Review- The Nightingale Girls by Donna Douglas -5*

Title: The Nightingale Girls
Series: Nightingales #1
Author: Donna Douglas
Genre: Historical Fiction

Rating: * * * * *

Publishers: Arrow

(Sept 10, 2012)

Paperback: 512 pages

ISBN: 978-0000569350

FTC Disclosure: Net Galley

Three very different girls sign up as student nurses in January 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 -- aka Lady Camilla -- 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. This utterly delightful novel brings a London pre-war hospital vividly to life.

Nightingale Girls

1. The Nightingale Girls (2012)

2. The Nightingale Sisters (2013)

3. The Nightingale Nurses (2013)

4. Nightingales on Call (2014)

5. A Nightingale Christmas Wish (2014)

A Child is Born (2013)

If you loved the PBS series Call the Midwife, these books are perfect for you. The story tells of three girls from vastly different backgrounds training for the honor of being a Nightingale. And make no mistake, back in the 1930’s, it was more about who you were or who your parents knew, that got your foot in the door. While I’ve never thought of nursing as a easy or glamorous job, it was definitely even less so in the 30’s. Nursing students were little more than servants at the beck and call of the head sisters. They lived in dorms together and under the iron fists of head sisters. (Just saw a parallel to the students in Hogwarts, hummm)
Nurses were not allowed to be married and had very little free time. Their escapades slipping in past curfew and dealing with roommates added a lighter level to these stories.
I read this on my Kindle which was so nice as I could stop and look up words that were unfamiliar to me both from the nursing and English standpoint. It was really fascinating and scary to see how much general medicine has changed in less than 100 years. Vaccinations and knowledge that we so take for granted was totally unknown or on the cutting edge in the 1930’s.
At just over 500 pages, I flew through this book. I couldn’t wait to see what happened in the next two books in this series that I had on my Kindle.