The Women by Kristin Hannah

 

Do you have any must read authors?  Authors that you must immediately read their new releases?  Kristin Hannah has become that kind of author for me after I read The Nightingale around ten years ago for my Rogue book club.

The Women is an intense story of a nurse, Frankie, who served on the frontlines of the Vietnam War only to return home to a changed America that does not welcome home its veterans.  How can Frankie find peace and a way forward in her civilian life?

·       The Women was an immersive story that made me feel like I was experiencing the changes that the Vietnam war brought to America in the 1960’s and 1970’s.  I loved in the author’s note at the end of the book Hannah lists her extensive research list and also explains that she had real Vietnam War nurses and veterans review the rough draft of the novel to critique it and provide real world details.  That really shines through in this book.

·       I really liked that the book didn't end with Frankie’s return from Vietnam, but went through her struggles, PTSD, and treatment after the war.

·       I enjoyed learning about the nurses that served during the Vietnam War.  I had never really thought before of how they had experienced the trauma of the war and that they were not recognized as veterans when they returned home.

·       This book NEEDS to be a movie.  I have read that the movie rights have already been sold.  I hope it actually does become a movie.  I am still waiting for The Nightingale to become a movie.

·       This book made me cry.  Kristin Hannah is good at making me feel the emotions of a story.

·       While I loved the historical fiction aspects of the story, the romance story fell flat for me.  I don’t want to ruin the story, but I loved it all until the very end.  SPOILER ALERT:  I could believe one dead great love being alive miraculously, but two was too much for me.  SPOILER END.  As with The Great Alone, sometimes Hannah has problems ending a great book with a believable ending.

·       I find it interesting that while most people really love Kristin Hannah, there are some that really don’t like her books and hate her for being a popular, best-selling author.  If you didn’t enjoy her other novels, you will probably not enjoy The Women.

What has been your favorite book of 2024 for far?  While I did not enjoy the ending, The Women was my favorite book of 2024 so far.  I learned a lot about the Vietnam War and the men and women who served.  It was an intense story.

Book Source:  Review copy from NetGalley. Thank-you!  Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

The Four Winds by Kristin Hannah

 Kristin Hannah’s historical fiction novels have become a “must read” for me as they come out.  I was very excited to read The Four Winds as part of the Brenda Novak Book Club – 2021 Reading Challenge.  She had a wonderful interview with Kristin Hannah last Thursday the 25^th that is available on Facebook.  It provides great insight into Hannah’s writing process and how she came up with the Four Winds.  I loved it!

 Elsa is a plain, unhappy, unloved, and unmarried daughter of a prosperous family in Texas in the 1920s.  One day she makes herself a red flapper dress, bobs her hair, and meets her husband.  Handsome Rafe has many dreams but settles down to raise a family with Elsa.   As the depression and then the Dust Bowl hit, the Martinelli family is hit with many difficult choices.  What will they do to survive?

 I loved the vivid portrait that Hannah painted of the Dust Bowl and the depression.  The very hard choices that people had to make for their family survival were devastating.  The ecological destruction wrought by the Dust Bowl helped to bring in new conservation practices that are still used to this day.  The travel from the shattered plains to California to then be treated like dirt was also heartbreaking.  People that proudly had their own farms or owned their own businesses were treated like trash and forced to live in tent cities.  The novel really humanized the situation.

 I LOVED the characters in this novel.  Elsa is a woman who had difficulty in self-confidence, but through the love of her children, she was able to work her hardest to survive.  I in particular loved her relationship with her in-laws and how they became her real parents.  I also loved the often-angry relationship she had with her 13-year-old daughter Loreda.  It rang as a true mother daughter relationship.  I loved that Elsa was doing her best, even when Loreda didn’t see it.

 I don’t want to ruin this book experience for others so I will not get further into the plot.  Like Hannah’s past few novels, I flew through this one and couldn’t put it down.  Tears were shed and emotions were felt.  I loved this novel.

 Favorite Quotes:

“Hope is a coin I carry:  an American penny, given to me by a man I came to love.”

 “Passion is a thunderstorm, there and gone.”

 “Elsa hadn’t known until right then how much difference a friend could make.  How one person could lift your spirit just enough to keep you upright.”

 “Poverty was a soul-crushing thing.  A cave that tightened around you, its pinprick of light closing a little more at the end of each desperate, unchanged day.”

 “Life went on, even in the hardest of times.”

 Overall, The Four Winds is a gripping story that vividly paints the devastation caused by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl.

Book Source:  Purchased from Amazon.com

The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah

I took The Great Alone on a recent trip to Michigan to visit my family and I couldn’t stop reading it in the car while my husband was driving.  It was such a great story, I was pulled in and the story didn’t let me go until the end.  I felt this way about Hannah’s The Nightingale as well although The Great Alone is a very different story.

Thirteen-year-old Leni has a very young mom, Cora, who loves Leni’s POW father, Ernt, with overwhelming passion. Cora insists that Ernt was a very different man before the Vietnam war, but Leni cannot really remember those times.  Ernt has a temper now and can’t seem to settle down anywhere.  Then Ernt finds out a fellow POW friend left him property in the Alaska.  Hoping for a new start, the family heads north.

In Alaska, the family discovers they are ill prepared, but that their neighbors are there to help.  Leni meets Matthew and finally has a friend her own age.  But as winter approaches, Ernt’s mood swings and violence increases. They especially increase when he feels threatened by their neighbor, Tom Walker, who seems to have it all and admires Cora. Will the family be able to survive the winter and all that Alaska has in store for them?

I loved this unique story and loved the author’s note at the end where Hannah describes living in Alaska and her family’s lodge.  I was disturbed that this is labeled a historic fiction novel as I was born in 1978, but I guess the 1970’s was 40 plus years ago and it’s time to accept that I am historic.    The description of the work the family must do to survive in a rugged terrain without running water or electricity were fascinating.  It was like Little House on the prairie set in the 1970s.  

Alaska itself is a star of this novel with visit description of the beauty of the land as well as the people who live there.  My favorite character was Large Marge.  Large Marge was a former Washington DC prosecutor who gave it all up to live on the land in Alaska.  She tells it as it is and isn’t afraid to take charge.  I love that there were several powerful women in this story.  I want Large Marge to get a book of her own.

The discussion of the lack of rights for women, especially woman that were subjected to domestic violence was thought provoking.  I did feel that Ernt at times seemed like a one-dimensional villain, but then Hannah would bring him back for Leni to remember what a great dad he could be at times.

I also loved the romance that developed between Leni and Matthew as it was a Romeo and Juliet story set in rugged Alaska.

SPOILER ALERT:

I loved this novel, but the ending still puzzles me.  I guess I really don’t understand how Matthew could be alive with his leg almost being severed and them not being found for two days.  I believe Leni put a tourniquet on Matthew at some point, but I just don’t understand how Matthew wouldn’t have died from a loss of blood or have lost his leg at the very least.  What happened to him was so disturbing . . . but I don’t even know if he should have lived.  I really want to talk to someone about this – leave any comments below.  If I could pick half stars, I would go with 4.5 stars out of 5 for this one.

SPOILER END.

Overall, The Great Alone is an epic and unique tale.  Kristin Hannah has a wonderful follow-up to The Nightingale.

Laura’s Top Ten Books of 2015

It’s hard to believe another year has wrapped up and we are starting 2016. I read a lot of outstanding books this past year and had a hard time narrowing my list down to only the top ten.  I did note though that this year, many of the books I read it book club made it to my top ten, we had a great year for books.   I also noticed most are historical fiction or historical non-fiction books. These books were not necessarily books published in 2015, but they were books I read in 2015.  I did not include books that I was rereading, but only books that I’ve read for the first time.  And now without further ado, my top ten books of 2015.

1.       The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah – This was a book club pick that I listened to on audio and was riveted. This is the story of two sisters in France during World War II, one sister is a wife and mother, the other a resistance fighter, but both are heroes and survivors in their own ways.  This novel was gripping until the last page and a great portrayal of women during the war.

2.      All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr  - Another book club pick, this book had me distressed for one of the main characters from the get go – a blind girl who cannot read the flyers the allies are dropping on the town to evacuate.  This story is also set in WWII and tells the parallel and then intersecting stories of a blind girl living in France and a young electronically gifted German boy who becomes a Nazi soldier.  This book was riveting all of the way through and is a story I still think about.

3.      The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman - You guessed it, this is another book club pick this year.  A WWI vet is living with his young wife at a remote lighthouse in Australia when they find a seemingly orphaned infant. Their choices change their lives forever. This one is another story that will haunt me forever with how the choices you make can impact so many lives.

 

4.      Ross Poldark by Winston Graham - I was on a book blog tour for this book with Austenprose and loved it.  This is a new fascinating historical fiction author and series for me.  I’ve read the first two books and vastly enjoyed them and also enjoyed the Masterpiece series based on them.  Up next in 2016 is reading book 3.  Ross Poldark has returned from fighting in the Revolutionary War in America to find his father dead, his estate ruined, and the woman he loved engaged to marry his cousin.  Most interesting to me was Poldark starting up copper mining on his property in Cornwall again after my years in the Copper Country (Upper Peninsula of Michigan where many Cornish miners immigrated).

5.      The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh – Another great book club pick for December, this was a very unique story that I found fascinating.  It describes a young girl that was raised in a variety of foster homes without a family.  She had one opportunity to have a family, but it all went very wrong.  The book skips back in time to this missed opportunity and in the future she tries to make a life for herself.  It also discusses how she uses the Victorian language of flowers to communicate and start a thriving business.

6.      Pioneer Girl:  The Annotated Biography by LauraIngalls Wilder – I have loved Laura Ingalls Wilder since I first read Little House in the Big Woods as an eight-year old. Pioneer Girl was Wilder’s first draft of the story of her life told for an adult audience.  Even better is that the editor added meticulous notes about the details that solved a lot of things I have been wondering since I was a child.  This book is fascinating for those that love Wilder as well as those that just want to learn the history of the pioneers of this country.

7.      The Oregon Trail by Rinker Buck – Rinker Buck goes on a cross country journey along the Oregon Trail with his brother Nick using mules and a wagon.  The journey is interesting and perilous at times.  Buck also gives a lot of great historical information about the Oregon Trail and those who traversed it. 

8.      A Desperate Fortune by Susanna Kearsley – I loved the Jacobite mystery in this novel as well as the mysterious Scottish man who I thought was a great hero.

9.      The Secret of Pembroke Park by Julie Klassen – I found a new favorite author this year – Julie Klassen.  I read this book also on a tour with Austenprose and loved this regency romance.  Part Jane Austen, part Charlotte Bronte, the mystery and sweet romance made this a page turner for me.

10.  The Other Typist by Suzanne Rindell – This book was a strange one that made me wonder what the heck was going on when I got to the end.  The ending still has me puzzled and thinking about it.  Who did it – I want to discuss!  A typist befriends an alluring new typist and has great adventures until everything takes a sinister twist.

Other books I loved this year but didn’t quite make my top ten include: The Wright Brothers by David McCullough, Inside the O’Briens by Lisa Genova, Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty, and The Summer Queen by Elizabeth Chadwick.

For more top books from the past, check out my lists from 2014, 2010, 2009, 2008, and 2007.

What were your favorite books of 2015?

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

Title: The Nightingale
Author: Kristin Hannah
Read by:  Polly Stone
Publisher: MacMillian Audio

Length: Approximately 17.5 hours (14 CDs)
Source:  Kewaunee Public Library - Thanks!

The Nightingale is one of the best novels I have read (or listened to!) in quite some time and I’ve read a lot of good books this year.  I looked forward to my daily commute just so I could listen to this audiobook and find out what was next in the story.  I don’t know if I have cried so much listening to another audiobook before . . . which I don’t recommend while driving!  The Nightingale packed an emotional punch and was a very compelling novel.

The Nightingale tells the story of two very different sisters.  Both were emotionally and figuratively abandoned by their father after their mother’s death.  Vianne was 14 and Isabelle was 4.  Vianne escaped through falling in love with Antoine and marrying when only 16.  After a series of miscarriages, she found herself unable to take care of her troublesome younger sister and Isabelle was shipped off to a series of boarding schools.  When WWII starts, Vianne says goodbye to her husband, but after the Germans quickly take over France, she soon realizes that the war will be fought at home and she will have to do what she can to survive.  Isabelle has high ideals and dreams of becoming a hero with the resistance, while Vianne tries to survive in her small town of Carriveau and keep herself and her daughter Sophie alive.

The novel starts out with an older woman in the United States narrating the story and wondering if she should tell her son about the terrible things that had happened during the war.  The reader is not sure who the narrator is until the end of the novel.  It was a nice mystery that was woven throughout.

I thought this was the best Kristin Hannah book I’ve read so far and I can’t wait to discuss it at our FLICKS book club meeting later this month.  There were many reasons why I enjoyed it so much.  One major reason was that this is a side of the story of WWII that I haven’t read or heard about as much before, the story of the women left behind in France and what happened to them during the occupation.  I was afraid the story would become cliché or that I would be able to guess what would happen, but it never did.  I was continually surprised at what direction the story took.  The characters were all well rounded, including some of the enemy officers.  Everyone had their faults, but it was what they chose to do with their life that made the difference.

The audiobook was very well done and Polly Stone was an excellent narrator who provided a voice for each character.  When I finished listening to this audiobook, I actually started listening to it again it was so good.  But sadly I have to take it back to the library now.

Overall, The Nightingale is not to be missed – you must read this book!  I have read on Kristin Hannah’s Facebook posts that this is going to be turned into a movie and I can’t wait, it will be excellent.  I could wax on about this book for quite some time, but going into it not knowing the intimate details is the best for a reader experiencing the book for the first time.  

A question for readers of this book – what part put you through the emotional wringer?  My first moment of tears was Sarah.