The Women Book Review

The Women

by Kristin Hannah

Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Ginasbookreport Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre: Historical Fiction / Literature / Feminism
Read This If You Love: The Nightingale / The Alice Network

“Men keep us in boxes, make us wear starched virgin white, and tell us that docs are gods. And the worst part is, we believe them.”

The Women by Kristin Hannah is a breathtaking epic novel that delves into the women who served in the Vietnam War. Francis McGrath has lived a privileged life, but longs for something meaningful. After she suffers a great loss, she trains to be a nurse and finds herself out of her depth and in the muck in Vietnam. The grueling work and fighting is in stark contrast to what is being reported in the news. While the days are long and bloody, Frankie makes the tightest bonds of her life befriending her bunk mates and fellow nurses. She finds love, loss, death, life, joy, and pain. Through her story of service and return to state-side life, Hannah weaves a heart-wrenching picture of the war and the women who are so often dismissed and overlooked. As she so succinctly points out, women can be heroes, too.

I’m so grateful to have read this book. Every year in school, we would get close to the end of the school year and I would request for my history teachers to cover Vietnam. It was fairly recent at that time and I was curious to know more about the conflict. It felt important to my young mind to understand what had happened and to better relate to people around me who I knew served. Every year, the teachers would mumble excuses about running out of time in the curriculum. Hannah paints a vivid picture of the mindset of the country regarding communism after JFK’s assassination and how that motivated US involvement. She also delves into the evolution of supporting/protesting the war. It was a great history lesson wrapped in a compelling piece of literature.

The Nightingale is one of my all-time favorite novels and while it still beats out The Women, this new novel takes second spot for me in the list of Hannah’s books. She excels in writing stories of war focused around women. To say I wept while reading both of these books is an understatement. I bawled when reading them and the writing is just so good. When trying to think of another author whose writing I find that emotionally touching, I was reminded of how I felt when reading Irving’s Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany, etc. You can’t get much more eloquent than lines like the following:

“War is full of goodbyes, and most of them never really happened; you were always too early or too late.”

The Women is broken into two parts with the first being set during the war “in country” and the second when Frankie is back in the United States. I found the first part to be the more compelling portion of the novel. Not that the second part isn’t good, but the first part was just so strong and vivid.