Monday, January 23, 2012

Nurse on Paradise Isle by Nell Marr Dean

Nurse on Paradise Isle by Nell Marr Dean, 1967.
Cover

Since my last book was by a female missionary, I thought I needed something a little more spicy. So I picked this book. Have I mentioned that I have a love of the pocket sized paperback? I think my love started at a young age with many visits to the local paperback exchange, the Book Rack (which now I see is sadly closed). I picked up all the hits there, A Clockwork Orange, New Stories from the Twilight Zone, Monkees go Mod..

The premise is a young nurse takes at job on a remote island in French Polynesia to run a hospital for the employees who are building a luxury hotel. She falls for the macho fella who is in charge of the project but there is competition from a local beauty.

Sounds pretty spicy right? Turns out, not so much. It wound up being a meditation on malpractice lawsuits  against doctors. Yawn. It made me realize that perhaps I don't need to keep every book that is in the Bibliotiki. Though I do like the cover. 

In researching the book I saw that the author was quite prolific in the romance genre. She wrote a lot books about nurses but she actually worked as a librarian. Now if this book was called Librarian on Paradise Isle, I'd be sold. She could have a card catalog in the outrigger.

One bonus with vintage paperbacks is you often get a list of other titles they publish. I might need to find Hounds of Hell and Agents of Chaos.

exciting new titles

exciting new titles

Well, it was nice to read some fiction from my collection, just wish it had a little more substance but that is par for the course with a 50 cent pocket paperback I guess.

2 comments:

Ms. D said...

I was expecting something pretty racy. . .too bad! I would definitely buy the librarian book. Maybe you should write one? An escapist fantasy for all of us librarians who'd like to run away to a tropical island?

Norrin2 said...

"Agent of Chaos" is a great book. I read it as a young man and it colored and crystallized my emerging views on politics and freedom. I still often see the world through the lens of Norman Spinrad's book. I hope you are able to track it down someday. I enjoy your blog. Keep up the good reading!