Review of "Nurse Dorothea Presents: Not Taking People and Things for Granted" by Michael Dow

​Score: 90/100 (9.0 out of 10)

Nurse Dorothea Presents: Not Taking People and Things for Granted is a gentle, classroom-style mental health book built around Nurse Dorothea leading an after-school discussion on what it means to take people, relationships, nature, daily life, and ordinary blessings for granted.

The book frames that behavior not just as a manners issue, but as something tied to emotional well-being, because feeling overlooked, unappreciated, or taken for granted can genuinely hurt and disrupt a person’s mental equilibrium. It is organized into four parts and presented as an interactive experience, with discussion prompts, student responses, poems, reflection, and practical ideas for showing appreciation.

At its core, the book argues that gratitude has to be active. Nurse Dorothea defines taking something for granted as assuming it will always be there, failing to show gratitude, or accepting it thoughtlessly as a given. From there, the book explores examples of people taking friends, love, support, nature, and even the Earth itself for granted. It also spends time on signs of unappreciation, like taking more than one gives or expecting favors without reciprocating.

The later sections move into solutions. The students and Nurse Dorothea discuss ways to resist this mindset, such as cherishing moments, focusing on what is within one’s control, avoiding constant complaint, practicing gratitude, doing self-care, seeing the good in people and situations, using coping skills, finding joy in ordinary life, and trying to view life as something miraculous rather than routine. The ending leans inspirational, closing with gratitude quotes and a reminder to care not only for your own mental health, but to help others on their journey too.

Like with a lot of things we've reviewed by Dow, the concept is actually very good, however, the execution is messy, clunky, and dry. Dow continues to struggle at presenting characters who seem like real people—or even, well, three-dimensional characters—instead of just talking heads to further a point. These student characters have almost no depth beyond having a name and a brief thing to share. Nurse Dorothea herself doesn't seem to have much depth beyond perhaps liking poetry and meaning well. By the way, why is Nurse Dorothea teaching a classroom? Teachers make about $10K-$20K less than nurses do every year. We get doing it for the love of the game, but Nurse Dorothea is technically losing money being a teacher. You could argue that this is an afterschool "Mental Health Club", however, that prompts the issue: Why are there seemingly dozens of students in this Mental Health Club? How bad have things gotten in society that dozens of students are literally joining a club exclusively about mental health rather than playing sports or joining the Girl Scouts/Boy Scouts?

However, our main issue with this book is this: the writing is so... unnatural and inorganic. We kept asking ourselves: Who talks like this?

Here's an example: when was the last time you witnessed a child raise their hand and say, "I feel I have taken for granted our healthcare system like our system of vaccines. I know vaccines can protect me from developing a dangerous illness that would affect the quality of my life as well as possibly being life-threatening. So much work has gone into researching vaccines and how to make them."

You know what would've fixed this? If instead of this one random kid giving this speech, Nurse Dorothea had a Socratic discussion with him leading to these conclusions instead of him just spurting them out. Like, she could've prompted him with questions such as, "In what ways do vaccines help us?"

This has been an issue with a lot of Dow's books, mainly the Nurse Florence series. The prose and dialogue often feel overly scripted rather than lived-in. Instead of sounding like real conversation, it sounds like a lesson plan being recited aloud. Characters do not really speak with rhythm, personality, spontaneity, or emotional texture. They often sound like mouthpieces for a message. The writing sounds really choppy and bland. There's little to no variety in language or sentence structure.

Almost every sentence sounds the same when read aloud. The cadence rarely changes. The phrasing keeps falling into the same kind of this-and-that, that-and-this, don't-do-this, don't-do-that, point-A-point-B construction, which makes the prose feel formulaic instead of fluid. It is so vanilla, flat, and basic that even when the book is talking about meaningful things, like gratitude, appreciation, and emotional well-being, the language drains a lot of the life out of those ideas.

That is the frustrating part. The book is not empty. It actually has heart. It has a lovely purpose. It wants to encourage reflection and healthier ways of thinking. But the actual writing keeps getting in its own way. Rather than drawing us into a believable classroom full of distinctive students, it often feels like we are reading bullet points that were stretched into dialogue. The result is a book that is admirable in intention but underwhelming in execution.

Let's count how many times the same words and phrases are reused in this 279 page book:
Let's start with the big one: “for granted” appears 133 times. One-hundred and thirty-three times!

Almost every page (with text) and like half the paragraphs include the phrase "for granted." It plays over and over again like a broken record. The most frustrating thing is that it sometimes even occurs in the exact same paragraph.

On page 11, the phrase shows up three times in one paragraph: first in “not taking people and/or things for granted,” then again in “when you were taken for granted,” and then again in “taking people and things for granted affects your mental health.” That is a lot of repetition for one short introductory passage.

On page 29, it becomes even more egregious. Dimitry says, “I feel I have taken nature for granted,” then later in the same paragraph says, “that’s why I took it for granted.” Nurse Dorothea then follows that with “not take things for granted” and “not take things for granted” again in the very next paragraph. So that page hits the phrase four times in a very small space.

But that's not the only phrase that's repeated over and over again.

“Nurse Dorothea calls” appears 73 times
“raises her hand” or "raises his hand" appears 73 times
“calls on him to talk” or "calls on her" appears 73 times

So, practically every scene or conversation in this book flows this exact same way and include these three phrases.

This makes the book seem really repetitive and formulaic.

By the way, "mental health" and "mental" are also repeated multiple times on the same page (17).
Also, kicking this off with Nurse Dorothea reciting not one, not two, but THREE POEMS comes across as really strange and unnatural. Who does that? What teacher just recites three different poems in a row to a bunch of grade school students? It should really only take one quote from one of these poems to make the point that Dorothea was trying to make.

Phew... well, let's talk about one way in which the book shines beside its valuable overall message. The illustrations are above average, especially for a Dow book. Lindsay Roberts, the illustrator, really did a high-effort, spirited job at producing about a hundred pages worth of illustrations! Wow! And many of them are actually quite good. They're like the art over at Chicano Park or Denver International Airport. There's a little bit of an uncanny valley in the appearance of these characters, but it is what it is. We question if the abstractness of some of this art is really appropriate for kids. There's a lot of symbolism and strangeness like a bloody hand in the middle of a clock, the use of the Yin & Yang symbol, and tons of hand gestures that make us wonder if this was originally supposed to double as a sign language book or something.

Anyway, the intentions behind this book were good.

Check it out on Amazon!