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Fiction
Project Hail Mary
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Narration ★5
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"Women can be heroes." When twenty-year-old nursing student Frankie McGrath hears those words in 1965, they crack something open, and she follows her brother to Vietnam. The Women completes what we would call Kristin Hannah's war-and-womanhood trilogy on our shelf, after The Nightingale and The Four Winds, and it hands the microphone once more to Julia Whelan, with Hannah herself reading the author's note. It topped every chart it touched, and having listened, we understand why.
Frankie serves two tours as a combat nurse, and Hannah renders the war years with a field-hospital intensity that rivals anything in her catalog, mass casualties, monsoon operations, the found family of nurses who hold each other together. But the book's truest ambition is its second half: coming home. The country Frankie returns to insists there were no women in Vietnam, her own parents cannot look at her service, and the novel becomes a portrait of a generation of women veterans erased twice, by the war's machinery and by the memory of it. The PTSD and addiction chapters are among the hardest, and most necessary, material Hannah has written.
Our third Whelan-Hannah collaboration review, and the pattern holds: Whelan's controlled restraint is precisely what melodrama-adjacent material needs. Her Frankie ages audibly, bright and untested in the early chapters, flattened and rewired after the first mass-casualty scene, and her handling of the homecoming spiral never begs for tears it has not earned. The veteran-reunion scenes late in the book are as fine a stretch of narration as she has recorded, and that is a high bar we set at Educated.
Well narrated? Whelan at full command of the Hannah register, the pairing at its peak. A devastating, overdue tribute to the women Vietnam forgot. Bring tissues; this is the heaviest of the Hannah epics we have covered, and the best.
The Nightingale and The Four Winds, the three together form an unofficial trilogy about women and war across three eras.
Julia Whelan narrates the novel, with Kristin Hannah reading the author's note, in the Macmillan Audio edition. It continues the acclaimed Whelan-Hannah pairing from The Four Winds.
Frankie is fictional, but the book is grounded in extensive research on the roughly ten thousand American women, mostly nurses, who served in Vietnam and were largely written out of its history. The author's note details the real accounts behind the fiction.
Both are Hannah at full power; The Nightingale is the more famous, The Women the more raw. If WWII-era fiction draws you, start with The Nightingale; if you want the braver, angrier book about how a country treats its veterans, this is it.
About 14 hours 57 minutes, and the two-act structure, war and homecoming, keeps the long runtime moving.
You can hear The Women free with an Audible trial, new members get their first title included. (Affiliate link, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.)
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