07/03/2024
BOOK REVIEW
Title: The Women
Author: Kristin Hannah ()
Genre: Historical Fiction
Rating. 4.75 stars ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️✨
This book wrecked me! 😭 I picked up The Women because there isn’t a lot of historical fiction about the Vietnam War, especially not from women’s perspectives. This book was so powerful. 📚
Premise: Frances “Frankie” McGrath was raised to become a housewife, but one day someone tells her what she needs to hear: “Women can be heroes, too.” She joins the Army as a nurse, soon shipping off to Vietnam.
Thoughts: Frankie is a stand-in for all the women who served during then Vietnam War. She saw horrific traumas, only to come home to a country that a) didn’t acknowledge her presence in Vietnam, let alone her service, and b) didn’t respect veterans of the then-ongoing conflict at all. Even other veterans constantly invalidated her service and experiences after she came home.
Was this a perfect book? No, however impactful. A couple of anachronisms kept me from giving this a perfect 5-star rating:
1) A character mentions niblings named Kaylee and Braden, which are jarringly out of place for kids in the 1960s. More likely, they’d be named Karen and Michael or something.
2) Another character dances and hums along to Hey Jude a full year before the song actually came out in 1968.
These are minor though, and they don’t take away from the book’s impact.
As someone who lost a close family member to service-related PTSD, Frankie’s experiences after coming home were absolutely gut wrenching. I also found it interesting that she and so many other veterans chose to protest against the war, even as awful as the Vietnam conflict was - I had no idea there were vet protests like that. At one point Frankie makes a good point - to paraphrase, “support the troops, not the war.”
QOTD. Have you read The Women? What did you think of it? 📖
