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FICTION
The Women
Kristin Hannah
Macmillan, $34.99
Women are often the most gravely neglected sufferers of war, yet they have remained largely missing from our history books. In her latest novel, The Women, Kristin Hannah turns her attention to the American women who served in Vietnam. The result is a sublime, earnest and ambitious story about the power of female friendship and courage in the face of gruelling adversity and despair. It is a thoroughly researched book that seeks to remedy the lack of attention afforded to the roughly 10,000 American military women who served in Vietnam.
Kristin Hannah’s protagonist follows her soldier brother to the horror that is Vietnam.Credit: Kevin Lynch
Beginning in 1966, The Women follows 20-year-old Frankie McGrath, the daughter of wealthy business people, who yearns to escape the affluent coziness of her life and make her mark in the world. When her brother is shipped off to Vietnam, Frankie vows to follow in his footsteps.
Her parents are less than pleased, even though she’d been taught all her life that military service was a family duty. She is a woman, after all. “It’s not patriotic to do something stupid,” her mother tells her.
But Frankie is head-strong and determined. She signs up to the Army Nurse Corps and quickly finds herself in a 400-bed field hospital 90 kilometres from Saigon, struggling under oppressive heat and trying to save thousands of “young men stuck in the hinterland between life and death” every day.
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She had wanted to feel useful in the world, and she had come to a place that tested her resolve, made her question her courage, fortitude and resilience.
The book chooses to turn away from the intricate political warfare of the time and focuses instead on the interpersonal choices of a young white woman. For Frankie, the war is a chance to reevaluate her goals in her life: “How did you know if you had the strength and courage for a thing like that? Especially as a woman, raised to be a lady, whose courage had been untested.“
As a seasoned storyteller of epic, sweeping tales, Hannah’s narrative pacing is resourcefully laid out, offering us reprieves from the violence and terror with friendship and romance. Frankie becomes close to two other combat nurses, Ethel a white, ER nurse from Virginia, who followed her husband to Vietnam, and Barb Johnson, a black surgical nurse from Georgia, who has posters of Mohammad Ali, MLK and Malcolm X above her bed.
As in all of Hannah’s novels, the romance between our heroine and her man is conventional, predictable and sentimental, but that sentimentality is welcome. Frankie falls in love with a series of both available and unavailable men, all of them offering her the promise of a future with no precedence.