I loved the first half. I felt like I could feel the jungle heat, and the tension when red alerts went off. There was ample gory descriptions of the wounded that came in to Frankie's care as a nurse which was hard to read, but felt true to history. 

The second half felt like the book that would never end. The second half was the book full of descriptions of feelings that didn't make me feel anything. There was so much melodrama. It was like Hannah threw the kitchen sink of all the possible post-war trauma she could think of at Frankie. It was very info-dumpy in the second half which is why I think I felt nothing while I was reading. The romances were over the top and not believable.

I appreciate that Hannah chose to focus on the women in Vietnam. That being said, a more apt title for the book is "The Woman" because we really only got one woman's story. This would be a powerful book to offer multiple POVs. Give us Ethel's story from her POV. Give us Barb's story. The choice to limit the story to a privileged white woman was an opportunity missed and it bugged me. I can tell through the narrative that representation was important to the writer and the writer understands that it was largely POC who served and died, but yet she chose to only tell a rich white woman's story. The math isn't mathing.