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A Thrilling Historical Novel of the Dark Side of Gilded Age New York City
by Amanda Skenandore
From acclaimed author and registered nurse Amanda Skenandore, a fascinating historical novel based on the little-known story of America's first nursing school, as a young female grifter in 1880s New York evades the police by conning her way into Bellevue Hospital's training school for nurses…
Based on Florence Nightingale's nursing principles, Bellevue is the first school of its kind in the country. Where once nurses were assumed to be ignorant and unskilled, Bellevue prizes discipline, intellect, and moral character, and only young women of good breeding need apply. At first, Una balks at her prim classmates and the doctors' endless commands. Yet life on the streets has prepared her for the horrors of injury and disease found on the wards, and she slowly gains friendship and self-respect.
Just as she finds her footing, Una's suspicions about a patient's death put her at risk of exposure, and will force her to choose between her instinct for self-preservation, and exposing her identity in order to save others.
Amanda Skenandore brings her medical expertise to a page-turning story that explores the evolution of modern nursing—including the grisly realities of nineteenth-century medicine—as seen through the eyes of an intriguing and dynamic heroine.
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"A spellbinding story, a vividly drawn setting, and characters that leap off the pages. This is historical fiction at its finest!" – Sara Ackerman, USA Today bestselling author of The Codebreaker's Secret
"Scrupulous in her research and practically clairvoyant in her choice of urgent subjects — from the Indigenous boarding schools of her first novel to the disease and quarantine of The Second Life of Mirielle West — historical novelist Amanda Skenandore has quietly become one of the valley's finest authors." —The Las Vegas Review Journal
This information about The Nurse's Secret was first featured
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Amanda Skenandore is an award-winning author of historical fiction and a registered nurse. Her debut novel, Between Earth and Sky, was winner of the American Library Association's RUSA Reading List Award and her third novel, The Second Life of Mirielle West, was the 2023 Silicon Valley Reads Selection, an Apple Best Books of the Month and a Hoopla Book Club Pick. She lives in Las Vegas, Nevada and can be found online at AmandaSkenandore.com.
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