Sue Barton, Visiting Nurse - Helen Dore Boylston

[goodreads]

Title: Sue Barton, Visiting Nurse Author: Helen Dore Boylston Genre: Classics, YA Rating: 4/5 # pages: 110 Date read: February 2005, January 2008, May 2017

Sue and her best friend, Kit, move to New York city; and join the Visiting Nurse service. Sue's duties take her from the Lower East Side to Harlem. There are many vignettes, humorous and touching. Not all Sue's duties are medical. She helps a lonely Polish new mother find neighborhood friends; and she helps a kind old woman realize her dreams of travel, (Sue secretly donates the money she had saved for her own trousseau for the trip). This leads into a surprising reward for Sue herself.


This used to be my favourite of the series, but I've had to downgrade the rating somewhat. I still absolutely I love reading about Sue's work in the streets of New York and how she has to be imaginative and think up solutions to problems she'd never have met at the hospital, but the older I get, the more the disagreement between her and Bill annoys me. I am completely on Sue's side and found Bill totally unreasonable, which made the end somewhat less than satisfying... especially as it's rather clear that the author is on Bill's side. A sign of the times, I guess, but annoyed me regardless.