The Women

by Kristin Hannah

Genre: Historical Fiction
Published: 2024
My Rating: ★★★★★
Storykeeper’s Verdict: A Story Worth Keeping

“There were no women in Vietnam.”

Every time some version of that sentiment appeared in this book, I wanted to punch something.

There WERE women in Vietnam.

They were nurses. They were officers. They were serving their country. They were standing in operating rooms trying to save horribly wounded soldiers while war raged around them. They witnessed things no human being should have to witness and then many of them came home to a country that acted as though they hadn’t even been there.

And that made me SO mad.

Kristin Hannah has a way of writing stories that stay with me long after I’ve finished them. The Nightingale absolutely broke my heart, so when I picked up The Women, I expected another emotional experience.

I got one.

But this time, the emotion I couldn’t shake was anger.

The Women follows Frances “Frankie” McGrath, a young woman raised in a world where the heroes displayed proudly on her family’s wall are men. Then her brother ships off to Vietnam, and Frankie makes a decision that will completely alter the course of her life: she joins the Army Nurse Corps.

And she goes to war.

Frankie arrives inexperienced and completely unprepared for the reality waiting for her. Very quickly, the sheltered life she knew is replaced by blood, death, fear, exhaustion, impossible decisions, and the relentless task of trying to keep people alive.

But she does find something good there…

Her people.

The friendships Frankie forms with the women serving beside her became one of my favorite parts of this entire book. If you have read A Court of Silver Flames, it reminds me of Nesta finding her girls, Gwyn and Emerie.

And this part hit particularly close to home for me.

As a firefighter, there was something about these relationships that I understood immediately. There is a bond that can form between people who experience difficult things together that is incredibly hard to explain to anyone outside of it.

Sometimes you don’t need to explain why something bothered you. You don’t need to describe what you saw. You don’t have to explain why you’re angry, why you’re quiet, or why something that seems insignificant to everyone else has gotten under your skin.

The people who were there already know.

Obviously, what I experience in my profession is not the same as serving in the Vietnam War, and I would never pretend that it is. But that feeling of relying on the people beside you, the people who understand because they were there too, felt familiar to me.

Watching Frankie develop those relationships made the women in this story feel even more real.

And then she came home. And her coming home made me even angrier.

I knew Vietnam veterans were treated horribly when they returned to the United States. What I hadn’t really considered before reading this book was what that experience looked like for the women who served.

Frankie returns carrying everything she experienced during the war, only to discover that the country she came home to doesn’t know what to do with her. Worse, some people refuse to believe she served at all. Again and again, she encounters the same attitude:

“Women weren’t in Vietnam.”

Imagine surviving a war. Imagine watching people die. Imagine desperately trying to save them. Imagine carrying those memories home with you and struggling to understand how you’re supposed to simply return to normal life afterward.

And then imagine being told, essentially, “That didn’t happen. You weren’t there.”

That part of Frankie’s story infuriated me.

Her trauma doesn’t disappear simply because other people refuse to acknowledge it. She is struggling, grieving, and desperately trying to find her footing and the very systems that should recognize what she’s experiencing often fail her.

I wanted someone to LOOK AT HER. To listen to her. To tell her that what she experienced mattered.

“The Women” is exactly the right title

By the time I finished this book, the title meant so much more to me than it did when I started. Yes, this is Frankie’s story, but it also feels like a tribute to the women whose stories were pushed aside, minimized, forgotten, or never properly recorded at all.

These women served, sacrificed, and came home carrying wounds people couldn’t see. They deserved to have their stories remembered too. That’s what I think Kristin Hannah does so beautifully here. She takes a part of history many readers may never have thought deeply about and forces us to look directly at it.

I finished The Nightingale devastated by what women endured during war. I finished The Women angry about what happened afterward.

And that’s why this book stayed with me.

Because beneath the war, the trauma, the friendships, and Frankie’s journey is an idea that feels perfectly suited for this little Hearth of mine: A person’s story doesn’t become less important simply because history failed to remember it. The women were there and their stories are worth keeping.

If you’ve read it, let me know what you thought below!

~Chelsea

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