Reviews

The White Linen Nurse by Eleanor Hallowell Abbott

glyptodonsneeze's review

3.0

Good heavens, let's talk about what's wrong with this book. The first thing is the title: the White Linen Nurse is only a white linen nurse for half an hour. The book opens with the White Linen Nurse (a.k.a. Rae Malgregor, although she's referred to as "the white linen nurse" throughout) having an existential crisis in her room on the last day of nursing college. Her roommates tell her why they wanted to be nurses, which makes the whole segment clunky and awkward. Rae, Zillah and Helene have all been roommates for three years, but the author wants to introduce them so they have a long, oddly dramatic, second-night-in-the-dorm, why are you here? conversation. It's a mystery why Zillah and Helene need such a long introduction, because Helene never appears in the book again and Zillah dies casually offscreen. Helene wants to be a nurse because it's noble, Zillah because she's slutty and likes danger. Rae takes her existential crisis down the head nurse's office, and the senior surgeon passes through and offers to take her on an exciting meningitis case. In the back of the senior surgeon's car, Rae finds his little, crippled daughter, along for the ride. Rae refuses to see the meningitis case and stays in the car mothering the crippled girl because she doesn't want to be a nurse anymore. This angers the senior surgeon, he drives recklessly, flips the car, lands underneath it, and Rae has to follow his instructions exactly to drive the car off him before it catches fire. What follows is a long interlude while Rae, the senior surgeon, and the shrill, crippled child wait for help. The senior surgeon proposes marriage, Rae accepts, concussed though they both may be. The senior surgeon does not want a wife to be normal and wifely to him, he says "general heart work for two" and makes the proposal sound different than "I want a cook/nursemaid who can't quit," but that's what he means. The high-pitched little girl does like Rae, and Rae likes her. So they move in together in a non-marital way and nothing much happens until

they fall in love more or less, due to familiarity. The senior surgeon is still a commandeering asshole though.

I listened to this book on Librivox. The reader was great.