Cherry is back at Spenser, now in her third and final year of nursing school. Challenges this year include stints in the operating room, becoming a Ward Nurse, and managing her advisee, a rude probationer. There is also the introduction of Lex, a cyclone of a young doctor, and someone is trying to steal Dr. Joe's formula. A continuation of the innocent and heroic idealism of the Greatest Generation in wartime. ( )

better than i thought it would be, for some reason, and the strong WWII-patriotism throughout was fascinating. i have three more of these, so i'll give them a try... ( )

I read the whole series in my early teens and have decided to do a nostalgic revisit of this and the other career series books I read; from memory there was a vet one and an air hostess one. The Cherry Ames series started in the 1940s in an attempt to get young girls into nursing to serve their country during WWII. Certainly the push is on throughout this book as Cherry agonises whether to serve on the home front or volunteer for the armed services even as she manages to deliver babies and foil plans to steal the formula of a medical breakthrough to fall into enemy hands. Cherry is as patriotic as the US apple pie and unlike a lot of the other young adult books of the time Cherry is portrayed as career focused instead of husband hunting (although she does have boyfriends) she is noble, kind, good and still able to pull practical jokes. I really enjoyed this simpler way of life, but could imagine that people who like more bangs for their buck would find it boring.

better than i thought it would be, for some reason, and the strong WWII-patriotism throughout was fascinating. i have three more of these, so i'll give them a try... ( )

The beginning of the Cherry Ames series, most of these are mysteries about a young nurse in the 1940s and 50s. In this one she tries to find missing medicine and also finds a sick man in an abandoned house and tries to save him. ( )