The Women by Kristen Hannah ~ Book Review

Frankie McGrath is a young woman barely out of her teens from a well to do California family where they live a typical all American lifestyle.  Image is everything in their circles and the men in the family serving their country are upheld highly.  Women go to school and then marry and become mothers.  That is the way of things. For various reason her father never did serve but has a family wall of heroes in his study of all the men in the family who served.  When her brother Finley gets drafted to the Vietnam war everyone is very proud and throws him a huge going away party.  But once he is gone, Frankie is at loose ends without her beloved brother and so she makes a rash decision to take her nursing degree and sign up with the Army Nurse Corp  hoping to see her brother in Vietnam.  Thinking her family would be proud, she is shocked when her father is angry and her mother is devastated.  When she arrives in Vietnam she is immediately thrown into the middle of the destruction and horror of what the war really is.  Nothing like the upbeat letters her brother had sent home.  When she finally comes home she does not find the rest and peace she hoped for or deserved for her 2 years of service on the front.  She comes home to a country divided, full of protests and is spat on when in uniform.  Her parents refuse to talk about Vietnam and what she experienced.  In fact, wherever she turns, people deny that women were even over in 'Nam.  As the anger in her builds, Frankie fights a whole other battle within herself away from Vietnam that has everything to do with being in Vietnam.

This is the most talked about book at the moment in any of the fb book groups that I am a part of.  The author first conceived of it more than 20 years ago but felt she wasn't, at that point in her writing, to do it justice.  She finally wrote it now.  It is intense.  Very, very intense.  So many trigger warnings but a story that must be told.  I was just a child when this war was being fought and I really had no idea. The story for me had 3 parts:  The first being the background of Frankie's life growing up in the idyllic American dream.  Then her two tours in Vietnam as a combat nurse.  And the last part being her experiences returning to a divided America who's government had been lying to them about the war.  The author does not hold back on the horrors experienced by the soldiers or the medical teams that tried to save their lives.  There is lots of descriptions of the combat and the injuries that came into medical units and what they had to do to save the men's lives.  The author did a good job in telling the story of the women who were over in Vietnam helping to save lives and the strong friendships that were formed amongst the nurses and the medical teams and other relationships that were formed.  She also did a really good job of relaying the experience of PTSD, from what I can tell as I've never had it or known anyone who did.  But she was able to bring in my emotions as the characters experienced it in the story.   It certainly opened my eyes to how easy it is to make wrong choices and decisions when experiencing and reliving the horrors that someone in combat does.  I learned a lot about a war I really knew nothing of.  The only thing that kept this from a 10 star read for me was I felt there was some repetition of things.  I especially remember one specific paragraph that jumped out at me because I felt it was literally copied and pasted from an earlier part in the story.  But that being said, it is an important book that finally tells the heartbreaking story of the women and and men who fought in an un-win-able, awful war and who for years to come were certainly not held as heroes.  

A note: if you want/need to know the trigger warnings before getting into this story email me as I didn't want to give spoilers in the review.

I gave it a 9/10 rating