The Night Shift by Nancy PeachMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Violet Winters has volunteered to work nights at Christmas in her Bristol hospital, mainly to avoid telling her loving parents how much she is struggling as a Junior Doctor. She struggles with social niceties and has offended both staff and patients with her abrupt manner.
Doctor Gus Jovic is an anaesthetist, he knows everyone in the hospital by name, is funny, friendly, very good to look at, and very much engaged to be married. Or so everyone thinks. In reality his fiancée left him three months ago for another man but he can't bear to tell anyone, especially his family who rely on him to be the carefree one with his life in order.
When Gus meets Violet he is intrigued by someone who doesn't hesitate to tell the unvarnished truth, there's no subterfuge with Violet, and as a man who spends his entire life trying to find ways to smooth things over, phrase things nicely, etc he finds it refreshing. After all, he spent the entire time with his fiancée bending over backwards to meet her demands, appease her insecurities, and getting whiplash from her mercurial moods.
For her part, Gus gives Violet some good advice, both about dealing with staff and patients and about hanging in during her first year because no-one is confident and after the first year she can start to understand where she wants to specialise. Violet would never mess with an engaged man, so although she objectively finds him very attractive, and subjectively he makes her heart flutter, she thinks he is safely in the friends zone.
I really enjoyed this book. Violet and Gus helped each other, she helped him see that he needed to view his own needs as just as important as other people's and he helped her to see that there are ways of telling the truth which are more palatable than others.
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