A review by rachels_booknook
The Women by Kristin Hannah

5.0

Thank you @netgalley and @stmartinspress for sending me this book for review. Opinions are mine. 

Everyone told me to read this book and they were right. I couldn’t put it down. I read this almost 500-page book in three days. It’s the first full Kristin Hannah book I’ve read, not being able to get through The Nightingale because it was too heartbreaking. 

Quoting Kristin Hannah on the @momsdonthavetimetoreadbooks podcast, “The Women is about the nurses, the young women in the 1960s who volunteered to serve in the Vietnam War. It’s their story of both going to war and coming home and what it was like.” 

This is a long book. But it was a long war. I think what this book drives home even more is that those who were lucky enough to come home never fully recovered – mentally, physically, emotionally. 

Frankie is a young American woman whose life has been changed by the Vietnam War. She enlists as an army nurse, trying to make her father proud, but having no clue what she’s getting into as Americans were lied to about the war for years – the harsh conditions, the death tolls, and even who exactly was fighting the war and why. 

The war chapters were of course hard to read, but riveting. I’ve never read a book set during the Vietnam War – a very different kind of war in the jungle. But when Frankie comes home, that’s when she really starts to feel the effects of the War and realizes that many Americans not only didn’t support the war, but also the veterans, and they especially didn’t believe any women had been in Vietnam at all. Frankie questions how she’s supposed to put her life back together when her service isn’t even acknowledged. 

Overall, this book is really about the enduring friendship of people who go through the same things together. While there were romantic relationships and those were extremely compelling, the central relationship in this novel was really Frankie, Ethel and Barb, nurses together during the war.