Lucilla AndrewsReviews

This was a pleasant enough read but far too short. The characters were very two-dimensional and didn't elicit much emotion from me. The description of the bomb attack at Christmas just didn't feel very real. Glad to finish this with a very contrived ending of the doctor and nurse getting together - more like Mills and Boon.

Lucilla Andrews is one of my favourite authors. She wrote several hospital romances, many of them set during World War II. This is her autobiography, written in 1976, but focussing on her wartime nursing experiences. With the exception of one chapter about her childhood, the book only covers her nursing years, ending abruptly in 1952 when she quit nursing to write full-time. I found it very interesting that this book was based on notes that she had been making throughout the war. It was fun to see that many of the events that she used in her books were based on her own experiences. She doesn't sugar-coat anything about her job—there's blood and grime and cockroaches, long hours and little pay. The one thing that she isn't straightforward about is the nature of her husband's mysterious illness. I only know from reading her obituaries online that it was very serious drug addiction, leading to his long term hospitalization shortly after the birth of their daughter. Her own love life was very different from that of a romance heroine.

This is one of Lucilla Andrews' later books that take place during the Second World War, and draw on her own nursing experiences. While her WWII novels are still considered romances, the romantic element is secondary to the war itself. The descriptions of bombs dropping around the hospitals, and the convoys of of injured soldiers are immediate and vivid, while the daily hardships of shortages of necessities and sheer exhaustion pervade the books.

After A Famous Victory is a short book, only 169 pages, and episodic. Most of the story takes place over four or five nights throughout November and December 1943, in a ward of severely injured soldiers at a hospital in the British countryside. As in most of her novels, there is a somewhat unrealistic romance, but the focus of the story is the soldiers and the war. Despite its short length, the book gives a strong impression of a vicious war that has been going on for four years, with no end in sight.

I really enjoyed this book although it starts quite slowly. Set on a Scottish Island, it traces the growing romance between a locum nurse and a local surgeon. Quite a lot of trauma abounds - she was involved in a disaster at sea and he has lost his wife and child. However, the gradual growth of their relationship, set against a mid-sea rescue, is well-written, even understated. One of Andrews' best.

Not my favourite Andrews. A rather confused romance with a nurse vacillating between several men. In the end, of couse, she ends up with a doctor.

A fun, light hospital romance. While training to be a nurse, Frances meets a friend and mentor who she nicknames the professor. Gradually, through the traumas of day to day life on the wards, where trainee nurses are treated as the lowest form of life, she comes to rely on him.

One of a series of books written about the traumas of nursing during the blitz. What with Dunkirk, and bombing raids, Clare Danes barely notices the attentions of young medical officer Joe Slaney, until suddenly he's not there. Lucilla Andrews trained as a nurse during the Second World War and has written a very realistic evocation of that era.

This book is about a romance between a doctor and a nurse in training. It takes place in post-WWII (?) England. I got interested in Lucilla Andrews' books after reading about how the hospital scenes in Atonement were similar to her books. Both take place in the same century, but this book, being a romance novel, is a lot more light-hearted. The ending seemed a bit unexpected since we don't get to see the doctor's point of view and as a result don't really see the process of him gradually falling in love. Perhaps it was written this way because people of that time were less likely to show their emotions openly, and the book was a first person narrative featuring the nurse in training. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this book even though I've never liked reading contemporary romance novels.

Very enjoyable