At the time of the publishing of this Betty Neels book, I was not much older than the protagonist and was either working for the philanderer who impregnated three women in a few months, or I was working at the phone sex place. Either way, my experience of the early 1990s couldn’t have been more different than the world we encounter in this book, The Girl With Green Eyes.
Look, Betty Neels was never a grounded, gritty author, but even for her, this one is sublimely silly. Lucy is a limp noodle who never stands up for herself and just drifts through the book wherever the winds take her.
She works with orphans, but it’s never clear how she manages a bunch of unruly kids because she doesn’t seem to have the speak-up-for-yourself gene and, trust me, the kids would definitely have noticed. I worked with kids, they’re like sharks. Show even a little weakness and they’re circling in for blood. Okay, maybe not sharks… wolves… they can look adorable, but they are just waiting to take you down. It’s the circle of life in miniature, and it’s not pretty. This poor girl would have been a lamb to slaughter for those little piranhas. (Yes, I do like kids, why do you ask?)
Lucy meets the Doctor, who surprisingly isn’t Dutch (pretty much the only surprise of the book), when she takes an orphan for medical treatment. The two of them have never met, even though they run in the same social circles. It’s never openly stated, but it’s clear that Lucy comes from money and a place of prestige. Her family is bored by her preoccupation with the orphans, and she is overlooked in favor of her two sisters, who both hold assistant/secretarial jobs with little prestige.
There is a Dutch doctor in the book, but he’s a friend of a friend who is helping Lucy and the Doctor to get together. Thank goodness someone is, because the two people at the center of this book are hopeless.
There is another of the villainous women that Betty Neels loved to throw into her stories. This one is determined to have the wealthy doctor and all his money for herself, and she couldn’t be more cartoonish. Oh, wait, I forgot about the governess of the last book. At least this one wasn’t kicking puppies.
It’s one of the weakest of Betty Neels’ books, and even my love for her sweet stories choked on this one.
2 1/2 This-Would-Fit-Better-in-the-1890s Stars
