Historical fiction can be hard-hitting, but The Women is worth it.
I had decided not to read Kristin Hannah’s latest novel, The Women, in spite of all the buzz, because a good friend and avid reader told me it made her mad – and who wants to be mad on summer vacation?! But with so many others telling me how amazing it was, I dove in – and as it turns out, they were all right.
The book follows a twenty-year-old nurse from idyllic Southern California on her quest to join her brother in the Vietnam War. We witness the many, many horrors she faced during her time as an Army nurse in Vietnam, as well as the aftermath of her military service in the years that followed back in the United States.
In a fragile state of mind, often reliving the worst moments of war in her head, the last thing Frankie, our main character, needed was to be treated as anything less than a hero upon her return home. But as a nation divided, not only did her fellow Americans not give her a hero’s welcome, they largely doubted she even served in the military, as most Americans were led to believe there were no women serving in Vietnam. As we know now, Americans were led to believe a lot of things about Vietnam that simply weren’t true.
I didn’t really know much about the Vietnam War before reading The Women, and now, I really want to learn more. Kristin Hannah tells us at the end of the audiobook (read by Julia Whelan, which took some getting used to on my part after usually hearing her read Emily Henry’s rom-coms) that she had been working on this book for decades and worked hard to make it as factual as possible, reading about and interviewing as many women as she could find.
The Women was a tough read at times, but worth it overall (and I did finish out the summer with a lighter read!).
