ZERO TO TEN

A short story collection by a retired nurse that depicts moments of trauma and triumph.

Debut author Taylor enjoyed a long and diverse career in nursing; over the course of 40 years, she served in hospice and psychiatric units, treated AIDS and cancer patients, and taught psychiatry to students in a nursing program. All of these roles and more are featured in this assemblage of more than a dozen tales that are either inspired by events in her own life or directly based upon them; the author refers to the stories as being “mostly fictional.” Each one of them provides an impressive look into the challenging world of nursing. In the first work, “Something New,” the protagonist, Patti, who’s a fledgling student nurse, witnesses a birth for the very first time and is astonished by the complexity and struggle of it all. She’s daunted by the experience, but she’s also fascinated: “A few minutes ago I would have said that this was definitely not for me; it was all too much. Now I wonder. Maybe, just maybe, this is something I could get used to.” The author also dramatizes achingly personal moments; in “I’ll Fly Away,” for example, she recounts her real-life experience of her own mother dying of cancer, in which she was left to await the inevitable. All of these pieces are written in a plain, straightforward prose style and have the feel of casual anecdotes, free of poetical embellishment. This lends the stories a low-key power and places the emphasis less on linguistic invention than on plot and protagonists’ insights.

However, this stylistic approach may eventually exhaust the reader precisely because the language casts no compelling spell of its own. Furthermore, the works can be excessively sentimental at times and even a touch cloying. Consider one of the concluding passages of “I’ll Fly Away”: “I wear hot pink to her funeral. We follow the program that she designed with her minister before her death, and sing all the old spirituals, including I’ll Fly Away. I’m high on the idea of her being in heaven with her mother. I know someday I’ll join them there. Hallelujah,I’ll Fly Away too.” There’s a neatness to the way Taylor uses the spiritual to tether the paragraph together, but this narrative symmetry comes across as contrivance. The primary allure of the author’s stories over the course of this collection is their realistic depiction of a complex professional world that very few people get to tour; if they do, it’s only from the perspective of a patient, which isn’t the clearest lens from which to view it. In this compilation, one receives the sharply focused testimony of the other side—an account that shows the deep humanity of a profession that’s devoted to saving other human beings’ lives. Taylor’s collection is impressively honest in this regard, as the reader gets to see the genuine heroism of nurses without any feeling of romanticization.

A thoughtful, if unevenly executed, set of tales about the world of nursing.