The Women

Women can be heroes.

When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances “Frankie” McGrath hears these words, it is a revelation.

–StoryGraph

MY REVIEW

Book club this year has some heavy hitting subject matter, lol. I probably would not have had this on my TBR without book club so I’m really glad that I got a chance to read it and will discuss it with the group on Thursday. The Vietnam is something that lingers a lot in my family, in our case my father was in it (hold your horses I’m not *that* old, there’s just a generation gap). Obviously it’s not dinner table conversation, but it meant that I sort of sought out information as I grew curious. So this book had another nuance for me in that it was something that I could read and connect to on a level.

Hannah made this almost easily digestible without taking away the horrors of Vietnam for all, not just the US service members (though it’s certainly not as gory as it could be and probably a good thing). Saying that, she wasn’t the best at describing wounds because she used the same few and the same phrasing every time and that at one point was so noticeable it made me sort of stop and took me out of the book. Despite its size, it’s not a dense read and it’s hard to put down because you keep wanting to know how Frankie will get through it.

PTSD is not shoved under the rug by any means. Frankie is hit with it upon her return and the way she handles it or tries to is so very human and so very telling of the times. The added layer of her being a woman service member makes it that much more heartbreaking because they’re often told ‘There were no women in Vietnam’ excluding them from their own stories and making it virtually impossible to get any sort of help -even if it wasn’t the best help-.

Frankie makes questionable choices but agains he’s very human and even when you’re wishing she would have chose something different, she can’t help but make mistakes like the rest of us. I loved Barb and ____ her friends from Vietnam. And I think I could read a whole chunky book like ‘The Women’ purely about Barbara Johnson. Her story would be absolutely fascinating.

Maybe this is ‘chick lit’ or maybe this is a little taste of reading more literature about Vietnam but either way you definitely come away affected if it’s the sort of read you think you’ll appreciate or enjoy.

I gave it 3.5 and rounded it down to 3 because I felt like Hannah could have pressed the envelope more and written more about Vietnam, and to have been overall maybe more insightful. Still, there you have it, 3.5 huge cups of coffee from me and its as an experience to be sure.