by Kristin Hannah
4.8 · 4 reviewsShe went to war to save lives — and came home to a country that pretended she was never there.
Frances "Frankie" McGrath grows up in a sheltered Southern California world where good girls follow the rules and the men in the family hang their portraits on a wall of heroes. When her brother ships out for Vietnam, an offhand remark — that women can be heroes too — lodges in Frankie's heart and sends her enlisting as an Army nurse, certain she is doing something noble that her parents will be proud of.
Nothing prepares her for the chaos of a combat hospital: the unrelenting waves of wounded, the gallows humor, the fierce friendships forged with the other women who keep one another alive through impossible shifts. In the heat and blood of the war, Frankie discovers a courage and a capability she never imagined she possessed.
But coming home proves to be its own kind of battlefield. In a divided America that insists "there were no women in Vietnam," Frankie struggles to be seen, to be believed, and to find her footing amid loss, addiction, and a love that may not survive what the war has done to her. Spanning the turbulent 1960s and '70s, this is a sweeping story of one woman's reckoning and the sisterhood that refuses to let her fall.
First published in 2024.
4 reviews
I had no idea about the nurses who served and were told to their faces they didn't exist. This book made that history impossible to ignore. Hand it to your mom, your book club, anyone.
The Vietnam sections are extraordinary and the look at how women veterans were erased really stayed with me. My one quibble is the back half leans hard on melodrama and a couple of plot turns felt engineered for maximum tears. Still very glad I read it.
Read this in two sittings. Hannah does that thing where you think you know where it's going and then she pulls the rug out. The detail in the hospital scenes is intense but never feels gratuitous. Easily my favorite of hers.
I went in expecting a war story and got so much more — the homecoming chapters wrecked me harder than anything that happened overseas. Frankie's friendships felt so real I missed them when the book ended. I cried on a plane and didn't even care.