The Women by Kristin Hannah: our honest verdict. The Vietnam War novel about female nurses — does it live up to The Nightingale? Everything you need to know.
• You loved The Nightingale and want more Kristin Hannah
• You're interested in the Vietnam War from perspectives that aren't usually centred
• You want to be emotionally devastated by historical fiction
• You believe books can restore neglected historical records
• You found The Nightingale too sentimental
• You're looking for literary prose rather than commercial historical fiction
• You're sensitive to trauma content — the PTSD sections are detailed and difficult
Kristin Hannah has made a career of finding the women at the edge of historical events — French Resistance in The Nightingale, Alaska settlers in The Great Alone. The Women turns to Vietnam, specifically to the female nurses who served there and came home to no parades, no welcome, and an erasure from the historical record that lasted decades.
Frankie McGrath enlists as an Army nurse in 1966 and serves three tours. What happens to her in Vietnam, and what happens to her when she comes home, is the whole book — and Hannah earns her research.
The Nightingale is Hannah's best novel. The Women is her second best. The difference is mostly structural — The Nightingale's dual-sister structure creates more friction and more complexity than The Women's single protagonist allows. But The Women's homecoming sections — the PTSD, the anti-veteran hostility, the particular isolation of female veterans — are among Hannah's most powerful writing.
One of the most important pieces of commercial historical fiction in recent years, because of its subject rather than despite it. Hannah is writing a restoration project — returning women who served in Vietnam to the historical record they were written out of. The emotion is sometimes manipulative. The history is not.
Score: 8.9/10. Essential for Hannah readers. Highly recommended for historical fiction readers who can handle difficult content.