The Women by Kristin Hannah

October 5, 2024

The Women by Kristin Hannah

Frankie McGrath grew up in a wealthy family on Coronado Island, California. Her father always preached the importance of service to one's country, but when Frankie volunteers for Vietnam as an Army nurse, her socialite parents are horrified and go to great lengths to hide Frankie's service from their friends. Frankie faces the horrors of war, but when she comes home, she is not prepared to face the scorn of her fellow American or the shame of her family.

Let's get one thing straight right away: women have gone to war as long as their have been wars. They were nurses, cooks, laundresses, ambulance drivers, clerks, spies, and yes, camp followers. Women have stood behind their men, reloading their guns for them, or fighting right beside them. All of the men in the book who claim there were no women in Vietnam were not paying attention. There is only one veteran in the book, a World War II veteran, who honors Frankie for her service, saying that he is alive today because a nurse like Frankie saved his life in France. It wasn't until two television series aired, China Beach and MASH, that Americans realized what these wonderful women did, and were ashamed of how they treated the men and women who returned home from the Vietnam War.

The government was just as bad, offering few services to the men returning from Vietnam, and absolutely none to the women veterans. PTSD was unknown at the time, as were the dangers of chemicals like Agent Orange, which caused high rates of cancer and miscarriages in veterans. In addition, the women veterans had to fight to have their fallen women comrades' names included on The Wall. There are now eight nurses honored on The Wall.

This is a wonderful book about the nurses who served in the Vietnam War. The author's previous book The Nightingale is about women on the homefront in France during World War II, also spectacular. I highly recommend both of these books to readers of historical fiction, literary fiction, or women's fiction.

The Vietnam Women's Memorial in Washington DC near the Vietnam War Memorial, aka The Wall - it's a Pieta of three nurses and a wounded soldier - there is a third nurse kneeling behind the three figures that you can see in this photo

The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah

February 27, 2021

The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah

In 1934, in the middle years of drought brought on by soil erosion, with the Great Depression in its fifth year, Elsa Martinelli makes the difficult decision to leave the family farm in Oklahoma and travel to California. Elsa's husband disappeared a few years earlier and Elsa believes he went to California following dreams of easy money. Their son is suffering from dust tuberculosis and the cleaner air in California is supposed to help. 

But California proves not to be the promised land - unable to find cheap housing, reduced to picking crops for low wages, the family is forced to live in a tent city. They experience grinding poverty, prejudice, and a number of other tragedies.

We all enjoy a good tearjerker now and again, but this was just too bleak. Nothing went right for the family and when Elsa finally does stand up for herself, it ends in tragedy. Her daughter Lorada has no absolutely redeeming qualities, and the sick son is a non-entity. The best characters in the book are Elsa's in-laws, Rosa and Tony Martinelli. They take Elsa in when she becomes pregnant with their son's child and her own parents throw her out (Elsa's parents also have no redeeming qualities). They are the first real family and love that Elsa has ever know.

I kept reading, hoping that something good happens or that there will be a happy ending, but it's all just so sad.

I am hit or miss with Kristin Hannah's books. Normally I'm not much into women's fiction, but I loved The Nightingale (which was more like historical women's fiction) and I moderated the book discussion at the library. The Great Alone was more like The Four Winds, bleak and depressing.

That's a dust storm blowing across the Great Plains behind the farm, not a mountain range

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an eARC.