My IRL Book Club this month was ‘The Women’ by Kristin Hannah, a book (as you will no doubt have guessed) that has been languishing on the TBR pile for a little while now. I think the size put me off a little – but when you have to read it for Book Club, you have to see past the size (and remind yourself that long books in hardback always look worse – haha).
‘The Women’ tells the story of Frankie, a young woman who makes the decision that she is going to go to ‘Nam as a nurse. Something that she hopes might get her on the hero wall her father adores in his study, but that will also bring her acceptance of the death of her brother in the same conflict. We follow her time there, and the consequences it has on her future and that of her family.
As I have come to expect with Kristin Hannah novels, we have strong female characters placed into extreme circumstances. Women who have had to learn to become survivors, but also women who learn to fight for what they believe in. And this is exactly what happens here.
The first half of the book in Vietnam is rather intense. As you are thrown into the conflict with Frankie, experiencing with her the violence, tragedy and emotional rollercoaster of war, you are with her as she forms friendships and is entangled in the trials and tribulations of love in the time of war. And you really feel all her heartbreak along the way – her heartbreak for the victims of war (on both sides) and the heartbreak she suffers as she believes she is in love.
The second half of the book, we are with Frankie as she attempts to adjust to life as a civilian back in America. This really considers the impact of war on an individual and on those that they love. Frankie is returning to a nation that has not just had many of its young men ravaged by their experiences at war, but one that is facing its own internal struggle over civil rights. The second half of the book is where you really realise why Hannah settled on the title of the book, ‘The Women’, because they really were forgotten for their time in the Vietnam War, and the support was even less for them than it was for the men who returned.
I am certain that this book is going to spark a lot of discussion at Book Club, because there is just so much amongst its pages to digest.
I have to admit that, despite the fascinating idea behind this book, it was not my favourite. It does everything I love in a Kristin Hannah book. But the ‘twist’ was no surprise and it was slightly lengthy, which made some of it a bit of a struggle to read. Please do not get me wrong: I would still suggest that fans of Kristin Hannah should pick this book up, and I am still glad that I read it, especially as it is going to encourage me to not just learn more about the events of Vietnam, but also pick up more of Kristin Hannah’s books soon, as that is all of them on my TBR pile completed (and I can’t say that very often).