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# Currently Reading: The Women by Kristin Hannah
- URL: https://www.thecetmag.com/currently-reading-the-women-by-kristin-hannah/
- Published: 2026-09-16T02:19:27.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-17T04:18:48.000Z
- Description: A different perspective on a war we thought we knew.
- Author: The CET
- Tags: Culture

We recently finished *The Women* by Kristin Hannah, and it left us thinking about the story long after we put it down.

Like most people, we'd learned about the Vietnam War largely through the experiences of male soldiers. Those were the stories we'd seen in movies, read in books and learned about in school.

What we hadn't spent nearly as much time thinking about were the women who were there.

*The Women* changed that for us.

The novel follows Frankie McGrath, a young woman who joins the Army Nurse Corps and serves in Vietnam. Through her story, we experience the war from the perspective of the nurses caring for wounded soldiers—women who witnessed the brutality of war firsthand but whose stories have received far less attention in popular portrayals of Vietnam.

And that was easily the part of the book we found most fascinating.

## A DIFFERENT SIDE OF THE STORY

One of the things we love about historical fiction is when a book makes us realize how much we **don't** know about a period we thought we understood.

That's exactly what happened here.

We've heard so many stories about Vietnam through the lens of the male soldier. *The Women* made us think about everyone else whose experiences don't necessarily make it into school textbooks, newspaper retrospectives or the movies we grow up watching.

The nurses.

The doctors.

The families waiting at home.

The people whose lives changed because of the war without ever becoming the central characters in the way we tell its history.

It made us wonder how many other major historical events we think we understand while knowing only the version that has been told most often.

That may have been our biggest takeaway from the entire book.

## THE WOMEN WHO WERE THERE

We especially loved learning about the nurses and what their lives could look like during the war.

They weren't standing on the sidelines of history. They were living inside it—working under extraordinary circumstances, caring for devastating injuries and experiencing their own trauma while trying to keep other people alive.

And yet their service hasn't occupied nearly the same amount of space in our cultural memory of Vietnam.

That perspective alone made the book worth reading for us.

## COMING HOME

We were also affected by the parts of the story dealing with what happened after Vietnam.

Frankie returns to a country deeply divided over the war and struggles to reconcile what she experienced with a society that doesn't always understand—or even acknowledge—her service.

It made us think differently about the veterans who returned from Vietnam and the complicated reception many encountered after serving in a war that had become so controversial at home.

Whatever someone's feelings were about the war itself, there is something deeply sad about imagining young people going where their country sent them, experiencing something incredibly traumatic and then coming home to a country that had changed while they were gone.

For Frankie, being a woman adds another layer to that experience.

Her story repeatedly confronts the idea that **“there were no women in Vietnam.”**

Of course, there were.

And that's really the heart of the book.

## WHO WE'D RECOMMEND IT TO

If you enjoy historical fiction, particularly books that approach familiar moments in history from perspectives you may not have considered before, we'd absolutely recommend *The Women*.

It's emotional, incredibly readable and, for us, genuinely thought-provoking.

We finished it knowing more than we did when we started—but more importantly, we finished it wanting to know more.

And that's one of our favorite things a book can do.

## THE CET TAKEAWAY

*The Women* reminded us that history is rarely just one story.

There are always other people in the room.

Other experiences.

Other versions of events that didn't become the version most of us learned.

Sometimes it takes a novel to make you curious enough to go looking for them.

**THE WOMEN**

*Kristin Hannah*

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### [READ THE BOOK →](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250178649/ref=cm%5Fsw%5Fr%5Fas%5Fgl%5Fapi%5Fgl%5Fi%5F1XXMA34RZGZMJSCQV4G8?linkCode=ml1&tag=stylis0c5-20&linkId=e22e286f0703154e0d0e3b546a6e5b18&gaOptInStatus=true)

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