Sandra The Old Woman in a Van's Reviews > The Women

Kristin Hannah's upcoming release, The Women, left me in a severe love-hate conundrum. I can only give it three stars, an average of the five stars it deserves for the parts set in Vietnam and the one star it deserves for the backstories and romances.

I loved the section of the book set in Vietnam. This part of the book was well-researched, action-packed, and took me as close as I wanted to be to a combat medical evacuation unit. Vietnam War literature has not covered the nurse's perspective much, so I especially valued this content. The Vietnam writing was gritty and sometimes challenging to read but written very well (trigger warnings for some readers, though, so be forewarned).

However, the book chapters preceding Frankie's tour in Vietnam were slow and plodding. Frankie seemed devoid of personality - a cardboard caricature of "the good girl." I came close to DNFing the book before it even took off. The last half of this overly long book covered Frankie's return home and her struggles with PTSD. Aspects of these sections had decent content, covering the abysmal treatment of returning vets, the complete dismissal of women serving in combat zones, and the range of issues Vietnam Vets had adapting to life back home.

All good, but then there were the intertwined romances and backstories, and these were, in my opinion, just horrible. I've watched soap operas with more feasible plot lines. I don't want to include spoilers, but there were way too many times I rolled my eyes in dismay. It wasn't even that the romance aspect was too swoony (people familiar with my reviews know I have a low tolerance for swooniness), but the plot devolved into the ludicrous. The ridiculousness of some of the events in Frankie's relationships detracted from the seriousness of the rest of the story. Given the book was almost 500 pages long, much of this could have (should have) been edited out.

Some details in the book's second half would have benefitted from better research. As written, they detracted from the good parts of the story and came off as just plain lazy. It's small stuff, but it piled up and was sometimes so frustrating I wanted to give up reading. Here are a few of my issues (that won't give away the plot). First, one nurse friend wants to be a veterinarian. OK, good for her, but in the late 1960s, few women were getting into vet school and, indeed, were mostly blocked from becoming large animal vets as this woman aspired to (I am a veterinarian, and vet school did not open broadly to women until the early 1980s). So this friend comes home from her tour in, I think, March and enrolls in vet school during the middle of the school year because, of course, a nurse can just do that without taking any prerequisites or entrance exams or even applying. Then this same friend, more than once, drops everything, including vet school, to fly out at the last minute and spend weeks helping Frankie, who is dealing with one melodramatic romantic crisis after another. Because you can do that in the middle of vet school with no apparent repercussions. This isn't the vet school I remember. And what regular folks just flew around the country on a whim in the 1960s? Flying was a big deal then, not done on a day's notice. Later in the book, a character living in rural Montana decides to become a clinical psychologist and does so while living in rural Montana because they have so many clinical psychology programs (yes, this is sarcasm).

I understand I am an outlier here, but I'm also not alone in my criticisms of the non-Vietnam aspects of the novel. You'll enjoy the book if melodrama, lack of historical accuracy, and telenovela-level romances don't bother you.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing me with an eBook version of the novel in return for a review.