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+

Sunday Snippets--A Catholic Carnival

Hello, and welcome to Sunday Snippets--A Catholic Carnival. We are a group of Catholic bloggers who gather weekly to share our best posts with each other. To participate, go to your blog and create a post titled Sunday Snippets--A Catholic Carnival. In it, discuss and link to your posts for the week--whether they deal with theology, Catholic living or cute Catholic kids. I'm mostly a book blogger so my posts are generally book reviews, some Catholic, some not. Make sure that post links back here. Once you publish it, come back here and leave a link below.

We also have a yahoogroup; signing up for it will get you one weekly reminder to post. Click here to sign up.

Question of the week: With apologies to any of you who pre-wrote your posts using the questions listed above, I'm changing the question this week.  Many of us have been blogging for a long time.  This week's "question of the week" isn't really a question, it's a request:  Go back at least a year and link us to one or more old posts that you'd like to promote or encourage us to read again.  My old posts:

A Welcome Can Make all the Difference

Attracting Young Families to our Parishes

How to Pay for College Without Massive Debt

What to do with Teen Parents

How Far is Too Far?

Because of Vatican II...or Because of the Times?

Perfect Timing

Too Much Parenting

I didn't blog this week.  What about you?

Sunday Snippets--A Catholic Carnival

Hello, and welcome to Sunday Snippets--A Catholic Carnival. We are a group of Catholic bloggers who gather weekly to share our best posts with each other. To participate, go to your blog and create a post titled Sunday Snippets--A Catholic Carnival. In it, discuss and link to your posts for the week--whether they deal with theology, Catholic living or cute Catholic kids. I'm mostly a book blogger so my posts are generally book reviews, some Catholic, some not. Make sure that post links back here. Once you publish it, come back here and leave a link below.

We also have a yahoogroup; signing up for it will get you one weekly reminder to post. Click here to sign up.

Question of the week:  Introduce yourself. Some of us have been participating for a long time; others are relative newcomers. Take a minute and briefly tell us about yourself and your blog.

Hi, I blog under the name RAnn though it wouldn't take much detective work on your part to learn my real name.  I'm a resident of the New Orleans area, and mom to three kids.  My 22  year old son is autistic and just started his first real job.  Please say a prayer that it works out.  My 19 year old daughter is starting her sophomore year at Northwestern State University of Louisiana (fork 'em Demons!).  She is a history major and part of the Louisiana Scholars College.  My youngest is ten, and a fifth grader at our parish school.  She is an altar server and a Girl Scout.  I work full time as a paralegal and the attorneys I work for do auto insurance defense and criminal defense.  In my spare time I like to read and write and this blog is primarily a book blog.  

This week I did Seven Quick Takes.  I reviewed a Christian romance about a war widow and her husband's twin. I also reviewed an inspiring memoir about a man who was convicted of killing his wife--and later found to be innocent.  

Somebody Like You: My Review

Somebody Like You: A Novel

About the Book:

Haley’s three-year marriage to Sam, an army medic, ends tragically when he’s killed in Afghanistan. Her attempts to create a new life for herself are ambushed when she arrives home one evening—and finds her husband waiting for her. Did the military make an unimaginable mistake when they told her Sam was killed? 

Too late to make things right with his estranged twin brother, Stephen discovers Sam never told Haley about him. As Haley and Stephen navigate their fragile relation­ship, they are inexorably drawn to each other. How can they honor the memory of a man whose death brought them together—and whose ghost could drive them apart? 

Somebody Like You is a beautifully rendered, affecting novel, reminding us that while we can’t change the past, we have the choice to change the future and start anew.

My Comments:

On thing this blurb doesn't tell you is that Haley is expecting a baby--a baby she never told Sam about.  Now as the baby is getting closer she is finding it harder and harder to hold life together on her own.  Unfortunately, one thing Sam always told her he loved about her was her strength, her ability to manage life on her own, and now she has a problem asking for the help she needs.  

As noted above Sam and Stephen had become estranged.  When Stephen shows up wanting to help there is no only the problem of wondering why Sam and never spoken about Stephen but also the problem of Haley's independence.  I enjoyed watching these two learn about themselves by comparing stories of Sam and watching them learn to love themselves and each other.  

The book is light Christian.  There are no intimate scenes but there are no long sermons that just perfectly fit where the characters are in life either.  While their faith plays a part in the story it isn't a "find Jesus find love" story either.  

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