Betty Neels wrote gentle, clean romances from 1970 to about 2000, many featuring English ladies, often nurses, and Dutch or English rich men, often doctors. These three novels are good examples of her writing.
The End of the Rainbow
Olympia is a trained nurse who works for her aunt at below-minimum wage in her very profitable London nursing home. When Olympia was young her nasty aunt convince Olympia to promise that she would work for her aunt forever, unless she married, and Olympia feels bound by this promise. Olympia encounters Dutch doctor Waldo van der Graaf whose wife is dead, leaving him with a young daughter.
Waldo proposes marriage under the guise of wanting a mother for his daughter. Elizabeth, a long-time friend of Waldo’s secretly sabotages Olympia, finally convincing his little girl to run away while blaming it on Olympia. Of course everything ends up happy.
Neels created a sympathetic character in Olympia and built her well. Often Neels creates female characters who effortlessly adapt to a completely different lifestyle – foreign country, marriage, being rich and living in a home with servants and plenty of money for clothes and flowers – and Olympia actually has to learn how to act in this new environment. Waldo and the other characters are less well-crafted, acting more as a cipher and respondent. The End of the Rainbow is one of Neels’ enjoyable stories.
4 Stars
The Bachelor’s Wedding
I liked The Bachelor’s Wedding the best of the three novels reviewed here, in part because our heroine is not a nurse but a an emergency home helper, and neither of the two protagonists is secretly in love with the other.
Araminta lives with her “delicate” (aka lazy and selfish) sister and feckless father who dotes on her sister and views Araminta as unpaid help. Professor Jason Lister hires Araminta to care for his niece and nephew when his sister must leave the country with no notice for an emergency. First Araminta cares for them in Jason’s London home, then she goes with the two teens to their country home and stays a couple of weeks.
She doesn’t see much of Jason but finds him intriguing and kind, but intimidating. When she returns home her sister hasn’t cleaned or done anything except spend all the housekeeping money on herself and her father expects her to user her earnings to pay the bills they both ran up.
(On a side note I’m appalled at the times Araminta mentions having to make other people’s beds. Why doesn’t everyone make their own?)
Jason hasn’t fallen in love with her, nor she with him, but they like each other and he decides it’s time to marry and get a buffer against all the demanding young ladies he knows. She likes him well enough and accepts, which causes her father to call her selfish and her sister to not attend her wedding but rather to wish her ill.
Of course everything ends up happy in the end.
4 Stars (Judging only Neels work I’d give this 5 stars)
The Little Dragon
I couldn’t finish this as the entire premise is nauseating. Constantia worked as a private nurse for many rich people who were nasty and selfish and concluded all rich people were icky. Dutch doctor Jeroen van der Giessen falls for her and constructs an elaborate charade of being poor and gets her to marry him in order to care for two children. Constantia is supposedly so gullible and stupid that she believes this and assumes that Jeroen must be living in a rich uncle’s lovely home.
1 Star
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