"The Women" by Kristin Hannah is the November selection for my Childless Collective Nomo Book Club, and the first Kristin Hannah novel I've read.
Frances (Frankie) McGrath is a newly graduated nurse, the sheltered daughter of an affluent, conservative California family who live near a naval base. Growing up, her father proudly regaled her and her older brother Finley with tales of the heroic military service of generations of their ancestors. The book opens in May 1966 at a farewell party for Finley, who is heading off to Vietnam, in a supposedly "safe" staff position.
"Women can be heroes," Finley's military college buddy Rye tells Frankie, as they look at the uniformed family portraits displayed in her father's office. For Frankie, it's a revolutionary thought. Inspired by the family photos, Rye's words and an encounter with a wounded soldier at the hospital where she works, and missing her brother, Frankie decides to enlist as an army nurse immediately after her 21st birthday. While her parents were proud of her brother's service, they're shocked -- and ashamed -- when she tells them what she's done. (Her father refuses to add her photo to the collection in his office -- he tells her he'll put up her wedding picture when she gets married. That, in his view, is an appropriate achievement for a woman.) Frankie is shocked by their reaction -- and it's only the first of many traumas and disappointments she endures over the next 15 years.
I was on the fence about this book for the first few chapters. I was a little irked by Frankie's family's affluence, when so many men who served in Vietnam were black and/or came from poor families and had no easy way of dodging the draft (although Frankie's youthful naivete and privilege does create an effective contrast to the culture shock she feels as a newbie in wartime Vietnam!). And Rye's comment to Frankie -- "Women can be heroes" -- seemed a little too modern/progressive for a young military college graduate in 1966. (Kristin Hannah was born in 1960 -- so she's about the same age as me, and was a pre-teen/young teenager when the war ended.)
Once Frankie arrives in Vietnam, though, the story quickly became a lot more interesting. Like many readers, I'm sure, I'd never really thought much about the nurses who served in Vietnam and what their experiences must have been like, and this book was a real eye-opener in that respect. About halfway through, Frankie returns home to America, and her difficult adjustment to civilian life was just as absorbing to read about -- perhaps even more so -- than the section about her war experiences. Like many of the male veterans of that war, Frankie suffered from PTSD (although it was not called that at the time), made worse by the people who shunned her, spat at her and called her "baby killer." The staff at the hospital where she gets a job after the war ignore her deep experience and put her to work emptying bedpans, as if she was a candy striper. Rubbing salt in these wounds, she learns her parents have told their friends she's been studying abroad in Italy (!). And whenever she tells people that she served in Vietnam -- even those working in government agencies, who are supposed to be helping veterans -- they don't believe her: "There are/were no women serving in Vietnam."
However -- I thought the story was just a LITTLE too predictable at times, with just a few too many improbable coincidences and other plot developments: (**SPOILERS AHEAD**) For example: I had a gut feeling Finley was not coming home, and sure enough, within minutes of Frankie telling her parents she's enlisted (!), the doorbell rings and two uniformed officers appear at the door with bad news for the family. I also KNEW she was going to run into Rye in Vietnam... and that he was going to show up in Hawaii when Frankie is there on leave. I correctly guessed that Frankie was going to lose both of the men she loved in Vietnam (although I dared to hope she wouldn't... and I did not see the twists coming later in the book, although perhaps I should have!). And as soon she encounters Henry Acevedo, I knew she/we would be seeing him again. A friend had told me (**SPOILER & ALI note**) that Frankie becomes pregnant later in the book and then has a miscarriage (possibly caused, at least in part, by her exposure to Agent Orange during the war) -- but the timing (what came just before the miscarriage, and what was scheduled to happen a few days later) was kind of unbelievable.
The last chapter -- which takes place at the 1982 dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC -- had me in tears. But it also had me exclaiming aloud, "Oh COME ON!!" (I mean, really??)
Hannah has clearly done a ton of research -- but I sometimes felt like she was trying to cram in everything that ever happened to someone who served in Vietnam (and every notable 1960s event or experience) into Frankie's story. (On the plus side, the frequent musical references reminded me that if there's ever a film version of this book, it's going to have a kickass soundtrack...!)
All that said -- despite these flaws, I kept turning the pages, and read the bulk of it over just two days. (It's a long-ish book, almost 500 pages.) I particularly appreciated its depiction of complicated grief, loss and trauma, the toll that disenfranchised grief can take -- and the realization that, despite the attempts (and constant advice) to forget, you can't. Frankie learns (as so many of us eventually do) that that the best way to heal is to remember and to share your story with others, particularly those who have had similar experiences. (Although many aspects of Frankie's story were very different from mine, there was a LOT here I could relate to!)
Overall, "The Women" was a compelling read, and a story that richly deserved to be (finally!) told. Kudos to Kristin Hannah for doing so!
4 stars on both Goodreads and StoryGraph.
Tip: Have tissues handy -- especially for that last chapter.
ALI note: As mentioned above, Frankie becomes unexpectedly pregnant after she returns home, but has a miscarriage, and remains childless.
This was Book #31 read to date in 2026 (and Book #2 finished in October), bringing me to 78% of my 2026 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 40 books. I am currently back on track to meet my goal! You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2026 tagged as "2026 books."
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I was born in 1961, and I remember the Vietnam war pretty well, although I didn't always completely understand what it was all about (I think a lot of people today STILL don't understand what it was all about..!) -- poring over the newspaper headlines, hearing the latest casualty figures on the evening news (particularly when we were visiting my grandparents and watching John Chancellor on NBC). I was 12 when the war ended in 1973, and 14 when the U.S. exited the country. I vividly remember watching the footage of desperate Vietnamese people at the gates of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, clinging to the last helicopter lifting off the roof (and then dropping off as it flew away).
My mother's small hometown in Minnesota lost several young men in Vietnam. At the county fair one summer in the early/mid-1970s, I was fascinated by a booth run by families of men missing in action (MIA), drawing attention to the issue, selling MIA/POW bracelets and handing out bumper stickers and buttons. (I had a couple of those in my scrapbook.) A woman at the booth was a high school classmate of my uncle's, I think, married to a classmate of my mother's. Her younger brother was a helicopter pilot who went missing in action after his aircraft was shot down in early January 1973 -- a little over a month after he arrived in Vietnam, and less than three weeks before American involvement in the war came to an official end. He was 23 years old. One of my (second) cousins wore a bracelet for him. For a while there were rumours that at least some of the helicopter crew had survived and been taken prisoner, but he was officially declared killed in action in 1979.
Years later, in 1994, an investigative team learned that a farmer who lived near where the helicopter was shot down had found a body and buried it in the village cemetery. The body was recovered and identified as the missing soldier from Mom's hometown, and returned to his family there. He was finally buried there n 1996.
His name is inscribed on the memorial wall in Washington, D.C. If & when I ever get there (as I have wanted to do, ever since I was kid), his is the name I will look for. I won't be able to tell my mom I was there... but I know she'd like that.
I was also reminded, as I read this book, that Phan Thi Kim Phuc -- the little girl who appears in one of the most famous photographs from the war -- lives in the Toronto area now, in the next town over from the one where we had our house for 26 years. She & her husband were granted political asylum in Canada in 1993, and became Canadian citizens in 1997. It took her years to recover from the napalm burns she suffered, and her body is still covered in scars. Today, she's 63 years old, a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador and an advocate for child victims of war.
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I haven't read a whole lot about the war before this, but I did read and love "The Long Gray Line" by Rick Atkinson, about several members of the West Point Class of 1966 and what happened to them over the next 25 years. As you can imagine, Vietnam figures prominently in the story, including the fight to build the memorial wall. It's been a while since I read it, but I remember the ending had me in tears.
I can also highly, highly recommend Ken Burns's documentary series on the war, which ran on PBS a few years back, and which I wrote about here.
(There's a scene in the book where vets protesting against the war throw their medals on the steps of the Capitol in Washington D.C. I was reminded of a scene in Burns's documentary where one vet describes throwing his medal away at this or a similar protest. Back in his hometown, he was criticized for doing this -- and his father, who had never had much to say about his service, stood up for him and said something to the effect of "It's his medal, he earned it, he can do what he wants with it." Recalling this years later on camera, the vet gave a quiet smile and said, "Way to go, Dad.")
While I was reading this, I was also reminded a lot of "M*A*S*H*" -- the original 1968 book, the 1970 movie and the long-running (1972-83) TV series -- which was set during the Korean War, but widely interpreted to be a thinly-disguised stand-in for Vietnam.
I've also seen several movies about or touching on the Vietnam war -- most notably "Apocalypse Now, which my first-year university film studies prof assigned us all to see, shortly after it came out, in early 1980. A classmate & I went to see it in a grand old movie palace with a big screen, and took notes for class as we watched!
