Waiting for Angels

“Angels?” Miss Kitty asked when I suggested she might like Odyssey of Angels by Joan La Blanc. She accepted the book and then looked at me with more antipathy than confusion.

“I thought you meant the Christmas kind. You know, with wings and harps. I’m ready for mistletoe and holly. Not nurses on a mission.”

Subtitled, A Novel of Navy Nurses in World War Two, the story is set on a hospital ship in the South Pacific Theater of World War II. But it’s not entirely about nurses, the war, or angels of mercy.

“It’s a love story,” I explained to Miss Kitty.

“Well then,” she purred. “I like a good love story.”

“It’s set against the mundane minutiae of ship operations, gruesome details of maimed servicemen, and lush descriptions of tropical paradises marred with dank smells of creosote and urine,” I said. “Navy nurse Anna Donovan is a young and beautiful widow who is engaged to a doctor. Yet she falls for a married chaplain.”

“Aha!” Miss Kitty blinked. “That sounds more like it.”

Putting aside her initial reluctance, Miss Kitty stretched into a relaxed position and burrowed into the story. Minutes later, however, she was confused anew by characters who appeared without context.

“It’s the third book in La Blanc’s four-volume set,” I explained. “All those characters—family members, friends, a dead husband, the current fiancé—appeared in the first two books.”

Miss Kitty squinched her eyes and refocused them on the current tale of a Navy nurse aboard the USS Compassion. A hospital ship, the fictitious Compassion is modeled on the comfort-class hospital ships that evacuated and transported injured servicemen.

One such ship, the USS Comfort, was attacked in April 1945 when a Japanese kamikaze pilot crashed into it, killing 28 people, including six nurses, four surgeons, and seven patients. Not only did the crew of the Compassion react with horror to the news of that blatant suicide attack on a hospital ship, but they also lived through a terrifying moment when a kamikaze pilot nearly destroyed their own.

The romance thrives in stark juxtaposition to cynical observations about war and God’s role in human suffering. Anna grapples with her private fall from grace within a larger scheme of deceit that involves the clandestine transportation of troops and the black-market trade of morphine.

When Anna leaves the Compassion for the last time, it is with a sense of being “wrenched from a secure womb.”

Miss Kitty wondered if Anna’s rebirth would allow a transition from lover in an illicit romance to faithful wife in an honorable marriage.

“You’ll have to read Ordinary Angels,” I suggested, referring to the fourth and final book in La Blanc’s series.

“I don’t want an ordinary angel,” Miss Kitty yawned. “I want a Christmas angel.” With that, she snuggled into a catnap of wings and harps.

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