Joan Mackenzie reviews The Women by Kristin Hannah

Hello I'm Joan and this book is called The Women by Kristin Hannah. Last year I read a book called Dust Child which told the story of the Vietnam War from a completely different perspective and that is what Kristin Hannah has managed to do with this one. It’s the story of Frankie McGrath who’s a 20 year old nursing student. The men in her family have been war heroes and this is set in the 1960s and her brother signs up to go to Vietnam. She then thinks that she could do the same thing and join the family legacy of war heroism. But the problem is that her family deeply disapprove. But off she goes to Vietnam and as you might imagine the work she does there is painful, and difficult, and unbelievably challenging. But she does it and she survives but when she comes home, not only her family but the people of America are deeply disapproving that a woman went to war and in many cases simply refused to accept the fact that women did go. The story then follows the next many years of her life as she readjusts to life in American society and lives with the trauma of what she went through in Vietnam while as I say people not believing that she was even there. What Kristin Hannah does so well in all her books is draw characters with whom you can have real empathy and understanding of the way they live their lives and the circumstances in which they are. I loved this book and I highly recommend it.