Will I love The Women?

Here is another book about strong women who supported each other as they served in battle, not as soldiers, but as nurses.

Reading The Women, I got to experience the evacuation hospitals designed to provide rapid trauma care near combat zones. The war-torn love represented in these pages is both platonic and romantic.

This is not a YA novel, but it is a very accessible read, and it raises important ethical questions. What makes a good war, exactly?

This incredible story about women who served in the Vietnam War has stayed with me for months.

Like all strong historical fiction, the author shines a light on the experiences of a group of people that is basically ignored in history books. In this case, it is the women who served in Vietnam. It opened my eyes to the trauma they experienced. Many of the women were nurses who served in field hospitals and operated on patients while under attack.

But the story goes further than that. This book showed me how service members—including the women—were treated when they came… show more.

The first half of the book was absolutely enthralling, packed with tense drama and emotional depictions of front-line medical care during the Vietnam War. The second half, after the main character returns home from war, drags a bit in places and fixates on some toxic relationships. Despite those rough patches, I picked it as a favorite this year for its unique take on the nurses' story, an often-overlooked part of history.

What a twenty-fifth novel! For me, a historical story that tells me something new while plunging me into love and loss, chaos and destruction, heroism and friendship is a truly memorable feast of a read. The Vietnam War spanned my teenage years, with a big impact on how I thought about the world.
Frankie McGrath joined the American Army Nurse Corps in 1965 on impulse. She witnessed the overwhelming horror and tragedy of Vietnam, the senseless death and mutilation of young men in an insect-infested tropical jungle. And she forged the fiercest female friendships amidst that inferno. But ‘no women… show more.

This is a book of two halves. The first half deals with Frankie's experience in Vietnam. I found this horrific in terms of the injuries she has to nurse and the conditions the medical staff lived in - so much so that I almost abandoned the book. But I am so glad that I didn't! The second part of the book deals with how the nurses are treated on their return from Vietnam and that is even more of an eyeopener! They are treated appallingly. I learned so much about the US and the Vietnam war from reading this book.

Before traveling to Vietnam, I read this historical novel that profoundly shaped my experience. Trekking through jungle paths, I felt the emotional horror the author described. I empathized with her isolation upon returning home, rejected as a pariah.

Today’s Vietnam is vastly different, leaving me with complex emotions—understanding both the veterans who served there and the resilient people I met. The book deepened my appreciation for Vietnam’s modern philosophy: always looking forward, never backward- a good philosophy for everyone.

I liked it because the Vietnam war shaped so many of our lives. I didn’t like that Ms. Hannah relied too much on coincidences and the experiences of too many people.

I love a Kristin Hannah book for the writing, characters and deep emotion it draws up in me. This was no different but the glimpse into the Vietnam War was new - and heartbreaking for me. It held me from the first page and I finished it in two days.

There was so much I was never aware of regarding women serving in Vietnam. The book took me on a personal journey into the lives of nurses who survived and then tried to rebuild their lives after the war—only to be doubted and discounted and left to cope on their own.

What a luscious read from this great storyteller. She says she started this book years ago, early in her career, but it was too grand, too deep, for her emerging skills, and took this long to get together. It's worth the wait. We meet Frances "Frankie" McGrath, a nurse from a privileged family who joins the Army Nurse Corps to aid our soldiers injured in the Vietnam War. An innocent in many ways, she becomes friends with two other women and together they survive the horrors of war, returning to a country and a society that does not believe women… show more.