It’s officially cosy season, so we couldn’t be more thrilled to curl up with a good book and settle in for some historical fiction with a twist – Emma Clifton reviews Kristin Hannah’s The Women, available at The Warehouse now! (And click through for our previous instalments!)
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The weather may have started cooling down in Aotearoa but for the past two weeks, my heart, brain and reading eyes have been in the humid, dusty world of Vietnam thanks to the international bestseller The Women.
The best kind of historical fiction wears its research lightly, rather than bogging you down in dull textbook details, and that’s exactly the magic that this book weaves. Author Kristin Hannah plunges you straight into the traumatic chaos of the Vietnam War through the perspective of Frances “Frankie” McGrath. Just 19, Frankie has been primed to follow in her mother’s fancy footsteps and become another elegant, conservative wife, stuck at home and slowly losing her mind.
But then Frankie’s beloved brother enrols to fight in Vietnam, a war that is being sold to the American public as a courageous, easy fight against a shadowy enemy. At her brother’s going away party, a family friend whispers the words ‘women can be heroes too’ to Frankie and she finally sees a way to prove her bravery to her family, to her father and to herself. So she enrols as an Army nurse and ships out.
Tragedy strikes before Frankie even makes it to Vietnam, and the cost of the war keeps rising. As a novice nurse, Frankie is sent straight into the thick of a losing war, where she watches young soldiers dying by the thousands, as the American forces also wreak havoc on innocent civilian population. The details are visceral – blood-soaked socks, the desperate cries of teenage soldiers dying in droves, the monsoon rain, the constant dirt and chaos of war. But in the midst of the horror, Frankie forms two close friendships with fellow female nurses, who help turn her into a bad-ass nurse who soon becomes unrecognisable to her former, good-girl self.
And on the frontlines, it’s not all horror – there’s some very good romance of the ‘we could be dead tomorrow, let’s enjoy today’ kind as Frankie slowly starts un-learning all of the conservative rules she grew up with. The novel is also timely in how it handles war – the propaganda used by the American government to sell the war to thousands of unwitting, young soldiers, who ship out for a big adventure and come back either wounded or in coffins; the growing rage of the nurses who are dealing with these maimed bodies, against a country back home that is protesting the war – for good reason – but ignoring the horror of those fighting in it as well. All of this, as a civilian population of women and children bear the brunt of a fight they have no say in. It’s impossible to read this and not think about the ongoing horrors in Gaza and the Ukraine, and how so often it’s women who are quite literally caught in the crossfires.
But The Women is also a very rare book in that it is a war story told exclusively through the eyes of the women in the thick of it – not just as wives, girlfriends or mothers, but as the main characters of a traumatic and dangerous new world, and how that is both deeply frightening and strangely empowering.
At one point, Frankie looks around the makeshift bar, filled with nurses and soldiers, all in their 20s, all in blood-stained clothing, exhausted from the day’s events, and wonders if, when they look back, they’ll consider these ‘the good old days’, when they were in the prime of their lives and filled with purpose. In comparison to the mental health and social struggles they all face when returning to a country that hates the war, and seems to hate them by proxy, it makes for an interesting, complicated background to a classic coming-of-age story. I truly couldn’t put it down.
