 Thank you very welcome back and that was the sound of Dolores Keynes and Tommy Sands and where have all the flowers gone. Song was written back in the 60s I suppose protesting against the war in Vietnam that Americans fought in from about 1964 to about 1973 and hundreds of thousands were killed and tonight we are reviewing The Woman written by Kristin Hannah that is set in Vietnam and it tells the story of Frankie McGraw who goes off to nurse there and joining me in the studio tonight I've got Tina Garry and Louise Flanagan just a mental block there. Liddy's you are very welcome. Thank you. Thanks Jane. So Tina it just gives a wee rundown on the storyline there. So it's an epic tale it's about Frances McGraw her family called her Frankie and she decides on a whim that she's going to go out and do service in Vietnam. She's from a very cushy well healed background. There's a lot of kind of parallels between their family and the Kennedys you know she has everything she could possibly want but she feels that there's something else out there for her. There are expectations for young women in those days where that especially for someone like Frankie that she would marry well like her mother and that there would be a path laid out for her and then her brother goes to Vietnam and her brother's friend makes a flippant remark that women can be heroes too and in her naivety she thinks that this is her calling that she needs to go to Vietnam as well but she's she's very comforted and very lacking in life experience and she soon realises that it's not going to be an easy experience for her does it without her parents knowledge she loses her or her brother into in Vietnam as well so they're horrified at the prospect of her going and we realise he has passed on page 20 so we're plunged into her grief and to her journey really really soon in the novel and then it's a case where she decides as soon as she arrives at you know I can't do this I'm not cut out for this and it's a hellish first section of the book the books in two different parts and it's punctuated then by her letters home and by her letters from her parents to her but it's an epic tale it's very gritty it's very detailed and true to form with Kristen Hannah it's very emotionally charged as well so it really does grip you and the historical accuracy with it as well is really gripping I was saying to Louise earlier I found myself slipping off to bed half seven eight o'clock just to get back into it you know it really you're you're hooked incredibly quickly and then it just it unleashes between there the novel title the women is basically about friendships that she makes when she's in Vietnam and the the sisterhood or the structural friendship that she has that keeps her from falling apart all of the times that she nearly falls apart whenever she eventually comes home and you're saying about her development as a person when she went off to Vietnam she was very very naive and when she came back as opposed to like you know she went as a was a version 21 year old she came back a woman of the world an established surgical nurse and did you find Louise that that was handled well by Kristen her development of her character I think it was yeah like as you said at the start of the story she is very very naive and she has always had such a sheltered life and Tina mentioned you know that you know her long-term expectation for her own life is to marry and to have kids and then she just gets this mad notion I suppose to go off and nurse and at the start like she is just so so naive she doesn't know what she's getting into when you know and she's so young as well and like when she arrives in Vietnam she's just thrown into the deep end there's you know a mass casualty situation and she doesn't know what to do she pretty much freezes she's like a rabbit in the headlights and after that I thought her first encounter in the your situation I think it's like her kind of her her boss basically says to her I heard you were as useful as a tiara in there you know so which I thought was kind of a funny turn of phrase so she goes from kind of being you know totally totally out of her depth you know to finding her feet and to being you know a lifesaver you know she literally saves lives over there and she does become you know very much you know self-assured and confident so when she goes back as you say she is a very different person so you do see that transition and the progress of her character from being very very naive and very unsure of herself you know to being very very competent and very relied on and very much respected by her peers in the army but then of course when she goes home she's like a scourge in society and it's about I suppose you know her struggle then of you know feeling confident and feeling proud of herself and then being exposed to so much animosity and disrespect like she literally gets spat on by several people when she comes home and she's quite confused by this because I suppose when they're over there they're quite sheltered from the reality of how people feel about the war there's a sense for a while that it's the hippies you know that have a problem with the war and you know some of the the remarks especially from her family they're very high-brow you know they'd be quite disparaging you know the old hippies you know what would they know type thing but then of course the anti-war movement becomes much more widespread and of course eventually encompasses the the veterans themselves you know in the efforts to try to stop the war so you see that entire span of her going off being so naive and so out of her depth to experiencing every you know step of that process you know towards the memorial and the eventual acceptance in America of of the atrocity and the loss of life and the devastation yeah the social realism element to it is quite clever you know there's a historical fiction as well as being you know that a wonderful piece of fiction at the same time it's historically very accurate and the representation of women in it and the change and expectations in society of what women were supposed to do and then Frankie goes down her own path and then coming back and trying to reconcile what her peers did with their lives in comparison with what she's done with hers she's fixed all of these people in Vietnam but she's returned utterly a broken and it's just about you know the expectations on women you know even there was a point where in her family home there was a hero wall where all of the men who had you know done service or who had been in the military had their you know their pictures on the wall where the females in the family their their wedding pictures were on the wall and when Frankie's father doesn't really recognize that she was one of the 11,000 women that did go to Vietnam she just she can't understand why she's not getting the same honour the same adulation as you know any other relative in the family would have gotten and the horrible irony about that is that Frankie's father herself didn't serve through some kind of technicality he didn't have to and she's really bitter that she gave up so you know so much of her life and so much of her time to do two terms of service out there but he still won't put her picture up on the wall because she's not doing what was expected of her which you know she didn't do she was told she wasn't you know following the path that had been set out for her so it's yeah it's epic it really is and I suppose it really there's she deals a lot with relationships and it was very strong throughout the book is her relationship with her father and she really wants to get his you know just his his love and affection and she wants to to make him proud of her and it has her going to Vietnam she thought she was going to do that but it had the completely opposite result yeah definitely um you know one of the recurring threads in the novel is that female trauma is not validated and her father never validates hers never validates her service either and there's this kind of you know where's my recognition and I suppose that's just symbolic of the other almost 11,000 women who had been in the same position um and and as Louise had said Hannah's very clever in her way that the novel kind of follows the journey of those women of gaining that recognition nearer the conclusion of the novel and I suppose there there are a lot of relationships Louise that there's a relationship with her parents with her mother as well and then her female friends uh Barb and Ethel and they become very close to her yeah so Barb and Ethel are two nurses who are there um a little bit before her so they're kind of used to the situation um and the trauma uh and when she arrives so when she first arrives she basically like uh she works and then she just crawls into her bed because she's exhausted and Barb and Ethel kind of pull her out of herself and they they encourage her to live while she's there as well and you know when you're reading it you know there's there's a part of me I could hardly believe it but they did smile and they did laugh and they did drink and they did dance and they did have a good time but obviously they deserved that and they needed that you know because it was kind of the only thing that could keep them on an even keel but one of the first parties that Barb and Ethel bring her to um Frankie can hear bombs dropping in the background and like the drinks are shaking and everything just with the the impact and she's obviously you know really freaked out and thinks you know we need to go to seek shelter and they say no you know just dance just try and switch off this is as good as it gets essentially so they they play a really really important role um in her in her enjoyment of a really terrible terrible situation you know there's a sense that they're all in it together but that they that they really really help each other to kind of get through um and to see the good uh in in what they can you know and I suppose in some instances to make the most of it you know um as when she's an older character you know Frankie looks back you know to her time in Vietnam to say that it was the worst memories but also the best memories of her life and those best memories are largely to do with Barb and Ethel they have a huge role to play like there's a sense that um they just they just understand the depths of each other's hearts and minds and so much doesn't even need to be said between them they would take one look at her and they would know what she needed you know if she needed a drink or if she needed a walk if she needed advice you know that they just kind of instinctively much more than the men in the story knew uh what they needed you know what each of them needed at any given moment of time and I think I've read a number of uh Kristen's books and I always found that she her descriptive technique was really good I you could feel yourself being in the hospital or in the jungle or on the helicopter did you find that Tina I thought it was very well written really vivid um well paced but like within 20 pages I I was like okay I have to put the book down I didn't want to okay I'll do I'll do a few more I'll do a few more now our structure is brilliant um there there's a section of the novel very large section of the novel that is set in Vietnam there's another section that's not I was surprised uh when the Vietnam section finished and it was like and I you know looked and it was quite a lot left and it was like oh I you know I thought historical fiction it's going to be a book about her experience in Vietnam quite a large chunk of the book is about her experience post-Vietnam and her her struggles with that um so it is it is very well paced as I'd said um already the letters home punctuate the kind of experience and the letters you know home to barb and ethyl after they finish their service and their correspondence with each other um sometimes can give an awful lot of way in what's not said um Frankie's correspondence and communication with her parents is all very you know higher as everyone everything here is fine we work you know things are busy but she doesn't she never goes into the true horror the true detail they're very much shielded from it in a way growing up that she was shielded from maybe a lot of realities of life as well and when her and barb and ethyl become you know this really tight-knit group you know ordinarily had they not been in Vietnam their backgrounds were as such that they would never have met they would never have been in the same social circles they would never have ordinarily undergone anything similar to each other but Vietnam brings them together and they share this you know unbreakable bond irrespective of their differences in background or differences in outlook and they remain friends throughout their whole life and they very much save each other under there for each other for the rest of their lives um i think they maybe deal with things a little bit better than Frankie does Frankie really struggles when she comes home um and it's it's the women are her saving grace and they return at different stages in her life to pick up the pieces and there's a lot of those stages and there's a lot of pieces now Frankie does make the point you know herself when she's talking to someone and she's trying to work through her her post-traumatic stress and you know she she makes that observation herself that her friends are seemingly coping with it so much better than her and one of the character says war trauma isn't a competitive sport which i which i thought was like a great turn of phrase you know twice suppose you know to justify or to explain like that you know everyone's coping skills are different and you know like there were times when i found i couldn't quite warm to Frankie's character as much as i wanted to at times um but i kind of was thinking about it you know for the purposes of discussing it and and i think that that might have been intentional on the part of the author like she is just a ball of enigma she's a mystery she i don't even think she truly understands herself so how could we as readers truly understand her as a character so i think i found it quite difficult in some instances to to relate to her or you know to fully engage with her um but i think that that was intentional yeah it's hard to understand why someone like Frankie would ever have signed up for vietnam she was the only person in her locality that had served the only female um and contrast to barb's hometown where everyone had signed up to serve because they didn't have the social opportunities or the opportunities for further education that frankie would have automatically just been afforded you know so it's it just kind of want to shake her sometimes yeah you know like the likes of barb was able to adapt because she'd struggled all her life and she was used to the struggle um and frankie didn't um so yeah and i thought you know her research was so good because uh like i taught this module whenever i taught her street relief insert and her description of the the whole vietnam war i thought was so accurate and how she researched uh the post traumatic stress that that frankie um suffered after coming back and so the very subtle description too of of blacks in america and how at that time they were second-class citizens i thought her research was very very good uh tina um it's meticulously researched in very detail and when you read all the thank yous at the back you know it is true to form as a piece of historical fiction you know and it and it brought so much back that maybe i'd forgotten that happened you know even down to the whole fake news element which we forget maybe just isn't something off the trump era um you know where what was what was being told at home through the media and through the newspapers what public information was given was very different to how real life was in vietnam and then when these veterans returned home they just couldn't get over why they wouldn't be afforded sympathy or why they weren't they weren't given a hero's welcome you know why everything was so pure so it was it was and i suppose that was a feature of world war two as well but it's just a case where the media had entirely led the american public astray and they weren't grateful for the sacrifice of so many young men and women um to quote that part paul hard castle song i'm showing me age now team what was the average age of the death of the young men in america at the time so yeah it was a very very well researched very detailed very true to form and just very much gripping you would wonder in the way that firefly leon has already been serialized would this be picked up as well and certainly and i think it is actually and its scope it's vast and often it has the emotional depth as well likes and dislikes uh louise oh lord um i i did like the the overall story but i've like as a genre i'm not really sure if war stories are my thing i found some of it you know difficult to read i suppose like most people i'm anti-war i don't understand yeah i just i don't understand why anybody would would head off to war as frankie did but again obviously cultural context and all the rest so i found it difficult to read it's very descriptive um and it's graphic but it you know what is what it says in the tin like you know it's a nurse in vietnam so obviously it's going to be quite graphic i found that difficult at times so to read um like i was heading over to uh edinburgh to visit two of my friends and i was in the airport by myself so i was like right i'll sit now and i'll have wee burger and i'll read another couple of pages of the book so i started reading anyway and i was just chewing the burger and there was a part about an amputation of a hand because gangrene had sat in and i was like right i'll eat first and then and then i'll carry on reading so you know it is but now she doesn't sensationalize it she doesn't kind of make it all gory and you know it just is what it is it's a very traumatic situation um and that is depicted very accurately but it's it's difficult to read at times you know so that would be something that uh that i found a little bit on satan likes dislikes tina um i like the fact that you were quickly hooked um the for the maybe the first 80 percent 90 percent of the novel it's paced really well it has really relatable characters that has a lovely storyline it's if you like a good cry it's a really poignant emotionally charged novel my dislike was there were times where i was kind of checking how much was left how many pages were left and i was like surely nothing else can go wrong and it kind of gets to the stage where it's it's trauma after trauma after trauma and it's like frankie pull yourself together here because if i think if these three friends existed in real life at one point they're going to say no it's time for you it's time for you to pull yourself together i kind of felt as if we could have just maybe had one trauma less towards the end because i felt maybe the last 20 dragged a small bit for me it's full of romance it's a great read but just towards the end it was like no come on wrap it up christin let's go out of ten we never even got talking about the four romances she had but uh we'll let the readers find that out themselves out of ten i'm going to go for an eight on this one eight as well eight and i'd give it a nine because i i do i do love her it's not my favorite book of course i think the nightingale was my favorite book i've read about five of her books the nightingale was my favorite but anyway as i said i would recommend it to the listeners tonight to go out and and and and buy it and i think it has been made into a film as well so tina and uh louise thank you so much for joining me tonight and uh hopefully we'll get you back again sometime thank you visit any show and co-op home build show at any show and get me hotel bon crana on saturday april 13th 11