Cherry Ames Army Nurse, Chief Nurse, and Flight Nurse

In Cherry Ames #3, Cherry Ames, Army Nurse, Cherry trains to work as a nurse in the army.  This book annoyed me so much that I refuse to write a decent summary.

On page 36, Lex is upset because Cherry was friendly to another man.  This is just like an abuser.  I still don't like Lex and don't know why Cherry likes him.

I find the relationships between Cherry and her commanding officers quite hard to believe.  There are passages in which I feel like the military is depicted as playtime. The girls call their instructor "Lovey."  Really?  This took away greatly from my enjoyment of this book.  I felt that the girls were too flippant and that their interaction with the officers was not portrayed accurately.  Since the girls' interaction with the officers was not accurate, I was suspicious about whether any of the content of the book was accurate to the time.  That caused me to be uninterested in everything.  I ended up skimming a lot of the book.

I found much of this book to be tedious and boring.  As I read this book, I experienced exactly what I always expected the Cherry Ames series to be, which is why I haven't read them until now.

I dreaded the next two books, also set during the war, and was quite honestly tempted to skip to a post-war book.  I decided to read the next two books with the goal of reading them as fast as possible.  Meanwhile, the idea of reading Biff Brewster, another series with which I struggle, was sounding better all the while.

In Cherry Ames #4, Cherry Ames, Chief Nurse, Cherry and all of her friends from nursing school are sent to an island in the Pacific where they care for injured soldiers.  My, how convenient that everyone from Spencer joins Cherry on the island.

On page 7, Cherry hopes that her commanding officer will say something "comforting and reassuring" to her.  Oh, please.  Cherry wants a military officer to be nurturing?  Ugh.  This isn't going well.  I already knew at this point that I would have as much trouble with this book as the previous one.

Cherry promises the soldiers an ice cream party.  Yes indeed, Cherry promises the soldiers ice cream on an isolated island in the Pacific in the middle of World War II with Japanese fighter planes bombing away in the surrounding area.  Not only that, but her commanding officer decides that the soldiers can't be disappointed.  He gets 400 quarts of ice cream delivered to the island.  Good grief.

Cherry asks the colonel for exceptions and favors and thinks he's mean when he refuses.  #$*&%!!!  It's the army!

I did not like most of this book.  I did like the last part of the book better once Cherry quits getting annoyed with the colonel for being such a meanie.  How dare he!

In Cherry Ames #5, Cherry Ames, Flight Nurse, Cherry and all of her friends are sent to England by the army.  Each nurse is assigned to a plane.  Each plane will fly out into the combat zone to pick up wounded soldiers to bring back for hospitalization.

On page 140, we learn that Cherry "had never found Lex much fun."  I'm just glad to be rid of the freak.

Once again, Cherry tells someone who is severely wounded that the doctors will make him what he once was.  On page 169, Cherry tells a soldier who has a "burned, torn face" that he will be restored.  Cherry says, "Plastic surgeons are going to restore your face.  They will work from pre-war photographs of you.  They'll turn you out as good as ever."  And, undoubtedly, the soldier will have no scarring.

I was set against enjoying this book due to my experience with the previous two books.  I wanted Cherry's military experiences to be over quickly.  I did not enjoy the first part of the book at all.  I did enjoy the book somewhat once I reached the later part of the story, but even then, much of the story was not interesting to me.

These wartime books have way too much information about nursing technique for my taste.  Apparently, most readers of Cherry Ames love the information in these books and particularly enjoy the books set during World War II.  I am uninterested in nursing, so all of the information about nursing is boring to me.  The part about World War II should have been interesting to me, but I couldn't get past Cherry's unreal expectations of the military officers.  I greatly dislike these three books and doubt I will ever read them again.