Set during the Vietnam War, Kristin Hannah’s The Women is a story about how the role women play in society is often minimized or overlooked. It is an engaging story, and I can see why it is such a popular novel. The Women is my next favourite Kristin Hannah novel so far after The Nightingale.

The Women is about a twenty-year-old nursing student named Frances “Frankie” McGrath who wants more from life than to become a wife and mother like her wealthy parents expect to her to. Inspired by her father’s “heroes wall” – pictures of all the men in her family who have gone to war – and her brother shipping out to serve in Vietnam, Frankie decides to join the Army Nurse Corps.

Frankie serves two tours in Vietnam, shedding the idealism of her privileged upbringing and becoming a confident nurse who is barely fazed by the gruesome horror of war injuries, but when she returns home, her parents are ashamed of her and her country hates her for her involvement in the war. The PTSD she suffers sends her life spiralling out of control, but every time she tries to find help, she is told that women were not in Vietnam.

The Women is a great feminist novel, but I would not call it a great war novel. Although Frankie’s experience as a combat nurse is vividly rendered, the novel only lightly scratches the surface of the divisiveness of the Vietnam War, the atrocities committed by the US in Vietnam and the affects of the war not just on nurses like Frankie, but also the soldiers who came home as addicts because drug use was the only way they knew how to cope with their experiences in Vietnam.

The Women has definitely roused my curiosity about the Vietnam War and why it was so unpopular with the American public, but it does excel as a story about one woman’s experience with the war. Frankie is a deeply sympathetic character as she struggles to adjust to life after war in a time when people were just figuring out what PTSD is and how to treat it and her actions, including her mistakes, are completely understandable. Only Frankie’s fellow combat nurses understand why she has difficulty settling into the role that society expects from her after the personal sacrifice she made to go to war and help save people’s lives. She wants, and deserves, to also be acknowledged as a hero.

Still, the plotting of The Women is a little too easy to predict. I feel that despite Frankie’s own desire to be a different kind of woman, The Women has too many elements of romance to detract from the female camaraderie at the heart of the novel.