The Women
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Kristin Hannah is the name on everybody’s literary lips these days, so your girl had to follow the buzz! I haven’t read The Nightingale so I came in with fresh eyes…that gradually rolled into the back of my head as the book went on.
I don’t want to be too much of a hater, so I’ll start with the good. It’s for sure a story worth telling. It follows Frankie, a girl from a wealthy family who makes a sudden, uncharacteristic choice to volunteer as an army nurse in Vietnam. When she returns home, she’s surprised by the negativity she receives from her fellow Americans for being associated with the war and, compounded with the PTSD she suffers from, she has a pretty rough reintegration. The plot piqued my interest– I don’t know anything about women in Vietnam and while I know there was plenty of anti-war sentiment, I haven’t read stories about how that was perceived by those who served. To her credit, Hannah did an excellent job portraying Frankie’s grief in the aftermath of her service and showed a clear, heart-felt change in character before and after.
Unfortunately, I feel as though Hannah fumbled the book-ball. For a book that’s 460 pages, I’m shocked at the lack of character depth. I felt this at every stage of the book. In the first 20 pages, a ‘shocking’ event happens and apparently I’m supposed to care? I don’t even know people's names yet! I would have had a wayyyy more emotional reaction if that relationship was built up for me first. Then, when she decides to go to Vietnam, I don’t really buy into her convictions. I’m not saying that I expect her to go in with clear eyes, guns blazing, but as a reader, I had no idea what her thought process was.
This speaks to the fact that I think this book would be much stronger if it was written in first-person. The third-person narration creates two issues for me. One, combined with the title, it makes it seem like we are going to learn about more than one woman, when really the book is just about Frankie, with peripheral characters mostly serving as props (her two best friends, Ethel and Barb, seem like caricatures to me and are disappointingly unexplored). Two, Frankie’s character arc was shown mainly by actions rather than her own thoughts. We see her go through certain motions but have little insight into her as a person. I never got a hold of what makes her unique.
Many of the actions that we witness from our third-person pedestal involve romance. I’m admittedly not the targeted audience for that genre, but when it’s done well, I’m completely sucked in. I think that it requires a really bedrock character– if I feel solidly connected with that main character, then I fully buy into their love for another person. In Demon Copperhead, Damon’s love for Dori was toxic and irrational but I knew exactly why it was happening because Barbara Kingsolver painted an undeniable picture of Damon. In The Women, because Frankie is so slippery of a character and I don’t know what’s going through her head, the degree of romance felt heavy-handed and repetitive. I wish that Hannah had dug into the inherently interesting plot more rather than fall back on predictable romantic tropes. If this is intended to be about women in Vietnam, let’s have it be about women in Vietnam. Sprinkle in some men on the side for fun but let’s not have it revolve around them. They have plenty of books, they’ll be fine!
Ok yes, this review is a bit long-winded, but this book seems totally beloved on Goodreads, so I had to say my piece. Overall, this was an ambitious undertaking that I don’t believe Kristin Hannah was ready to tackle. Her route was to throw the kitchen sink at it, including all sorts of plot points and dragging the story out without doing the harder work of deep-diving into Frankie’s character and truly unpacking her psyche. The best Vietnam War book I’ve read is still The Things They Carried (highly recommend) and I now wish that I had a similarly moving book about the women in Vietnam. Since The Women left me wanting, I give it 2 out of 5 flames.
