paced female medico s odyssey, with another scalpel-and-scruples tale--this time concerning three women doctors, all dynamite practitioners. Among the freshman class (99% male) at California s?...?更多?? Castillo Medical College: gorgeous Sondra Mallone from Arizona, determined to ""help the people who had given her birth"" through medicine (adopted, Sondra is certain she s half black); Ruth Shapiro, determined to be Number One, driven by the need for one kind word of praise from Daddy (who always loved her other siblings best); and miserable Mickey Long, all alone but for a dying widowed mother, and psychically scarred by a huge disfiguring birthmark on one half of her face. The three friends will help and support one another through the rigors of medical training: while Ruth successfully plugs away, Sondra has a peak experience observing a brain operation (""the staggering comprehension of life and death""). . . and Mickey is transformed from Gorgon to gorgeous through the virtuoso efforts of a crack surgeon. But graduation means separation--Mickey to an internship in Hawaii, Ruth choosing obstetrics, Sondra heading for Africa. And meanwhile, of course, love raises its distracting head. Sondra, after avoiding romance, succumbs at a Kenyan mission--working alongside taciturn Dr. Derry Farrar, whose ""cobalt blue eyes"" shrewdly diagnose the many ills of his adoptive people: they wed, have a child, and plan to stay. Back in Hawaii, Mickey wonders if she did the right thing in choosing a plastic surgeon s life apart from filmmaker Jonathan--but she ll marry kind, wealthy Harrison, father of a doomed young accident victim. Up in Seattle, Ruth, married to quiet CPA Arnie Roth, is Super Mom and Super Everything (private practice, clinic, newspaper column-writing). But all three docs will face final crises--Arnie s infidelity, Sondra s devastating losses, Mickey s infertility--before meeting at their old school for rededication and mutual support. Much firmer and livelier than run-of-the-mill medico-soaps--with operating-theater energy and excitement steadily sparking the romantic melodrama.