When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances "Frankie" McGrath hears these unexpected words, it is a revelation. Raised on idyllic Coronado Island and sheltered by her conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the right thing, being a good girl. But in 1965 the world is changing, and she suddenly imagines a different choice for her life. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she impulsively joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path. As green and inexperienced as the men sent to Vietnam to fight, Frankie is overwhelmed by the chaos and destruction of war, as well as the unexpected trauma of coming home to a changed and politically divided America.
Hannah takes up the Vietnam epic and re-centers the story on the experience of women ... Hannah is in top form here, plunging the reader into the chaotic miseries of the combat zone. She deploys details to visceral effect.
She again proves her skill at submerging readers in a compelling character's experience and enlightening them about history's overlooked heroines ... Hannah has rendered you helpless at this point, compelled by a character who grows increasingly complicated and flawed, as she flails in love and life and joins a quest for recognition of the approximately 10,000 women who served in Vietnam.
Reading Hannah’s books may be a masochistic pastime, but it’s also a hugely popular one ... Is there a single line — 'Not my Leni' — that will get the waterworks going years after reading it? I would love to tell you, but my screen is getting inexplicably blurry.
