Thank you to Carrie for bringing this month’s The Women book club discussion as part of our ongoing virtual book club. I LOVED this book, and we’re excited to share it with you!
Meredith and I are super excited to discuss our latest pick, The Women, by Kristin Hannah.
Wow. Just wow.
I’m going to admit here that I don’t always love Kristin Hannah books. I know, I know, everyone loves her!! But people have their own preferences and I just found a lot of her books weren’t what I was looking for. So I went into this one skeptically. Yes, everyone in the known universe is talking about how amazing this book is, but is it?
You tell us!! From our perspective, this book was absolutely amazing! Thoughtful, well-researched, heartbreaking, beautiful, sad, and shocking … there were so many feelings!
The Women book club discussion
The story follows Frankie, a nurse who would love to one day have her picture on her father’s “hero” wall. The Vietnam War is amping up and Frankie’s brother decides to enlist. After a chance meeting where she is told that women can be heroes too, she decides to enlist herself. She is a nurse after all and nurses were much needed!
We get to see Frankie from her first day til her last, going from one hospital to another far more dangerous hospital within Vietnam. We are as shocked and dismayed as she is when she first arrives. Nothing could prepare her for this. This first half of the book was both horrifying and riveting. We see Frankie turn into an amazing surgical nurse, saving many, many lives. The horrors of the war are not hidden. We read about all kinds of gruesome injuries, and not just of our soldiers, but Southern Vietnamese civilians as well, many of them women and children.
Frankie develops many relationships while in Vietnam. I can only imagine how close you would feel to people who are experiencing this kind of insanity day in and day out. She becomes so close to the job and her colleagues that she extends her year-long service into two years. Her parents are of course horrified. But she is thriving in the hospitals. While she faces agonizing situations, she also feels her calling while holding soldiers’ hands while they die, taking pictures with them, or having a soft spot for them.
The dichotomy between being in Vietnam and returning home is stark and so well-written. Hannah did an amazing job making you see and feel the difference. Of course, we all know that soldiers were not treated with respect when they came home from the war and we get to see how devastating that was. Being spit on is the very last thing you would imagine would happen to you when you arrive home from saving hundreds of American lives.
It’s interesting because you would think the trauma during her time in Vietnam would be the worst part, and while it was devastating, the aftermath, returning to the States and “normal life” was brutal for Frankie. And on top of it, she was a woman. And, as she was repeatedly told, “women weren’t in Nam” which we all know was not true.
I applaud Kristin Hannah for writing about these women who served in Vietnam. In fact, in the acknowledgments, she talks about how she has been wanting to write about this topic for years but wanted to become more of a seasoned writer before she tackled it. She took her time and did the research and it shows!
One heartbreaking thing after another happens to Frankie when she returns home. Most, if not all, resulted from her trauma. She is frequently told to just forget about Vietnam and she really does try to do so. Her journey from her return home to the end of the book, when she can see the Vietnam War Memorial in DC, is quite remarkable and gives people who have had to deal with terrible trauma some hope. But her self-destruction is for sure hard to watch. You are angry and sad and scared for her. The injustice is almost unbearable.
I love a book that makes me want to learn more about the subject matter immediately. I had heard some stories about Vietnam from my father, whose brothers served, but this made me want to really dig in and understand. Don’t miss out on this incredible book that gives you a true view into what the women who served in Vietnam went through! You won’t regret it!
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Meredith and I are super excited about our next pick, Family Family by Laurie Frankel, a favorite author of ours! Read on for a description of this funny and heart-wrenching novel with a heavy dose of (you guessed it!) family themes layered in! As always, we are giving away a copy for free! Leave a comment on this blog post or Instagram by 3/15/24 by 5:30 am ET, and as long as you are 18 or older and live in the continental United States, you are eligible to win!
Family Family by Laurie Frankel
“Not all stories of adoption are stories of pain and regret. Not even most of them. Why don’t we ever get that movie?”
India Allwood grew up wanting to be an actor. Armed with a stack of index cards (for research/line memorization/make-shift confetti), she goes from awkward sixteen-year-old to Broadway ingenue to TV superhero.
Her new movie is a prestige picture about adoption, but its spin is the same old tired story of tragedy. India is an adoptive mom in real life though. She wants everyone to know there’s more to her family than pain and regret. So she does something you should never do — she tells a journalist the truth: it’s a bad movie.
Soon she’s at the center of a media storm, battling accusations from the press and the paparazzi, from protesters on the right and advocates on the left. Her twin ten-year-olds know they need help – and who better to call than family? But that’s where it gets really messy because India’s not just an adoptive mother…
The one thing she knows for sure is what makes a family isn’t blood. And it isn’t love. No matter how they’re formed, the truth about family is this: it’s complicated.
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Thanks so much for joining our The Women book club discussion! As always, we love hearing your thoughts and opinions! Keep them coming!!
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Meredith says
Has it been an entire month already?!?
The Women was on my book list before you two featured it – I guess it needs a little nudging more toward the top of the list. And, I was just looking at Family Family this week! Great minds think alike and all that jazz. 🙂
Meredith says
We need to chat about these books! Both are powerful reads! Here’s to those great minds 😉
Carrie says
I love Kristin Hannah’s books. My favorite so far has been The Four Winds. I’m looking forward to reading The Women with my book club this week!
Meredith says
I learned so much from The Four Winds…that is true of all of her books though! Thanks for checking in, and let me know what you thought of The Women–so great you’re reading it for book club!
Ruth North says
Great book, but I wonder if it was too much. Seemed like everything that could possibly happen did? Having lived through Vietnam, as a state-side observer I remember and enjoyed all the historical details. It felt a little contrived that all those things happen to one women. Maybe events between the three women could have been shared. Great Read.
Meredith says
That is a really interesting point, Ruth! This would be a great book club question! And I love that you have the experience and rememberance of so much that was happening. Thanks so much for sharing here!