening, with impossibly high standards. But the sisters have troubles of their own...

Violet

The new night sister is not all that she seems. Who is she and what dark secret is she hiding? As the mystery deepens, Sister Wren is determined to find out the truth.

Dora

The student nurse is struggling with her own secret, and with her heartbreak over Nick, the man who got away. A new arrival on the ward brings the chance to put a smile back on her face. But can she really get over Nick so easily?

Millie

Dora's fellow student is also torn between the two men in her life. But then an unexpected friendship with an elderly patient makes her question where her heart - and her future - really lies.

As the nation mourns the death of King George V, it seems as if nothing is ever going to be the same again, especially for the women at the Nightingale.

The Nightingale Nurses: (Nightingales 3)

About the Book:

'Pay attention please, nurses. The next six months will be the most important of your lives'

It's the final year of training for three young nurses at The Nightingale Hospital.  Helen is at a crossroads in her life as she battles with her domineering mother over both her love life and her future career.  Dora can't stop loving Nick, who is married to her best friend, Ruby. But Ruby is hiding a dark secret with the potential to destroy Ruby's marriage.  Millie is anxious about her fiance, sent to Spain to cover the Civil War, and things only get worse when she encounters a fortune teller who gives her a sinister warning.  With war looming in Europe, and the East End of London squaring up to the threat of Oswald Mosley's blackshirts, the women of the Nightingale have to face their own challenges, at work and in love.

My Comments:

These books are volumes two and three in the soap operaish saga of student nurses and others in a London hospital in the 1930's.  Like any good soap opera these stories include love, deception, romance, hatred, violence and violation and characters whose lives intertwine in ways they would never imagine.  These books are also a fascinating look at London in the 1930's, both the medical aspect (which I find especially interesting) and the general society.  

I'd like to thank the publisher for making review copies available via NetGalley.  Grade:  B.

Review: The Nightingale Girls

The Nightingale Girls: (Nightingales 1)

About the Book:

Three very different girls sign up as student nurses in 1936, while England is still mourning the death of George V. Dora is a tough East Ender, driven by ambition, but also desperate to escape her squalid, overcrowded home and her abusive stepfather. Helen is the quiet one, a mystery to her fellow nurses, avoiding fun, gossip and the limelight. In fact she is in the formidable shadow of her overbearing mother, who dominates every aspect of her life. Can a nursing career free Helen at last? The third of our heroines is naughty, rebellious Millie an aristocrat on the run from her conventional upper class life. She is doomed to clash over and over again with terrifying Sister Hyde and to get into scrape after scrape especially where men are concerned.

My Comments:

Once upon a time I wanted to be a nurse.  In the early 1970's I read piles of nurse romance novels, many of which were set in hospital schools of nursing where girls in blue striped pinafores moved from being probationers who did menial chores to graduate nurses who were in charge of wards.  Students provided labor in exchange for training; a system that pretty much came to an end in the 1970's.  However, that system started years earlier, and the Nightingale Hospital in London was one of the early adopters.  Their students nurses were paid employees who lived on the grounds and were under the supervision of the hospital 24/7. 

This is the the story of these three young women's first year as student nurses.  It is full of period details like descriptions of the hospital wards, the social season and the East End tenements.  Women of a certain age will remember when marriage was a career-ending event.  Those of us familiar with the "same day surgery" concept of hospital care will contrast that with patients remaining on the wards for weeks until they were completely recovered from whatever ailed them.  

I enjoyed watching these three girls, their friends and their enemies grow during this formative year in their lives and I look forward to reading the other books in the series.  If it is important to you, the only sex scenes in the book were abusive and if you didn't realize what was happening you wouldn't know what it was from the description given.  The book is set in England and uses English spellings and words (most notably "Sister" for a charge nurse.)  

I'd like to thank the publisher for making a review copy available via NetGalley.  Grade:  B+