A Nurse's Story (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

Although not widely reviewed in the year of its release, Peter Baida's collection A Nurse's Story and Others was very well received by those critics who did review it. As Aoibheann Sweeney notes in the New York Times: "Baida is not a sucker for happy endings. The nine stories in his posthumous collection are about the kinds of characters — nurses, patients, old unionists and old friends — who make mistakes they cannot fix and confront questions they cannot resolve." Jeff Zaleski of Publishers Weekly concurs with this suggestion that Baida's stories are open-ended. Zaleski concludes that Baida's "stories offer no grand epiphanies, no tidy resolutions — but they address complicated issues of loyalty, class, race, ethics and family in a spare, direct style that is insightful and moving."

Although critics tended toward plot summary of the stories rather than extensive praise for any single one, their comments are consistently directed at celebrating Baida's humanity. In the end, as Sweeney concludes, Baida's only collection does what the most carefully crafted fiction should do: it "leaves us not with a more comfortable sense of the world's injustices but with a keener one." Though assessments of Baida's work are few, the collection was highly recommended as part of Ellie Barta-Moran's listing of adult fiction in Booklist.