The Women, a fiction novel based on the real-life story of the Vietnam War, is a phenomenal read. One of the best all-time novels ever. Heart-wrenching, heartbreaking, heart-stopping. Painfully good. Kristin Hannah is a brilliant writer, and no other author could have written this as well as she did. The story of Frankie, a Vietnam nurse, coupled with the descriptive setting that the author does so well puts you smack down in the middle of the action A beautiful story, and a beautiful tribute to those who served. Truly an unputdownable read.

Knowing the topic of this book, you know it won’t be light reading. I admit, I cried, a lot….but it was worth it. I also admit that I haven’t read many stories about the Vietnam war. My closest tie is probably my sister in laws parents who are both Vietnam veterans, he was a pilot and she was a nurse.

This is the story of Frankie, from naive young nurse through the war and the aftermath. From a historical perspective, it hurts to know how badly these vets were treated upon their return. I loved that it wasn’t just a war story and you got the full story of what happens after the war. I can’t imagine serving like she did and being told that there were no women in the war! I wanted to scream on her behalf.

Her relationships with her family were really well developed. I think we can all agree, the relationships with men were roller coasters…. But the best relationships had to be Barb and Ethel. It is every woman’s dream to have friendships like that.

I was shocked at the ending and then cried some more. I didn’t realize that there was a memorial for the women too, how cool is that! I hope that means that the women will never be forgotten.

Where I'm coming from:
I was born in the very late 1950s. The Vietnam war was a part of my childhood, in the background, nightly news. Too recent to be "history" by the time I hit junior high / high school and too far in the past to be considered "current event". It wasn't discussed much in my schooling.

My cousin served. He didn't talk about what went on "over there". In the past year, I've stumbled over four books set in Vietnam. Because of each of those, I'd love to pick his brain about his experiences, but sadly he's no longer with us.

What I felt:
As I read THE WOMEN, I was totally transported. I could SEE everything, I was in the middle of the action. I ached for Frankie and the casualties. I sympathized with the families. I was close to tears at the end of the book. It will stay with me.

But:
-- I got angry at 80% when I thought that the book was going to take a turn I didn't like -- after all Frankie had been through, I was afraid of the direction she was headed.
-- There is one sentence that was continually repeated (at least three times). "There were veterans in wheelchairs and on crutches, some blinded and being helped along by friends." The first time I read it, it was a powerful visual. By the third time, I thought: "come on now, find a different way to describe it"
-- I don't like the title. THE WOMEN is too general. If you want those word, maybe it should be THE INVISIBLE WOMEN.
-- and grrrr to the one reviewer who posted her favorite quotes and blew the ending for me!

I think Kristen Hannah will be considered one of the best authors of the century. Every novel is amazing. The Women is one of her best. Have never read any story of women in the war and this was such a jolt to the senses. Every paragraph brings you closer and closer to her world and she makes you a part of it. Marvelous read!

I am giving this book ALL the stars. The Vietnam war was taking place during my formative years so the story struck home for me.
This is a riveting story of navigating and surviving not only the war, but it's aftermath and all that it entails.
Brought back so many memories of the turmoil of the times for me both good and bad. Highly recommend. I will be thinking about this book for a long time. Highly recommend.

6 out of 5! Definitely buying a print copy for my sharing library.

Frances Grace McGrath adores her older brother Finely. When Finely is shipped to Viet Nam she decides she is going to join him as a RN (nurse). By the time she completes her studies, get accepted into the Army Corp of Nurses and is ready to ship out the family receives a letter from the Navy that Fin had died. Determined to do the her best to save other men she arrives in Vietnam ill equipped for what awaits her.

This historical fiction novel kept me riveted. Attending high school during Frankie's time in Vietnam this book was extremely relevant to my memories of the era. What Frankie and her nursing sisters lived through was shell shocking and their return to civilian life was disgraceful in the way not only the general public dishonored them but that the Male Veterans and the government administration dismissed women's service.

How Frankie and her fellow nurses made lives for themselves had me cheering for them at every turn.

This is a book every person should read. If we don't learn history we are bound to repeat it and this is one bit of history that should never happen again.

Frances "Frankie" McGrath has seen the hero's wall in her father's library her whole life. The men of the family are pictured in uniform while the women of the family are shown on their wedding day. In her family, only the men are seen as heroes. Her brother's picture will soon be on that wall since he is about to leave for Vietnam. Can women be heroes too? After becoming a nurse, Frankie decides to enlist and go to Vietnam.

Frankie acted impulsively. As she reports for duty in Vietnam, she realizes this job is much more challenging than she imagined. Understaffed and overworked, medical personnel in Vietnam saved lives in spite of the difficult circumstances. As Frankie serves, the letters from home explain that America is changing. People are protesting this war. Soldiers returning from combat are not celebrated as the veterans of other wars have been. There are no heroes.

The Women looks at the experiences of women who served in Vietnam. Vets were harassed, called names, and told their service didn't matter. Women who served in Vietnam were denied recognition of their service and their contributions were ignored. Frankie returns from war with valuable trauma experience but no one will recognize her skills. She suffers from the horrors she dealt with in Vietnam and the misunderstanding of the American people. Will time heal these wounds? How can the American public understand Vietnam?

Time has passed and popular opinion has changed. America no longer feels that Vietnam service is an embarrassment. Kristin Hannah deftly opens our eyes to the sacrifices made by scores of women serving our country. What they did and how they overcame the situations they were placed in is genuinely heroic. Kristin Hannah uses her magnificent storytelling ability to bring long-overdue recognition to women who deserve our thanks.

I knew that I would love this book because of KH’s proven track record, but I did not expect for it to break my heart in every way possible.

The way KH is able to transport you to any setting within the first few pages of this book is unmatched. The main character, Frankie, has so many dimensions and you feel her losses and struggles as your own.

This book is perfect for every type of reader; Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC!

Wow! I think I liked this better than The Nightingale. What a shocking look into the Vietnam war this was. I have always heard about the anti-war sentiment and lack of help for our returning veterans, but through reading this I better understand what it may have actually been like for them.

This book focuses on the WOMEN who served in Vietnam. Most people don’t even know that women served. And as this book pointed out, most men that served didn’t even know there women who served.

Our main character, Frankie, signs herself up to be an army nurse and deploy to Vietnam, following in her brother’s footsteps. This went against everything well-to-do women were supposed to want to achieve at the time and actually disappointed her family.

We follow Frankie as she starts out as a wide eyed innocent girl getting more than she bargained for, to her becoming a war hardened woman who experience love, friendship, and loss in Vietnam and then deals with the fallout back in the US.

At the center of the story, and my favorite part of it, is the female friendships forged and maintained throughout Frankie’s life. They quite literally save her life more than once.

Without trying to give too much more away, this is a highly recommend and 5 stars from me! I especially loved the first half of the novel and can’t wait until it comes out in January.

Thank you to St. Martin’s Press and Netgally for this early read of this incredible book. All opinions are my own.

The Positives:
There are so many things this book has going for it. The untold stories of the women of Vietnam. The horror of a war that isn’t spoken/written about as often. The reaction and unsettling actions from the American people and their views on the Vietnam War. The PTSD representation is done so well.

Part one felt a little slow in the pacing for me sometimes. But I chalked that up to a me issue because it’s heavy on the war and nursing which are two things that don’t immediately grab my attention. But even so, I was enjoying it! It was well researched and well written and felt authentic to that time period.

Now for the part that didn’t work for me:
*** Spoilers ahead. ***
This felt like KH was just simply writing for the shock value. But like even the twists were so repetitive.

First, three of the men she is closes with die. (It’s war. I get it.) But then not one, but TWO of them come back from the dead.
Then, there’s multiple accidental pregnancies. We all should know how I feel about that at this point.
And the miscarriage. Lord, help me. This storyline was NOT needed AT ALL. But then to blame it (and ALL of the miscarriages of the time) on herbicide, angers me so much. It’s fair and factual to mention that. But anytime an author writes about pregnancy and miscarriages, it needs to be handled with grace and consideration. And this was not.

And then the love stories. Why was everything so affair-y?

I feel like the author was just trying to make us cry. And zero tears were shed by this overwhelming amount of chaos.

In The Women by Kristin Hannah, the turbulence of the 1960’s comes alive through her characters and their experiences. Frankie McGrath who was raised on Coronado Island in a rarified atmosphere, decides to follow her brother’s footsteps to Vietnam. She enlisted in the Army Nurse Corps and treated the wounded soldiers and civilians in Vietnam. As brutal and traumatic as her experience in treating wounded soldiers, Frankie found that she was very good at tending to the soldiers’ physical and emotional needs. But like many veterans, she had a difficult time adjusting to civilian life when she returned. Kristin Hannah explores sensitive issues such as PTSD, lack of support, and mental health. Although this is historical fiction, it accurately reflects the upheaval in society during the ‘60’s and the contribution women made in the war effort. I highly recommend this book to readers of historical fiction and to readers who have enjoyed Kristin Hannah’s previous books. Thank you to NetGalley for an advance digital copy of this book.

The Women by Kristin Hannah is one of those books you keep thinking about and talking about long after you have read it! I learned so much from this book especially how women played such an important role during the Vietnam War. Not only for their medical skills but how much they helped the men feel like someone genuinely cared about them and wanted to help them get home to their loved ones. Loved the characters! This is my favorite book by Kristin Hannah and my favorite book I have read this year!

My only complaint about The Women is the amount of sleep I lost consuming it. I read it in less than 48 hours. I could not put it down.

If you’ve read any Kristin Hannah books then you know they always come with big emotions. And man did this book have them. Love, betrayal, friendship, loss, hope, despair, heartbreak, faith, resilience, addiction, trauma.

It follows the story of Frankie, a young privileged woman who volunteers to serve as a nurse in the Vietnam war to try to make her father proud and because someone told her “women can be heroes too.” She is barely out of college with only a couple weeks of real world experience when she is thrust into a mass casualty situation in the middle of a war. She sees more loss in her first night there than most see in a lifetime.

During her time in Vietnam, she finds her strength. She finds the bonds of true friendship. She finds love. And she finds that when she finally returns home from war, it is no longer the world she once knew. She is hated, spat upon, forgotten.

Not only had the country she served abandoned those once regarded as heroes, it is worse for the women. The women who served, because they did not fight in combat or “see war,” were told to move on, get married, have kids.

Frankie’s journey was real and raw. The Women is an absolute masterpiece. I have read several of Kristin Hannah’s books, but The Women just might be my favorite.

What a wonderful book! I have always been a Kristen Hannah fan and I sure was not disappointed with The Women. This book is about the forgotten contribution women as nurses made in Vietnam. The main character Frances aka Frankie comes from a high society background but decides she wants to follow in the soldier brother’s footsteps so she enlists as an Army nurse. But what she finds in Nam is a horror known only by the brave men and women that were there. Often working until she drops she sees the suffering of the troops and the Vietnamese people. She makes good lifelong friends and even falls in love. When her tour of duty is over she comes home to an America that she doesn’t recognize. One that no longer looks at soldiers as heroes but as baby killers. Frankie has to adjust to what her new reality is. This is a deep character study of one nurse who no longer knows who she is or where she belongs because she went to Vietnam to serve her country. Loved loved this book. I would give it 10 stars if I could.

’The missing. The forgotten. The brave… The women.’

I turned two less than a week before this war began, and it lasted until after I graduated high school, into my college years, but I don’t remember seeing regular news about it until my Jr. High / High school years, shortly before a boy I knew was leaving soon to go there, and who told me that when he returned he would marry me - we hadn’t even dated. A month or so later, his body was returned.

This story revolves around that war, and a family that has already been scarred by war. A father whose office is filled with memories of war, proud of his service. A son who wanted to follow in his footsteps, and a daughter who wants to follow in her brother’s footsteps, despite both her parents disapproval. She imagines it is what he would have wanted her to do, and so she joins the Army Nurse Corps, and leaves her safe home on Coronado Island for Vietnam.

What she finds in Vietnam is very different from what she had imagined, from the housing units to the weather, and the things she will see over her time there. The horror. The exhaustion. The endless hours trying to save lives, sometimes with a life saved, and other times, just being there to hold their hand or just be there so she could write to their parents and let them know their son was not alone when he passed. She feels that it is the least she can do. And, to keep them all from focusing on the horror endlessly, there are times when they manage to have some fun, dance, drink and try to forget the things that they’ve seen that haunt them.

The women who served there came home to a country that had changed. When she told people, men, that she’d served in Vietnam, they would respond by saying there were no women who had served in Vietnam. The skills she’d learned there as a nurse, including surgeries she performed, were not recognized when she returned home, and so she was relegated to performing skills like emptying bedpans.

This was a beautiful, if often heartbreaking story of war, the aftermath of war, the friendships formed there that remember it all, and will remain a part of their lives forever.



Pub Date: 06 Feb 2024

Many thanks for the ARC provided by St. Martin’s Press

This was a wonderful book that really gives you a up-close-and-personal perspective on what it was like for women serving in Vietnam. Hannah certainly is an amazing writer.

The first half of the book is, in my opinion, the strongest section and follows Frankie through her two tours in-country, from her girdle and pumps wearing arrival to her trip home where she is immediately spit upon and called names at in the airport. The writing in this part is visceral and makes the experience come alive (for better or worse.)

Shortly after Frankie arrives home the book begins to sag a bit. The initial part with her parents is heartbreaking, and really hit home how much many of these women were defying expectations (i.e. wedding shower scene.) Also the scenes where hospitals are ignoring her life saving nursing skills and putting her back to changing bedpans were infuriating.

Sadly then things slowed down even more. While I truly appreciated the discussion about PTSD and how women who served were given no support in dealing with it, in my opinion, the relationship drama took over the plot a bit and there was a bit too much "Frankie falls apart and her friends visit to save her" passages for my taste. I think the problem was that I wasn't as invested in Frankie's love life as I was in her mental health and happiness. These are small quibbles though.

Thankfully, the book ended strong, with Frankie contemplating what it means to be a female vet and finding her path. Overall, this was a beautiful and educational read. Thank you to the author and NetGalley for granting me the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

Kristen Hannah once again proves her mastery in historical writing with her latest book, The Women. Her vivid descriptions and knowledge of the past are unparalleled. As you read through the book, you are transported to Vietnam and are right beside the protagonist, Frankie, every step of the way. The sights and sounds of the war are described in such detail that you can almost feel the danger lurking around every corner.

Frankie, a young Army nurse, faces challenges that are profound and life-threatening. The smell of blood and sweat lingers in the air as she tends to the wounded soldiers who come into the med tents. Some of them have lost limbs, while others only survive for a few minutes before passing away. The sound of gunfire and explosions echo in the background, a constant reminder of the danger that surrounds them.

As Frankie struggles to cope with the horrors of war, she also has to deal with personal issues. She misses her loved ones who are back home, and when she returns, she finds herself ostracized by her family for enlisting in the army. The history of the women in Vietnam, who were never acknowledged until the 90s, overwhelms the reader with a sense of sorrow and injustice.

The emotional impact of Frankie's PTSD is heart-wrenching and real. Hannah's writing brings you into the story, and you feel the anguish, sorrow, and anger that Frankie and her fellow nurses experienced. You cannot help but be invested in the story, eagerly turning the pages to find out what happens next.

At the end of the book, there is a sense of final joy that is well-deserved and soothing for the reader. The Women is a powerful and unforgettable story that will stay with you long after you finish reading it.

I think this is my favorite book this year. Maybe because I am a woman, maybe because women want to be seen as equal to men, or maybe because this subject is close to my heart. But in any way, it was a favorite!

My favorite show growing up was China Beach. Colleen Murphy, Cherry, Boonie, Dodger, KC, Beckett, Lila, the mechanic, and so many more memorable characters. So this book sent me back to that show.

June 1969-70. Those were the dates my dad was in Vietnam. I have heard of Pleiku, Hanoi, An Khe, Da Nang, Hue, Quoy Nhon, and of course the infamous "the place that shall not be named". He was a dog handler, guarding ammo dumps throughout Vietnam. I have heard stories of him before Nam, and then of course knew him after Nam, and how they are two different people. We didn't get to go to firework shows growing up, except one time. Anything that was a loud boom, and you better have your running shoes on to catch up. But he did good there too. He and some of his buddies rebuilt orphanages, tried to adopt a couple of orphans but since my mom and dad had only been married less than a year they couldn't, and how he counted the days until he got his papers to go home.

This was the story of Francis Grace McGrath "Frankie" a nurse in the San Diego area. After her brother goes to Vietnam and dies, she learns that women can go as nurses and be heroes too. She signs up. But women don't go to war - even though they literally have since the beginning of time. She goes and makes friends with Barb, Ethel, Jamie, and her brother's friend, Rye. She serves her time, and even extended it an additional year. But the real story is when she comes home, how alone she feels, how the only support she really has is her girls from Nam, because they understand her. She tries to do right, she starts working again, but flashbacks come and go, people who she thought were her support system were not, she tries to get help at the VA (but women were not there), and then Rye comes home and it all comes crashing down. But in the end, she figures out what she needs to do, and I think in the end she was happy and she found her place in the world that turned their backs on her so long ago.

The story is harsh, the story is real, the story is brutal in places, the story is heartbreaking, and in the end it is happy. I understand how hard it was for her to return, the spitting as they came off the planes (true it happened to my dad), the protests, the mocking because they were there. The feeling of being ashamed because they were there, that they came home and others didn't, that they were hated when in reality many just did what the government told them to by the draft. PTSD was not big then, or they just didn't want to acknowledge that Vietnam Vets had it because of the controversy of the war, but it was real and it does exist.

Frankie's dad had a heroes wall for all that fought in WWII, and before, but she wasn't considered a hero because she was a woman, woman didn't go there, and therefore she was not a hero. But she was, she was there, she saw the horror that was happening, she helped save countless lives, and in the end she just wanted the same credit. Credit that some still have not received - 60 years later.

I understand the fear, the not wanting to be acknowledged, the notoriety of being there. That was my whole life. I understand the comradery, because for the longest time, they only had themselves, they held it all in. I've grown up that the only time you hear about it is at reunions, seeing my dad stand at the top of the knoll to go see the Wall for 2 hours before he could turn around and actually look at it, standing outside the movie theater for 1/2 a day to go see Platoon, and the refusal to watch my favorite show China Beach (because it was too real for him). The fear they have/had is because of what they endured, what they saw, and the fact that so many back home did not support them.

Thank you to Netgalley, St. Martin's Press, and especially Ms. Hannah for bringing this beautiful book to light.

The Women changed my views on how I view women in the services along with Vietnam Vets. This book seems to capture just what happens after coming home from war as well as navigate being a woman in a man's world. I was rooting for Frankie the whole book and was so happy when things came together for her. I devoured this book. Another great read from Kristin Hannah.

(ARC Review) Another 5-star read from Kristin Hannah. As with her other books, like Firefly Lane, which particularly touched me, Kristin takes you on a whirlwind of emotions with her newest novel The Women, which I believe will be one of the top reads of 2024.

This story takes you back to the time of the Vietnam War and showcases women’s contribution to that effort. The central character is a young woman named Frankie whose brother enlists in the war, and she decides to follow him, not knowing what she is getting herself into after living a quite sheltered life, at just 20 years old and just out of nursing school. From there, she is thrown into the horrors of the war – severely wounded men and horrible conditions. Lack of staff leads to not only nursing in extreme conditions but having to learn how to do medical procedures as well. While she does come out with friends for life and making a strong contribution to the effort, she also comes out with the horrors of war leading to PTSD, depression and more on her way to figuring out her life.

Filled with twists and turns and ups and downs with a topic that isn’t easy, but important to know more about, I would highly recommend this read and hope that this will bring even more fans to the Kristin Hannah fold.

Thanks to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for this early copy.