The Nightingale Girls (Book Review)

Title:  The Nightingale Girls (Book 1)
Author:  Donna Douglas

Publication Information:  Arrow, 2012, available in paperback or digital edition

Genre: Historical Fiction/Nursing 

Plot:  Three very different young women attend nursing school at Florence Nightingale Hospital in London’s East End in 1934 and become friends.   Dora Doyle is an inarticulate young woman from the slums whose enthusiasm and work ethic impresses the new matron sufficiently to gain her a place in the training class. 

Sue Barton or Cherry Ames?

The Sue Barton series, seven novels about an irrepressible nurse, is set approximately in the 1940s.  It follows the eponymous Sue from nursing school (based on the author's experience at Mass General)  to wife to a busy doctor and mother of three children.  The author, Helen Dore Boylston, was a real person (in contrast to the famous Stratemeyer Syndicate - not that I didn't enjoy those books as well) and friendly with Rose Wilder Lane, the daughter (as you know) of Laura Ingalls Wilder.