Not having read novelist Kristin Hannah before, I came to The Women because its subject matter, the experience of female combat nurses (in an era when combat nurses were overwhelmingly male) in the Vietnam War, struck me as instructive not only historically but for our present times. Let me be direct: The Women is a novel in two parts. The first half, covering the two-year combat experience of “Frankie” McGrath, a callow upper-class Californian, in two of the Vietnam combat hospitals, one of them in the territory eventually overrun during the 1968 Tet offensive, is thrilling and moving. This half is superbly, graphically written, depicting unadorned the horror of that war and indeed all wars. On the basis of that fifty percent, I recommend The Women wholeheartedly. The second half, recounting a Vietnam veteran’s postwar travails in a home country suddenly against the war (as it should have been), full of tragedies, mistreatment, PTSD, and female comradeship, could have been written by a different author, for it lurches rather than flows and falls into near-romance-category simplification. The author’s plotting holds up to the climax, so the overall read is enjoyable, but at the end, I found myself wishing for a different, much deeper and much more resonant postscript half. By all means, buy and recommend The Women, for this is an important tale; you may find yourself more attuned than I to the author’s late stylistics and emotionality.
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