Jenbebookish's Reviews > The Women

Eeeek. This will undoubtedly be one of my most disappointing reads of '24! I am baffled by all the 5 star ratings that it's getting.

After "The Nightingale" and "Four Winds," both of which were 5 star reads for me, I was really looking forward to "The Women." I started it immediately the day it was released. I was excited, to say the least.

But ugh.

The premise: Frankie McGrath is not your traditional girl, wanting more out of life than the traditional domestic roles. When the U.S. goes to war in Vietnam, her brother Finley, who is also her best friend, enlists and her parents are brimming with pride. Her father came from a "Navy house" and has a "hero wall" in their home where he puts up pictures of "heroes." His father was a veteran, and his own generation of men all went to war during WWII, but he was not able to go and overcompensated for his subsequent feelings of inadequacy by going overboard on the patriotism. His children are raised believing that serving your country is the highest honor. So when her brother Finley enlists & is deployed, it occurs to Frankie that as an R.N., she should follow in his footsteps. She winds up joining the army bc it's the only military branch that will accept her fresh out of college with no experience, she envisions proud parents, meeting up with her brother in 'Nam, coming home to accolades and a heroes welcome. Reality is nothing even close to that.



So it started off alright. I am not particularly knowledgable about the Vietnam War so I figured I'd learn a thing or two. Things escalate quickly. Before Frankie's plane even lands in Vietnam, she's getting shot at by "Charlie" & cowering in fear bc of all the loud, terrifying gunshots & explosions happening in the vicinity. She's quickly thrust into wartime nursing, exposed to death, missing limbs, & other horrific injuries within minutes of reporting for duty. There is no learning curve, there is no training, she's forced to sac up & buckle down & WORK.

So this was as far as I got while still thinking that I would enjoy this. At this point, things started to go awry. (view spoiler)[Although the first strange thing I took note of was the lack of response when Frankie finds out that her brother had been killed in action & there were no remains. This was supposed to be her best friend and only sibling, the reason why she enlisted, the closest person in the world to her, yet her reaction to his death felt bizarrely unreactive. Her family gets a letter, she's sad, takes a melancholy walk on the beach & that's basically it. For the way their relationship was depicted, the response felt disproportionately mild. I dismissed it as just a weird thing & would have been willing to overlook it had Hannah not proceeded to do the same thing over & over.

And from this point on it's just one cliche after another. Enormous things happen abruptly and in a matter of a few pages. Frankie's responses are meager & fleeting. The fact that she enlisted for her brother & then lost him before being deployed is rarely mentioned, & when it is it's secondary & superficial, nothing but a quick opportunity to reinforce the supposed narrative that losing her brother actually meant something to her & wasn’t just some inconsequential event like it seems. Frankie gets to Vietnam & initially is seemingly shellshocked, but by the end of the night she's thinking about the dreamy MARRIED doctor with the "sad eyes" that whispered cliched reassurances & sweet nothings in her ear like "Don't worry, I got you. You're safe." She falls in love in a matter of a couple pages after a few of the most cliched wartime interactions ever, & then oops, he dies too. We got a page or two full of shrieking "SAVE HIM!" followed by obligatory sad moment w/her friends, but a few pages later there's a new guy whispering similar cliched things in her ear that make her weak with lust. It's instalovey to the extreme.

The whole story moves along at breakneck speed, despite being mostly devoid of plot, with Frankie moving through experience after experience with banal, paltry one page responses, which ultimately just makes it all a bunch of stuff that happened to her that l didn’t really care about. Kristin Hannah just never gives us time to care.

None of the other characters in the book have any depth whatsoever, they're all cardboard cutouts, stereotypical renderings of best friends & wartime lovers. Even the most heartbreaking parts of the story were rendered unfeeling because of how quickly they were moved through. There are various deaths & descriptions of soldiers/villagers last moments, at one point a baby is brought in that's covered in head to toe burns, barely alive, having been found in the arms of her dead mother. She takes her last breath in Frankie’s arms, & not even a page later it's on to the next thing. Which to be fair, one might defend by saying that’s just the life of a military nurse, where days go by w/lightening speed & there’s no time for despair. Which might very well be the case, but then it’s essentially just someone saying, “a baby came in with burns all over its body & died." Yes, that’s very sad, but such quick descriptions hardly evoke strong emotional responses. A humanization needs to take place in order for me to extend any significant amount of empathy, most especially when what we’re reading is fiction.

The after the war half of the book was no better. Again Frankie moves through event after event, phase after phase with minimal depth. She comes home from war expecting elated parents & a revered veteran's welcome only to find that an entire country has changed it's outlook on the war—her own parents were so ashamed that they'd concealed the truth & claimed she was studying abroad.

Frankie tries to settle in. She moves thru the expected war responses one right after another, the behavior stereotypical & cursory, the healing process offensively unrealistic. (There's mention of bad dreams. At a party a firework goes off & she dives under a table & shrieks for everyone to take cover, etc etc) Eventually enter man #3 that more or less "saves her.” She gets pregnant & then is spontaneously (but temporarily) healed. More of the typical women’s-problems-can-be-cured-by-marriage-and-a-baby-mentality, wow it can even cure PTSD!! But wait, oh no, man #2 that she thought was dead makes a stunning reappearance & she loses the baby from the shock of it. At this point all her PTSD symptoms reemerge with a vengeance, bc of course things didn’t get really bad till there was a man involved. She realizes he’s married to someone else, which naturally causes her PTSD to escalate from something she had a solid grasp on to full blown PTSD with depression and suicidal ideation, and from there to an actual suicide attempt, which is proceeded by magically healing via get this...getting a place of her own in a location with wide open spaces. (Insert eyeroll here)

Maybe if I had liked Frankie, like at all, I would have cared more about what happened to her but I just couldn't get there. A self proclaimed "good girl," Frankie pretty much immediately falls into an entanglement with a married man. Her pathetic attempt at resistance felt almost like she was being coy more than it felt like she was experiencing any moral quandary. I know, I know, they're at war! It's a tale as old as war itself, the idea of a wartime dalliance, when the normal rules don't apply & the lives & wives waiting thousand of miles away back at home are inconsequential in the midst of a war where any minute could be one's last. I understand the logic but it’s still hard for me to wrap my brain around, bc personally I can’t imagine wanting to spend my final moments on this earth being unfaithful to the man I love, but yeah ok, I can acknowledge that I don’t know what any of that truly feels like, but Frankie’s dithering protestations were just so pathetic & absurdly fake, I couldn’t even try to believe it. Especially considering she basically does the same thing not once, but TWICE. And we’re supposed to believe she’s struggling with attractions to unavailable men that are just so fierce that they are downright unconquerable?! Pffff. "But...But... I'm a good girl!!" No girlfriend, you are not, not when you're knowingly f'ing with married men. It's really not that hard to not, I've come across plenty of married men that I have found attractive, but their marriage status is like turning off a switch. I won't go there, so everything else is irrelevant. I do not indulge the attraction. It’s pretty simple. In Frankie's case, she had no real principles despite believing that she did. She was a selfish, self absorbed simp, a supposed feminist who wanted something different, or more than the traditional domestic life, yet all she did from beginning to end is was fall all over herself for sexy men. I'm sure there are a lot of Kristin Hannah devotees who enjoy and specifically seek her out for her personal brand of romance. Nightingale was romance heavy as well, but its steady pacing & other separate, unrelated plots made it all easier to get on board with bc it wasn't the only relevant storyline. And while in "The Women,' the romances didn’t exactly impel the nonexistent plot to it’s end, it was all still essentially a romance with a Vietnam War setting. (hide spoiler)]

The best bits IMO were the bits about the friendships Frankie made while nursing. Going through something as traumatizing as a war together has a way of solidifying relationships & bringing people much closer together than the average friendship. The way that Frankie relied on them & the way they showed up for her time & time again warmed my heart, but tbh even these parts highlighted how lacking the whole book was bc again, they lacked any substantial characterizations. We got no real backstories on either of the women, even the bits & pieces of their present lives were quickly glossed over. They were props, devices plugged in just to get Frankie out of whatever man-induced hole she was currently in. It also validated my opinion about Frankie being self absorbed & selfish, for all the support & love she’s given by these women, she gave almost none of it herself. For example, it takes her a very long time to be open minded about the cause her “best friend” has devoted her life to bc she’s too busy wallowing, & then when one of them gets engaged Frankie is jealous. Everything ties back to whatever is going on in her love life, it was annoying. For a book titled "The Women” which supposedly was intended to be something that gave distinction & a voice to a group that history has all but forgotten, a lot of this was about the men.

Historical fiction is not my favorite genre, but when written well (according to my preferences) they can still be some of my favorite books. But when I pick up a piece of historical fiction, I want to learn something about a time or a place or a people. Often after or while reading HF I find myself reading up on that topic, watching documentaries, searching out facts. Kate Quinn, John Boyne, Emma Donoghue are a few that come to mind that have consistently provided me with what I want in my historical fiction. What I don’t want is to read a romance within a historical setting. In “The Women,” reading about the experiences of a nurse in a time of war DID interest me, but it could have just as easily been any other place or time or war. Other than a few mentions of the heat & of “Charlie” one would hardly be able to differentiate between this & any other wars. It was ultimately a hollow construction of the war, a backdrop for the romantic exploits of our MC. I could have written this book with what little I knew about the Vietnam war. I got through just shy of 500 pages without learning a single thing. The title “Love In A Time Of War” would have mo

To be fair, I didn’t completely despise this book, it was readable, I was never bored. It was just that I had such high expectations & the result was disappointing. I have not read any of Kristin Hannah’s earlier works to know firsthand whether this is actually true or not, but I had gotten the sense that she had begun to deviate a bit from her previous chick-lit/romance with more literary work with "Nightingale," and "Four Winds," but it feels like she’s reverted back to her former M.O. with "The Women." (Which no shame to readers of chick-lit, some of it is great, but it’s just not what I was looking for in this instance.) Ordinarily I might have rated this 3 stars, but because my disappointment was so severe I had to go with 2. That doesn't mean that I'm giving up on Kristin Hannah, I still plan to one day read the "Great Alone," and I will likely continue to read whatever she comes out with.

It is also worth noting that so far the reaction to “The Women”has been so positive that it leaves me feeling like I might be alone in my feelings about it. I’m getting the typical “what did I miss?!” feeling. To each their own I guess 🤷🏻‍♀️🤷🏻‍♀️