Month: October 2024

The Women

By Kristin Hannah

Published 2024

Read May 2024

It’s mid-1960’s and before the Coronado Island-San Diego bridge was built.  The book opens during the going-away party for the older brother and only sibling of Francis (Frankie) McGrath.  He’s graduated from Annapolis and is headed to Vietnam on a ship.  Frankie’s parents have made clear to her that their plan for her is to marry well, consistent with their stature in society.  Frankie’s dad never served in the military but has a wall of fame for those in the family who have.  The wall includes wedding pictures for the women.  Frankie has another idea, prompted by a comment by a friend of her brother at this party—women can be heroes too.  She has completed a nursing course and enlists in the army to be a nurse in Vietnam—the only military service that will ship nurses to Vietnam with no military experience.  Her brother is killed just before she leaves for Vietnam and her parents are both devastated by this loss and furious at her for enlisting.

We witness Frankie’s “trial by fire” as she’s dropped into a hospital dealing with all the Vietnam trauma we’ve heard about.  Hannah’s writing engages the reader rapidly and completely and we are quickly cheering for her and her sister nurses.  She’s smart and committed and manages to become a competent nurse that the doctors rely on—and hit on and might abuse if out at night alone.  She deflects potential relationships with married or engaged men even when she is in love with them. Things get even tougher for her when she is transferred to a unit essentially at the front. 

But the toughest challenges Frankie faces happen when her term is complete, and she returns home to a country that is routinely spitting at returning soldiers.  She learns her parents have lied to others, indicating she’s been travelling in Europe, not trying to keep soldiers alive in Vietnam.  The veteran support services don’t recognize that women were in Vietnam at all, so she has no legitimate claim to their services.  Her parents expect her to resume her role in their pre-conceived story for her and don’t even want to hear anything about her time in Vietnam.  Our hearts break as Frankie’s does. It’s not surprising this book became a best seller.  The author’s writing drives you to turn the pages; the protagonist is engaging and suffers mightily and believably state-side. The medical scenes, the relaxation scenes, the state-side scenes are all believable.  We want Frankie to find something to pull her through the transition that allows her to make a new life for herself. As an aside–this reader wondered how Frankie would have fared if she didn’t have parents who financially supported her during her darkest days, but it still worked.  Overall, the story is perfect for a movie or a streaming service series or both!  If the popularity of the book, movie, series, etc help highlight the little credit given women for the critical roles they have played in war throughout history it’s all good. 

Tell Me Everything     

By Elizabeth Strout

Published 2024

Read Oct 2024

Since the publication of Olive Kitteridge, this reader has read all of Elizabeth’s Strout previously published books and now often reads her newest book as soon as her place in line at the library allows.  For this book, an audio version was the first available and this reader devoured it.  The audiobook reader was great, especially when Olive Kitteridge is speaking.

Yes, Olive Kitteridge is in this book along with all of the (still living) major characters from many of the pre-Olive books, Amy and Isabelle and The Burgess Boys, as well as the Lucy Barton books, My Name is Lucy Barton, Anything is Possible, Oh William, and Lucy by the Sea as well as some of the minor ones in those books.  It’s not necessary to have read these previous books as the authors gives us sufficient background for the purposes of this book, but this reader’s experience was likely deepened having read them before this book. 

Much of this book focuses on conversations between various characters as they tell stories to each other, generally about other people and occasionally about themselves.  One such pair is Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge.  Lucy Barton is a successfully published author of memoirs who is now living in the Crosby, ME area with her ex-husband, William.  Lucy by the Sea told of their move there to escape the COVID-19 pandemic.  Lucy and Olive become acquainted when Olive asks Bob Burgess to have Lucy visit her so Olive can tell Lucy a story.  Lucy visits Olive at the senior living facility in which Olive, now 90, resides.  Lucy and Olive meet with some frequency to tell each other stories of “unrecorded lives”.  At one point Lucy is concerned about the purpose of the life of one of her friends who was the topic of Lucy’s story.  Olive was not impressed that Lucy asked about the purpose of a life, and when asked by Lucy for Olive’s view, Olive tells her she and her husband shared the view that the purpose of life was to work hard and help people.  This is one example of how the stories about people, which is a frequent part of most of Strout’s books, sometimes goes beyond just the story in this book into something deeper that the pair finds themselves discussing. 

This book has a focus on Bob Burgess, who was first introduced in The Burgess Boys and who reappears in Lucy by the Sea.   He takes on a murder case that is eventually resolved, he helps his brother, Jim, deal with his son, he helps his ex-wife deal with her alcoholism, he consoles his wife as she deals with her position as minister at a local church, and he walks and talks with Lucy Barton, something they started in Lucy by the Sea. Their regular walks cover a wide variety of topics and sometimes get quite philosophical.  Their walks are very important parts of both Lucy and Bob’s lives.  It becomes evident that Bob Burgess is an extraordinary person although he doesn’t realize it.  He does things for people that truly make a difference in their lives, and he makes hard decisions that impact his own life just because it’s in his nature to do what he knows should be done.

This reader became aware of an article in the Oprah Daily about the book which had this information:  “At the end of Oprah’s 107^th Book Club pick, Tell Me Everything, by Elizabeth Strout, a character references an article called “Love Is Love” that helped her understand that “love comes in so many different forms, but it is always love. If it is love, then it is love.”  The article publishes this article, which was originally published by Strout in German.  It’s worth a read. It turns out there are many fine examples of love in Tell Me Everything which is definitely worth a read.