Reading Hannah’s books may be a masochistic pastime, but it’s also a hugely popular one. “The Nightingale,” “The Four Winds,” “The Great Alone,” “Firefly Lane”: Her books are such reliable bestsellers that her publisher is betting big on “The Women” with an initial printing of 1 million copies. If Kleenex doesn’t come up with a tie-in campaign, it’s leaving money on the table.... I read “The Women” while hugging an emotional-support pillow and trying to divine which characters would be sacrificed. Hannah’s protective instincts toward her protagonists are on par with George R.R. Martin’s. But even if Frankie made it out alive, I knew there would be many more who wouldn’t.... while it destroyed me, it also awoke something that was — and continues to be — in short supply: empathy. It gave me a new appreciation for what everyday people from the past endured; it also gave me perspective for how my own micro-tragedies fit into the larger framework of history. Hannah tells the stories of real but unsung heroes, and when you consider that, the price of a few sobs seems relatively small.

A few chapters into “The Women,” I experienced a wave of déjà vu — and it wasn’t just the warm Tab and the creme rinse. If you grew up in the 1980s, the Vietnam redemption arc was imprinted on your gray matter by a stampede of young novelists and filmmakers coming to grips with their foundational trauma: patriotic innocence shattered by the barbarity of jungle warfare; the return home to a hostile nation; the chasm of despair and addiction; and finally, the healing power of activism.... Kristin Hannah takes up the Vietnam epic and re-centers the story on the experience of women — in this instance, the military nurses who worked under fire, on bases and in field hospitals, to patch soldiers back together. Or not.... Hannah’s real superpower is her ability to hook you along from catastrophe to catastrophe, sometimes peering between your fingers, because you simply cannot give up on her characters. If the story loses a little momentum after Frankie completes her second tour — slingshot to the finish by a series of occasionally strained plot twists — well, isn’t that the way it went for so many veterans returning home? Without the imperatives of war, you stumble along until you find your way.

The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world..... In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away. A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.