Linda Soules Releases 'So You Want To Be A Nurse,' a 44-Page Career Guide for Kids Ages 10 to 14

Author Linda Soules has released So You Want To Be A Nurse: A Kids' Guide to Nursing, Hospitals, Medicine, and the Compassionate Professionals Who Care for Us When We Are Sick, Scared, Hurt, or Brand New to the World, a 44-page children's nonfiction book now listed at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HP7Y5WXP. The book is written for readers ages 10 to 14, and for curious readers 8 and up. It follows a registered nurse through a full 12-hour shift and explains what the job involves, including the parts that are difficult. It is the latest title in Soules's So You Want To Be A… series of career-exploration books for young readers. The book's listing cites a Grand Prize in the 2026 Purple Dragonfly Book Awards and a Silver Award in the Children's Nonfiction category of the 2026 CIPA EVVY Book Awards.

Children usually meet nurses at moments of stress, such as a vaccination, a stitched-up knee, an emergency room visit or a relative's hospital stay. Few get a clear picture of what nurses do when the visit is over. Soules's book starts from a plain premise: in a hospital, doctors come and go, and nurses stay. They are often the people awake at 3 a.m., the first to notice a rising fever or a patient breathing a little too fast. The book uses that premise to show readers that nursing is a clinical, analytical and physically demanding profession, not only a caring one. It is aimed at young people who are beginning to think about what they might do as adults, and at the parents, teachers and librarians who help them.

The core of the book is a narrative walk through a busy shift. Readers follow a registered nurse as she catches early sepsis before it becomes life-threatening, helps a grandmother take her first steps after surgery, and gives a sticker to an IV pole named Steve. These scenes show nursing as a series of judgment calls, observations and small acts of kindness. The book also maps the range of settings where nurses work. Beyond hospital wards, it covers emergency rooms, newborn intensive care units, helicopters, cruise ships, schools and the Australian outback. The breadth is meant to show readers that a nursing credential leads to many kinds of work in many kinds of places.

A second section covers the history of the profession through short profiles. Susie Walking Bear Yellowtail was the first Crow registered nurse. Mary Seacole paid her own way to the Crimean War. Mary Eliza Mahoney was the first African American professionally trained nurse in the United States. The book also introduces Luther Christman, Kofoworola Abeni Pratt, Ildaura Murillo-Rohde, Lillian Wald and Florence Nightingale, who used colorful math charts to save soldiers' lives. Lighter material runs alongside the profiles: NASA's nurse for the first astronauts, the medical maggots and leeches nurses use on purpose, premature babies once displayed in incubators at Coney Island, and Nightingale's pet owl, which napped in her pocket. A "Talk Like a Nurse" page decodes hospital terms such as STAT, NPO and "code brown."

The book does not present nursing as uniformly rewarding. It addresses long shifts, staffing shortages, burnout and the emotional weight of caring for very sick people, and it does so in language pitched at young readers. It then lays out the route into the profession step by step, from nursing assistant to registered nurse to nurse practitioner. It argues that math, writing and courage matter more to the work than most people expect. For a reader weighing a future in health care, that combination of candor and a concrete pathway gives the book practical value beyond inspiration. It also gives parents and counselors a starting point for conversations about training, workload and what the job asks of a person.

Career books for children often lean on celebratory language and a narrow set of familiar jobs. Soules's series takes a different approach, treating young readers as capable thinkers who can handle accurate information. In this title, that means showing a realistic shift rather than an idealized one, naming the profession's pressures, and crediting nurses from Indigenous, Black, Latina, Jamaican and male backgrounds who shaped the field. The book also pairs its storytelling with tools readers can use immediately. These include activities to try, a career quiz, a glossary, and a curated list of books, websites and organizations for further exploration. The result is closer to a short field guide than a standard picture-book biography.

"Kids can handle the truth about hard jobs. When we show them the long shifts and the courage involved, they take the work more seriously, not less," said Linda Soules, author of the So You Want To Be A… series.

That philosophy runs through the series. Soules has said young readers are smarter, more curious and more capable than the publishing world often credits, and that they deserve books that respect their intelligence while sparking real enthusiasm. In the nursing title, the approach shows up in the choice to include sepsis, burnout and staffing shortages alongside the stories about helicopters and cruise ships. The aim is for a reader to finish the book with an accurate sense of what nurses do and why the work matters, whether or not that reader ever becomes one.

The book is written for several kinds of readers. A middle-schooler who has watched a relative recover in a hospital can see the daily work behind that experience. A student already interested in medicine can compare nursing roles, from nursing assistant to nurse practitioner, and see what each step requires. Readers who like unusual facts will find material to retell, from medical maggots to a NASA nurse. The inclusion of nurses from many backgrounds also gives readers who rarely see themselves in career books a set of historical figures to learn about. For families, the book offers a way to talk about illness and care with children who may be anxious about hospitals.

The publisher's description positions the book for classrooms, libraries and families. Its activities, career quiz, glossary and resource list make it suitable for STEM and health science lessons, career exploration units and homeschool programs. Teachers can use the shift narrative to discuss observation, data and critical thinking, and the historical profiles to connect science with social history. Florence Nightingale's use of charts to save soldiers' lives gives math teachers a concrete example of statistics applied to a real problem. School and public librarians looking to broaden career nonfiction collections beyond the most familiar professions will find a title that covers a large, widely trusted occupation. The book is also described as a gift for future nurses and for the nurses who inspire them.

So You Want To Be A Nurse is available through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HP7Y5WXP. The book runs 44 pages and carries the ISBN 979-8-951756-33-6. It is classified as children's nonfiction. Readers, parents, educators and librarians can find the full description, the listing's award citations and ordering options on the product page. Pricing and format details are shown on that page and may vary by edition and seller. Educators and librarians interested in the broader series can use the same Amazon listing as a starting point to see other titles by the author.

The nursing book joins a series that Soules envisions spanning more than 180 titles, with over 60 published to date and new releases arriving on a steady cadence. Subjects already covered range from astronauts and marine biologists to magicians, stunt performers and roller coaster designers. Each title is written to pull back the curtain on a real career, covering its joys, its challenges and the path to get there. The structure lets a family, classroom or library build a shelf of career books that grows over time. Adding nursing places a health care profession alongside the series' science, entertainment and engineering careers, and gives young readers one more realistic path to consider.

Linda Soules is the author and creator of the So You Want To Be A… series, a growing collection of career-exploration books for readers ages 10 to 14 and beyond. Her stated philosophy is never to talk down to kids, and each title is built to show a real career honestly, including its challenges and the route to get there. Before turning to children's publishing, she spent 25 years in law and finance, advising hedge funds and sophisticated financial institutions. So You Want To Be A Nurse is available at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0HP7Y5WXP.