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WORK TITLE: The Women
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WEBSITE: http://www.kristinhannah.com/
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NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: LRC 2018
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PERSONAL
Born September 25, 1960, in Garden Grove, CA; daughter of Laurence and Sharon John; married Benjamin Hannah (a film buyer), May 17, 1986; children: one son.
EDUCATION:University of Washington, B.A. (communications), 1982; University of Puget Sound, J.D., 1986.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Northwest Diversified Entertainment, Seattle, WA, lawyer, 1986-93; writer, 1993—. Has also worked in advertising.
MEMBER:Romance Writers of America, Novelists, Inc.
AWARDS:Maggie Award and RITA/Golden Heart Award, Romance Writers of America, 1990, both for A Handful of Heaven; National Readers’ Choice Award, Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1996, and Booklist Best Book of 1996, all for Home Again; Best Historical Fiction Prize, Goodreads Choice Awards, 2015, and Fiction Prize, Audie Awards, named a Best Book of the Year by Amazon, iTunes, Buzzfeed, the Wall Street Journal, Paste, and The Week 2016, all for The Nightingale; Goodreads Best Historical Novel of the Year and New York Times #1 bestseller, for The Great Alone.
WRITINGS
Firefly Lane was made into a Netflix original series, 2021; The Nightingale is in production at Tri Star.
SIDELIGHTS
Kristin Hannah gained success as a writer after first practicing as a lawyer. Her first writing effort, a historical tale set in Scotland, was written while she was in law school. She worked on it with her mother, who was ill with cancer at the time. Although that novel has never been published, it nevertheless was a milestone in Hannah’s path as an author. She completed law school and began practicing, but when her first pregnancy forced her to take complete bed rest, she turned to writing for something to while away the hours. She sold a novel when her son was just two years old, and she has published at a rate of about a book a year since then. Her novels are generally put in the category of romantic fiction, but many critics have lauded her work as being a cut above that usually found in the genre.
Hannah’s earliest several novels were published in paperback. On Mystic Lake was her breakthrough to the more prestigious hardcover market. According to a reviewer in Publishers Weekly, in On Mystic Lake Hannah “shows what it takes for an author to make that defining leap. Never one to gush, she is more than ever disciplined in her writing, and the result is a clean, deep thrust into the reader’s heart.”
The story concerns Annie Colwater, who faces loneliness when her seventeen-year-old daughter, Natalie, departs for a summer in London. Annie soon learns that her husband wants a divorce so he can pursue his relationship with a younger woman. Annie retreats to her hometown and the gruff affection of her father, who raised her after her mother’s untimely death. She meets up with her high school sweetheart, who is struggling in the wake of his wife’s suicide. Patty Engelmann, writing in Booklist, called this “an extremely satisfying, insightful, and emotional tale.”
In Hannah’s next hardcover novel, Angel Falls, Dr. Liam Campbell is forced to cope with a shattered life when his wife, Mikaela, ends up in a coma after a horseback riding accident. While she is unconscious, Liam learns that she was once married to a world-famous movie star, Julian True. Liam realizes that Julian’s name is the only one that evokes a response from Mikaela. Devastated and struggling with jealousy, Liam nevertheless contacts Julian, and the actor’s presence helps to revive Mikaela. She has partial amnesia, however, and Liam feels he must let her choose once again between Julian and himself.
Margaret Ann Hanes, writing in Library Journal, remarked that despite a melodramatic plot, “Hannah does manage to instill a sense of pathos and sentimentality that pulls the reader along.” A Booklist reviewer added that “Hannah ably uses her insights into small-town and family life … in a story sure to please fans of dramatic, romantic love stories.”
The problems sometimes faced by married couples after their children are grown form the core of Distant Shores, another of Hannah’s novels. Elizabeth and Jack Shore are struggling to chart their marital future. A former professional football player who now has a mostly unsuccessful career as a sports commentator, Jack has been a difficult husband—unfaithful and self-centered. When he contemplates a move to New York from Washington State in order to pursue his broadcasting career, Elizabeth must ask herself if she still loves him enough to follow.
Noting that the subject matter has the potential to be “depressing,” Angela A. Bauer in the Florida Times Union found that “Hannah’s skillful writing makes it an uplifting tale in which the reader gains the notion that the Shores will be all right. … It might inspire some readers to question what is lacking in their own lives and fill the void before they reach Elizabeth’s breaking point.” Booklist reviewer Engelmann also praised Distant Shores, declaring: “This insightful look into the dynamics of marriage will resonate with readers, and mark Hannah as a strong voice in women’s fiction.”
Between Sisters is the story of Meghann Dontess and Claire Cavenaugh, two sisters with very different lives and a great deal of baggage standing between them. Meghann is a thirty-something, successful divorce attorney who lives in Seattle, and her career is her entire life. Her younger sister, Claire, is a single mother with a five-year-old daughter, living in a small town in the Pacific Northwest, where she helps her father run the family resort, a small business that sits on the lake. Meghann and Claire are actually half-sisters, sharing a mother who had stars in her eyes and finally ended years of neglect by taking off for Hollywood to star in a science fiction series, abandoning the girls at the ages of sixteen and nine. Meghann, always more mother to Claire than their own mother was, located her sister’s father when their mother left; suddenly finding herself on her own, she focused solely on school and eventually her work. Now many years down the line, Claire is preparing to marry a country singer who has three divorces under his belt, a match that has Meghann terrified for her sister’s heart. When Claire is suddenly diagnosed with a brain tumor, however, everything comes grinding to a halt, including a potential reunion with their mother, who was offering to help Claire’s fiancé get a record deal. Meghann, with her networking skills and wide range of acquaintances, ends up stepping in as the true hero of the tale.
A reviewer in Publishers Weekly found the story to be melodramatic, noting that “some devoted fans will enjoy the sisterly bonding, but the broad-strokes characters will disappoint more demanding readers of women’s fiction.”
Hannah’s Comfort and Joy is a holiday romance that starts on a depressing note. Joy Faith Candellaro, a high school librarian in Bakersfield, California, is just getting off duty on the last day prior to the holiday break, but her mood is still low over the end of her marriage, sparked by the discovery of her husband, Thom, in bed with her sister, Stacey. The divorce is final, however, and Joy is making an attempt to move forward with her own life. Unfortunately, her old life keeps creeping up to distract her, as evidenced by the fact that, returning home, she discovers Stacey standing in her driveway with the announcement that she and Thom are marrying and that Stacey is going to have a baby. Devastated, Joy simply gets in her car and drives. Before she knows what she’s doing, she makes her way to the airport and buys a ticket to Hope, Canada. She has no real plans as to what she will do once she arrives, but she decides that is not the point. Anywhere must be better than home. Once she arrives, Joy meets a father and his son and discovers through them that there are plenty of people in the world with problems far more serious than her own.
A reviewer in Publishers Weekly remarked that, while the author’s fans might enjoy the book, it is otherwise “a bit too much for the more skeptical to swallow.”
Magic Hour tells the story of Dr. Julia Cates, a child psychiatrist who, though acquitted in court of incompetence in a case, is nevertheless skewered by the press to the point where she loses all of her clients. Then she gets a call from her estranged sister, Ellie, inviting her to head home to Rain Valley, Washington. Ellie is the police chief there and has an interesting case that calls for a child psychiatrist’s involvement. A young girl has been discovered recently in the local forest, accompanied by a wolf. The child has adopted animal behaviors and refuses to speak. Julia returns home and, together with Ellie, attempts to determine where the child belongs and to protect her from the dangers that seem to crop up everywhere. Engelmann, writing again in Booklist, dubbed the book “one of this perennially best-selling writer’s most compelling and riveting novels to date.”
Firefly Lane tells the story of the friendship between Tully Hart and Kate Mularkey. Despite their differences, the girls become friends as teenagers when fourteen-year-old Tully breaks down at a party and spills her secrets to Kate. Tully’s mother, a hippie, has run off and abandoned her. Kate, despite her own secure and loving family, sympathizes with Tully, and the two form a bond that lasts them through adulthood. As they grow up, Tully is determined to make a better life for herself. With the goal of becoming a television news anchor, she eventually gets a job at a small TV station following college, securing a spot for Kate as well. However, while Tully works hard in an effort to advance, Kate falls for their boss at the station and ends up as a wife and mother. Their lives diverge at this point, but their friendship continues until years later when certain events conspire to break the bond between them. Kristine Huntley, writing in Booklist, found the book to be “a moving and realistic portrait of a complex and enduring friendship.” Jane Ritter, in School Library Journal, wrote that Hannah’s offering “will keep readers turning the pages.”
Hannah’s next novel, True Colors, portrays the Grey sisters, Winona and Vivi Ann. The story is set in a small town in Washington State. The Grey sisters’ mother died when they were teenagers, but the plot mainly focuses on the men in the sisters’ lives. Winona has a crush on Luke, but he falls for Vivi Ann instead. Vivi Ann, however, cheats on Luke with Dallas. Vivi Ann marries Dallas and has his son, but Dallas is arrested and charged with murder. Winona, who has since become a lawyer, refuses to take the case because she is still upset about their betrayal of her beloved Luke. Dallas is convicted, effectively leaving Vivi Ann a single mother. The sisters’ redemption is established through Vivi Ann’s son, who brings Winona and Vivi Ann back together.
Critics applauded True Colors as a poignant, well-written, and riveting novel. Indeed, a Publishers Weekly writer commented that “though Hannah boldly embraces over-the-top drama, she really knows what women—her characters and her audience—want.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor was also impressed, finding that the book is “above-average formula fiction, making full display of the author’s strong suits: sense of place, compassion for characters and understanding of family dynamics.” Engelmann, again writing in Booklist, offered additional praise, noting that the author “creates a beautiful and captivating story of love and rivalry, family and community, that readers will happily devour.” A somewhat more ambivalent assessment was offered by an America’s Intelligence Wire reviewer: “ True Colors is as rewarding and riveting as one would expect from a Hannah novel. That is, if the reader isn’t turned off by borderline corny writing; indeed, at the novel’s conclusion, Hannah writes the ‘Grey’ sisters find their ‘true colors,’ as the title suggests.”
Library Journal writer Elizabeth Mellett called the book “an engrossing, fast-paced story that will appeal to … fans of women’s fiction. Furthermore, in a lengthy review on the Book Binge website, a critic commended the book as being “emotional,” going on to explain that “the reunion at the end of the book was extremely emotional. … I think that seeing Vivi grow up from a twenty-four year old carefree girl to a thirty-nine year old heartbroken woman was the hardest thing to read. If anyone deserved a happy ending, it was her.”
In Night Road, Jude fears that her fraternal twins, Mia and Zac, will have trouble adjusting to high school. Mia has always been overlooked by her fellow students, while Zach is typically a popular boy. Mia defies her mother’s doubts, and she befriends Lexi, a quiet girl who has spent her life in the foster care system. By their senior year, Mia must adjust to her brother’s budding relationship with her best friend. The trio struggles with the decision to part ways for college, but their ambitions are shattered when catastrophe strikes on their graduation night. Lexi has been drinking and driving when she crashes, and Mia is killed. Jude must mourn her daughter, but she also supports Lexi, who admits her guilt and peacefully serves out her sentence.
Critical reaction to Night Road was filled with praise. Reviewers noted that the plot features two compelling protagonists in Jude and Lexi, and many considered Night Road to be one of Hannah’s best novels to date. For instance, a contributor to the My Friend Amy website found that “ Night Road is a richly rewarding emotional read that engages universal themes and contemporary problems facing parents and teens alike.” A columnist at the online A Novel Source was equally laudatory, asserting: “ Night Road is a tale that will make you think you’ve jumped right into the story itself with its up and down, emotional rollercoaster, your heart will be ripped to shreds and patched up again in the same sentence.” The columnist added: “Everyone out there will see a little part of themselves in these characters.” In a rare negative review, a Publishers Weekly contributor complained that “even readers who like their melodrama thick will have problems as Hannah pushes credibility to the breaking point.” Norah Piehl, writing on Bookreporter.com, praised the book, however, pointing out that “Hannah sets herself a challenging task. The novel is simultaneously a love story, a book about siblings, and a story about several sets of mothers and daughters.” Piehl went on to call the story “a powerfully emotional journey that will leave readers reflecting on their own roles as mothers, daughters, sisters and friends.” Hanes, writing in Library Journal, called Night Road “not quite at the level of a Jodi Picoult or Chris Bohjalian story but awfully darn close.” Booklist reviewer Huntley commended the “several surprising twists” and “the way [Hannah] limns the grief and eventual healing of her appealing characters.”
Hannah turns to historical fiction with The Nightingale, a tale of two French sisters and their divergent lives in the wake of World War II. After their mother dies and their father withdraws, young Viann and Isabelle Rossignol are largely left to their own devices. Viann sleeps with a classmate and ends up pregnant and married by age sixteen, while her younger sister, Isabelle, is expelled from a growing list of boarding schools. When World War II erupts and the Germans invade France, everything changes. Viann’s husband is a prisoner of war in Germany, and she is forced to take in a German captain as a boarder to support herself and her child. Isabelle, meanwhile, joins the French resistance and helps French soldiers escape into the mountains and on to Spain.
“The author ably depicts war’s horrors through the eyes of these two women, whose strength of character … shines through,” a Publishers Weekly critic declared. In a more ambivalent assessment, a Kirkus Reviews contributor noted: “Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.” Nevertheless, the contributor went on to conclude that the novel is “still … a respectful and absorbing page-turner.” Patty Rhule, writing in USA Today, was even more positive, and she asserted that “ The Nightingale is a heart-pounding story, based on a real Belgian woman who did what Isabelle did.” Rhule added that “Hannah’s book is most searing as the horrors of war ratchet upward,” and she commended “the novel’s soaring finale.” Offering further applause, Booklist correspondent Huntley advised: “This moving, emotional tribute … is bound to gain the already immensely popular Hannah an even wider audience.”
Discussing her writing process in an interview on her home page, Hannah noted: “In a perfect world, I begin writing at around nine o’clock in the morning. How long I spend at it is largely dependent on where I am in the book. In the first draft—which I write long hand—I can only spend four or five hours at a time working. After that, as the novel begins to take shape, my ability to concentrate increases. By the end of the process, I am often working ten to twelve hour days. … Honestly, I never believe I’m done, but sooner or later, my deadline arrives and I’m forced to say ‘enough.’”
In The Great Alone, Hannah tells the story of Ernt and Cora Allbright and their 13-year-old daughter, Leni, adjusting to a new life in the raw landscape of Alaska. The year is 1974, and Ernt has returned from the Vietnam war a changed man after years of imprisonment in a foreign land. When Cora married Ernt, at the disapproval of her middle class parents, he had been a happy man and became a devoted father when Leni was born. But now, struggling with PTSD, he is restless, paranoid, and violent.
Since Ernt’s return from war, the family has moved constantly, so frequently that Leni has attended five different schools in four years. When Ernt learns that an army friend has died and left him a piece of land in Kaneq, Alaska, he decides to uproot the family yet again and head north. Leni is initially resistant, tired of moving and having to make new friends, but she quickly adjusts to the quirks of the land. The house they move to lacks electricity, running water, and indoor plumbing, but Leni is drawn to the wildness of remote Kaneq.
It becomes clear that the Allbrights are ill-prepared for an Alaskan winter. The surrounding community, with such characters as Large Marge and Mad Earl, come together to help the family stay afloat. Leni finds comfort in books and in her new friend, Matthew. She meets the boy at the one room school they both attend, and, as the only other kid her age in the neighborhood, they are immediately drawn to one another. Matthew also comes from an unstable home life. As the two find comfort and connection in one another, their friendship blossoms into a young romance.
Tara Kehoe in School Library Journal wrote, “Hannah highlights, with vivid description, the natural dangers of Alaska juxtaposed against incongruous violence.” While Leni finds joy in the land, Ernt’s PTSD symptoms are not quelled. Leni watches on as Ernt abuses her mother and his paranoia and isolation worsen. He develops an irrational hatred of Matthew’s family, and Leni’s relationship with Matthew is threatened. Again the Kaneq community comes to the aid of the family, providing a way to safety for Leni. Ron Charles in Washington Post wrote that the novel “makes Alaska sound equally gorgeous and treacherous,” while Kristine Huntley in Booklist noted Hannah “paints a compelling portrait of a family in crisis and a community on the brink of change.”
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In her sweeping historical drama The Four Winds, Hannah portrays a tough, resilient woman’s struggle for survival during the Great Depression and devastation of the Dust Bowl. In northwestern Texas in 1921, Elsa Wolcott is looking at spinsterhood until she meets Rafe Martinelli, the Catholic son of Italian immigrants, whom she marries. They and their children work the Martinelli farm until by 1934 the dust storms and drought have destroyed the farm land and cattle. The family must make the harrowing decision to stay and hope the land recovers or move west to California for a better life. Elsa learns of the plight of laborers exploited by wealthy corporations, and joins efforts to organize migrant workers in California.
Commenting in Washington Post, Ron Charles noted that Hannah is “examining a traumatic era in American history while also using it to reflect on the current scourges of xenophobia and economic exploitation tearing through the United States,” along with the dangers of socialism and the crime and disease blamed on migrants. Charles added that despite melodrama and flat characters, Hannah utilizes a “well-oiled machine that reliably produces such marketable passion.” In Booklist, Sarah Johnson remarked: “This wide-ranging saga ticks all the boxes for deeply satisfying historical fiction,” while Eliot Schefer in USA Today praised “the overall power of this majestic and absorbing story that turns attention to the unsung women of the Dust Bowl.”
Hannah next published The Women, focusing on a young nurse during the Vietnam War. Following the death of her older brother in the war, Frances “Frankie” McGrath enlists in the Army Nurse Corps in 1966 and ships out. Without adequate training, Frankie learns to work under fire from battle-scarred nurses and doctors who deal with horrific wounds and napalm scarred soldiers. To relieve the tension, she begins a romance with not only a married surgeon but her dead brother’s best friend. Returning home after two tours, Frankie now faces American society’s distrust and hatred of Vietnam veterans.
In an interview with Sarah Laing at Globe and Mail, Hannah explained why she wrote the story as fiction rather than nonfiction: “The strength of fiction is to take history, and really personalize it, plunge the reader into it and allow them to step into the shoes of historical characters in a very fully engaged and emotional way. The hope is that reading fiction, especially historical fiction, creates empathy with those characters and makes you understand them.”
Praising how vividly the novel affirms the narrative of the Vietnam War, New York Times Book Review contributor Beatriz Williams added: “Hannah may not offer any revolutionary takes on the war and its aftermath, but she gathers women into the experience with moving conviction. And maybe this story’s time has come again.” A Kirkus Reviews critic remarked that despite some one-dimensional characters and Frankie experiencing every possible bad break: “Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
America’s Intelligence Wire, March 27, 2009, review of True Colors.
Booklist, November 15, 1998, Patty Engelmann, review of On Mystic Lake, p. 547; February 1, 2000, Catherine Sias, review of Angel Falls, p. 996; January 1, 2001, Patty Engelmann, review of Summer Island, p. 870; July, 2001, Joyce Saricks, review of Summer Island, p. 2029; May 1, 2002, Patty Engelmann, review of Distant Shores, p. 1444; March 15, 2003, Patty Engelmann, review of Between Sisters, p. 1253; April 15, 2004, Patty Engelmann, review of The Things We Do for Love, p. 1404; December 15, 2005, Patty Engelmann, review of Magic Hour, p. 5; December 15, 2007, Kristine Huntley, review of Firefly Lane, p. 24; November 1, 2008, Patty Engelmann, review of True Colors, p. 5; February 1, 2011, Kristine Huntley, review of Night Road, p. 28; December 15, 2014, Kristine Huntley, review of The Nightingale, p. 33; November 1, 2017, Kristine Huntley, review of The Great Alone, p. 13; October 15, 2020, Sarah Johnson, review of The Four Winds, p. 32.
Florida Times Union, August 4, 2002, Angela A. Bauer, review of Distant Shores, p. D4.
Globe and Mail, June 22, 2024, Sarah Laing, “Kristin Hannah Tells an Often-Forgotten Story.”
Kirkus Reviews, April 1, 2003, review of Between Sisters, p. 496; May 15, 2004, review of The Things We Do for Love, p. 460; October 15, 2008, review of True Colors; December 1, 2014, review of The Nightingale; November 15, 2017, review of The Great Alone; December 1, 2023, review of The Women.
Library Journal, August, 1994, Kristin Ramsdell, review of When Lightning Strikes, p. 66; November 15, 1995, Kristin Ramsdell, review of Waiting for the Moon, p. 64; November 15, 1996, Kristin Ramsdell, review of Home Again, p. 52; December, 1998, Carol J. Bissett, review of On Mystic Lake, p. 154; November 1, 1999, Jodi L. Israel, review of On Mystic Lake, p. 143; March 15, 2000, Margaret Ann Hanes, review of Angel Falls, p. 126; February 15, 2001, Margaret Hanes, review of Summer Island, p. 200; December, 2001, Jodi L. Israel, review of Summer Island, p. 198; April 15, 2003, Margaret Hanes, review of Between Sisters, p. 122; June 1, 2004, Margaret Hanes, review of The Things We Do for Love, p. 120; November 1, 2008, Elizabeth Mellett, review of True Colors, p. 57; February 1, 2011, Margaret Hanes, review of Night Road, p. 53.
New York Times, February 1, 2021, Elisabeth Egan, “A Resilient Nation of Scrappy Survivors,” review of The Four Winds, p. C4(L).
New York Times Book Review, February 18, 2024, Beatriz Williams, review of The Women.
Publishers Weekly, June 22, 1992, review of The Enchantment, p. 56; January 11, 1993, review of Once in Every Life, p. 57; December 13, 1993, review of If You Believe, p. 66; September 26, 1994, review of When Lightning Strikes, p. 61; September 18, 1995, review of Waiting for the Moon, p. 125; October 28, 1996, review of Home Again, p. 76; January 18, 1999, review of On Mystic Lake, p. 327; October 4, 1999, “Hannah’s Mystical Appeal,” p. 21; March 20, 2000, review of Angel Falls, p. 72; January 22, 2001, review of Summer Island, p. 300; May 27, 2002, review of Distant Shores, p. 33; April 14, 2003, review of Between Sisters, p. 49; June 21, 2004, review of The Things We Do for Love, p. 45; September 26, 2005, review of Comfort and Joy, p. 63; September 29, 2008, review of True Colors, p. 57; January 3, 2011, review of Night Road, p. 30; December 1, 2014, review of The Nightingale, p. 33; October 9, 2017, review of The Great Alone, p. 41.
School Library Journal, April 1, 2008, Jane Ritter, review of Firefly Lane, p. 173; March, 2018, Tara Kehoe, review of The Great Alone, p. 128.
Seattle Times, March 22, 1999, Melinda Bargreen, review of On Mystic Lake, p. E3; March 19, 2001, Melinda Bargreen, “Mother Knows Best,” p. E1; July 28, 2002, Melinda Bargreen, review of Distant Shores, p. K9.
USA Today, February 8, 2015, Patty Rhule, review of The Nightingale; February 8, 2021, Eliot Schefer, “Hannah’s Epic ‘Winds’ Honor Dust Bowl Resilience,” review of The Four Winds, p. 08B.
Washington Post, February 6, 2018, Ron Charles, review of The Great Alone; January 28, 2021, Ron Charles, review of The Four Winds.
ONLINE
A Novel Source, http://www.anovelsource.com/ (April 13, 2011), review of Night Road.
Book Binge, http://thebookbinge.com/ (March 13, 2009), review of True Colors.
Bookreporter.com, http://www.bookreporter.com/ (March 28, 2011), Norah Piehl, review of Night Road.
Kristin Hannah Website, http://www.kristinhannah.com (May 3, 2015).
My Friend Amy, http://www.myfriendamysblog.com/ (March 21, 2011), review of Night Road.
About Kristin
Kristin Hannah is the award-winning and bestselling author of more than 20 novels including the international blockbuster, The Nightingale, which was named Goodreads Best Historical fiction novel for 2015 and won the coveted People’s Choice award for best fiction in the same year. Additionally, it was a selection of the Reese Witherspoon Book Club in 2023. It was named a Best Book of the Year by Amazon, iTunes, Buzzfeed, the Wall Street Journal, Paste, and The Week. In 2018, The Great Alone became an instant New York Times #1 bestseller and was named the Best Historical Novel of the Year by Goodreads.
The Four Winds was published in February of 2021 and immediately hit #1 on the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Indie bookstores’ bestseller lists. Additionally, it was selected as a book club pick by the both Today Show and the Book Of the Month club, which named it the best book of 2021.
The Nightingale is currently in production at Tri Star, with Dakota and Elle Fanning set to star. Tri Star has also optioned The Great Alone and it is in development. Firefly Lane, her beloved novel about two best friends, was the #1 Netflix series around the world, in the week it came out. The popular tv show stars Katherine Heigl and Sarah Chalke and Season Two is currently set to conclude the series on April 27, 2023.
A former attorney, Kristin lives in the Pacific Northwest.
FAQ
How long have you been writing?
It feels as if I just got started on this career. I’m always a little bit surprised by my answer to this question: it’s almost 30 years. Honestly, I don’t know how that’s possible being as young as I am! That’s certainly the upside of a career you love. Time flies.
What’s your ideal writing day like?
Hmmm…let’s see. The perfect writing day. Well, first of all, I’ll be in a place where I can hear the waves washing along the sand and warm breezes rustling through coconut palms or evergreen trees. Then I’ll wake up early, go for a nice morning run along the beach, and come home ready to get to work. My very favorite thing is to sit in a lawn chair on my deck, notepad in hand, and lose myself in the story. It doesn’t happen every day — or even often — but when it does, it’s pure magic. And the perfect writing day.
How long does it take you to write a book?
For the most part, each of my books has taken a year. Some — notably The Nightingale, Firefly Lane and On Mystic Lake — have taken up to two years. Generally, I spend about three months coming up with idea, researching it, and formulating a loose plan for the spine of the story and the character arcs. After a few months of research, the writing of the first draft — if I’m lucky — is about five months. This usually entails several “wrong” starts and do-overs. The final process of taking that draft and turning it into the novel I’d envisioned takes between four and six months. Normally, I do about ten drafts of the book.
Do you miss practicing law?
Wait. I have to stop laughing. I can’t see the computer keys. No. I don’t miss it. I loved the law, but writing is the best career on the planet for me. I’m truly blessed. I can’t imagine having to wear heels to work again. I’d probably fall flat on my face.
Why do you write?
Quite simply, I write because it frees something in me. It’s the greatest job in the world. It allows me to be the wife/mother/friend I want to be, with plenty of time for the people I care about, while still giving me something that’s mine, something that defines me as an individual.
What’s a typical day like for you?
The great thing about being a writer is that there really is no typical day. When my son was home, my writing schedule was pretty much subject to the local school schedule. For years, I wrote school hours, school days, school months. It gave me a lovely, if inflexible, routine. Nowadays, though, I’m much more of a gypsy with a pen and paper. My ordinary day begins with a three or four mile run — preferably along a stretch of sunny beach — then it’s back home to get started. I’ll write fairly solidly until about five o’clock. There are certainly breaks taken along the way — lunch, phone calls with girlfriends, and checking my email. At the end of the day, I try to spend at least an hour outside, sitting on my deck and relaxing. Now, of course, I’m supposed to fit blogging into all of that. Wish me luck!
How do you know when a book is over?
I’m exhausted. Or my deadline is looming. Or I have a migraine that lasts for two days. The truth is, a book never really feels “done.” I wish it did. What’s more likely is that my deadline is approaching and I’ve simply run out of time. Thankfully, I’m a disciplined writer. I actually start my books on time; no more than two weeks after the previous effort is finished. The stress of being “behind” is really not something I’d good with, so I stay on schedule.
Do you always know the whole story, including the ending, when you begin?
I think I do. On occasion, I even turn out to be correct. Because my books are more character than plot driven, the end of my novels is wholly dependent on the characters’ arcs and growth patterns. When I was a beginning writer, I followed a strict, twenty-page outline and lengthy character biographies. I spent a lot of my research time creating characters; then I moved them through the plot as I’d conceived it. In the end, I found that this hampered my creativity somewhat and began, as I moved into the bigger, more complex books, to require more editing. So, I let go. Now I spend more of my time discovering my characters. Although it creates a lot of missteps and wrong starts and endless drafts, I find that I enjoy the process more.
Do you have a favorite character in your own novels?
Honestly, I have a couple of characters that stay in my mind after the writing is over. They are, in no particular order — Izzy from On Mystic Lake, Alice from Magic Hour, Tully from Firefly Lane, and Anya Whitson from Winter Garden. But at the moment my very favorite character is the protagonist from the novel I’m currently writing. She may be my favorite character of all time. We’ll see.
How do you recommend new writers get started?
This is a question that I get asked a lot, of course. The easiest and most obvious answer is also the most difficult to accomplish: it’s to sit down and keep writing. Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of writers come and go — published and unpublished — and what I’ve learned is that the ones who make it keep writing no matter what. When life is tough, they write; when the kids are sick, they write; when rejections pile up, they write. Are you seeing a pattern? That’s really what this career is ultimately about. Showing up at your computer day after day to hone your craft. Of course you should take classes and read other peoples’ books and study as much as you can, but none of it can ever take the place of daily work.
Warner Bros Pre-Buys Kristin Hannah Book ‘The Women,’ Developing Portrait Of Vietnam Nurses For Film
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'The Women' book by Kristin Hannah in development as film from Warner Bros
EXCLUSIVE: Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group has preemptively acquired rights to The Women, a new book from #1 New York Times bestselling author Kristin Hannah, which is up for publication by St. Martin’s Press in February.
The book exposes a turbulent, transformative time in America — the 1960s — specifically honing in on the often forgotten story of the nurses who served in the Vietnam war. It is at once an intimate portrait of a woman coming of age in a dangerous time and an epic tale of a nation divided by war and broken by politics, of a generation both fueled by dreams and lost on the battlefield.
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Hannah’s work on the novel saw her interview several former nurses who served during the war. The adaptation will be overseen by Cate Adams and Diamond McNeil on behalf of Warner Bros.
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Previous bestsellers from Hannah, who’s written dozens of novels to date, include The Four Winds and The Nightingale, which respectively examine the Great Depression and the struggle for survival of two sisters in Nazi-occupied France.
Earlier this month, Warner Bros ironed out a new strategic partnership which will see Tom Cruise return to the studio to develop and produce original and franchise theatrical titles in which he’ll star. The company recently saw Paul Thomas Anderson set a starry cast for his next feature, as we were first to report, and also has on its upcoming slate a Frankenstein pic from Maggie Gyllenhaal and the Minecraft film starring Jason Momoa, among many other projects.
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Hannah is represented by CAA and Jane Rotrosen Agency.
Kristin Hannah
Author
Photo by Benjamin Hannah
About Kristin Hannah
Kristin Hannah wrote her first book at 25—with her mother, who was then dying of breast cancer—but she's seen her biggest hits after 50. She's written six books since then, two of them No. 1 bestsellers.
At 52, after two decades of stay-at-home motherhood and writing contemporary novels, Hannah found inspiration in the true story of the women of the French Resistance during World War II.
This provided the backbone for "The Nightingale," published in 2015 and her first historical fiction novel.
"The Nightingale" was on the New York Times Best Seller list for 86 weeks, named Best Book of the Year by Amazon, and is being produced as a feature film starring sisters Dakota and Elle Fanning.
In 2021, the Netflix adaptation of her novel "Firefly Lane" was released and immediately hit No. 1 in both the U.S. and worldwide.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Kristin Hannah
Born September 25, 1960 (age 63)[1]
Garden Grove, California, U.S.
Occupation Novelist
Nationality American
Period 1991–present
Genre fiction
Website
www.kristinhannah.com
Kristin Hannah (born September 25, 1960) is an American writer. Her most notable works include Winter Garden, The Nightingale, Firefly Lane, The Great Alone, and The Four Winds. In 2024, St. Martin's Publishing Group published her novel, The Women, which is set in America in the 1960s.[2]
Biography
Kristin Hannah was born in California. After graduating with a degree in communication from the University of Washington, Hannah worked at an advertising agency in Seattle. She graduated from the University of Puget Sound law school and practiced law in Seattle before becoming a full-time writer. Hannah wrote her first novel with her mother, who was dying of cancer at the time, but the book was never published.[3]
Hannah's best-selling work, The Nightingale, has sold over 4.5 million copies worldwide and has been published in 45 languages.[4][5]
Hannah lives on Bainbridge Island, Washington,[6] with her husband and their son.
Bibliography
Standalone novels
A Handful of Heaven (July 1991)
The Enchantment (June 1992)
Once in Every Life (December 1992)
If You Believe (December 1993)
When Lightning Strikes (October 1994)
Waiting for the Moon (September 1995)
Home Again (October 1996)
On Mystic Lake (February 1999)
Angel Falls (April 2000)
Summer Island (March 2001)
Distant Shores (July 2002)
Between Sisters (April 2003)
The Things We Do for Love (June 2004)
Comfort and Joy (October 2005)
Magic Hour (February 2006)
Firefly Lane (2008)
True Colors (2009)
Winter Garden (2010)
Night Road (March 2011)
Home Front (2012)
Fly Away (2013)
The Nightingale (2015)
The Great Alone (2018)
The Four Winds (2021)
The Women (2024)
Omnibus
On Mystic Lake / Summer Island (2005)
Firefly Lane / Fly Away (2008, 2013)
Anthologies in collaboration
"Liar's Moon" in Harvest Hearts 1993 (with Joanne Cassity, Sharon Harlow and Rebecca Paisley)
Of Love and Life 2000 (with Janice Graham and Philippa Gregory)
"Liar's Moon" in With Love 2002 (with Jennifer Blake and Linda Lael Miller)
Film and TV
Four of Hannah's novels have been optioned for films: Home Front,[7] The Nightingale,[8]The Great Alone,[4] and The Women. [9]
Firefly Lane was turned into a Netflix original series, starring Sarah Chalke and Katherine Heigl, which premiered on February 3, 2021.[10]
Author Kristin Hannah finds inspiration in heartbreak
Tearjerkers and epic female-driven novels have earned the 1983 alumna an international following.
By Hannelore Sudermann | Photo by Meryl Schenker | March 2019
UW Magazine Facebook @UWalum @UWalum Jump To Comments
Kristin Hannah, the best-selling author of historical romances, does her writing in a most unromantic way. On a yellow legal notepad.
Admittedly, she chooses some pleasant perches from which to compose. She starts her days up in her bedroom, in a chair next to the fireplace. If the weather’s nice, she will move to the patio of the wood-shingled waterfront home near Seattle that she shares with her husband, Benjamin.
But really, it’s her process—efficient and orderly with outlines, research, drafts and dedicated writing time—that seems to run counter to the lush landscapes and lively tales she brings to life in her sweeping novels.
“I don’t think of myself as one of those freewheeling muse-driven writers,” says Hannah, ’83, during a recent interview at her home. “I’m more organized, descriptive and analytical.” It has served her well as she has written more than 20 books, including “The Nightingale,” her 2015 novel about women in the French Resistance. The book has sold more than 2 million copies and been published in more than 40 languages. It was a No. 1 New York Times best-seller and a Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Year.
Hannah’s methodical approach to her work may come, in part, from her training and practice as a lawyer. Or it may be an instinctive response to the free-spirited childhood her family provided.
“I do sort of consciously put my characters through really terrible things. In doing that, they find out who they really are.”
Kristin Hannah
When Hannah was 8, in 1968, her parents decided to flee crowded Southern California. They loaded Hannah, her younger brother and sister, and a couple of friends into a VW van and took off on a 16-week quest. “What my dad said was, ‘Raise your hand when you see home,’” says Hannah. Everyone in the van found something they liked in the Pacific Northwest.
So they settled in Snohomish, and from there frequently made their way up to the mountains and to Alaska to go fishing. That Pacific Northwest grounding is why the region factors into Hannah’s books, whether it is a brief stopping point or a central character.
While she started out writing romance, Hannah has evolved to be master of the tearjerker: Best friends and betrayal, a family torn apart by war, a fragile child, mother-daughter bonds. Other writers have asked her if she gets caught up in the emotions and experiences of her characters. Hannah laughs. “For me, writing is a job,” she says. “I do my job and then I stop.
“I do sort of consciously put my characters through really terrible things. In doing that, they find out who they really are.”
Just as her novels are tinged with heartbreak, so is Hannah’s own story of finding her calling. When she was in her third year of law school at the University of Puget Sound, her mother was in the advanced stages of breast cancer. “I would go to see her every day after class and somehow one day I was complaining about one of my classes. She said, ‘Don’t worry about it, you’re going to be a writer anyway.’”
That premonition became a plan for mother and daughter to work together on a book. Hannah wanted to try writing horror, but her mother held sway with historical romance. “She said, ‘I’m sick, I pick,’” says Hannah. “Who can argue with that?” Hannah spent hours by her mom’s hospital bed, capturing their ideas on paper. As her mother grew weaker, their story came to life. “It gave us something uplifting to talk about in the last days,” she says.
Writing has become such a part of her that if she goes more than a day or two without it, she feels on edge.
When her mother died, Hannah bundled the draft, notes and research into a box and put it away while she went on to become a lawyer. Not until a few years later, when she was pregnant and ordered to bed rest, did she return to the book as a way to beat the boredom. She quickly found she liked telling stories as well as the accomplishment she felt as she progressed through the novel.
She decided to keep at it after her son was born. “I thought I’d give myself until he left for kindergarten,” she says. Now, he’s through college and has a family of his own. And writing has become such a part of her that if she goes more than a day or two without it, she feels on edge.
Hannah’s first novel, “Handful of Heaven,” published in 1991, was a Gold Rush-era Alaska romance starring a beautiful, adventurous woman and a gruff, misunderstood man. It had a classic cover of lovers in a clinch. With it, Hannah was on her way, cranking out another book the following year. And then another the year after that. In 2004, the paperback edition of “On Mystic Lake” became her first book to make The New York Times Best Seller list. In it, as in all her novels, her characters deal with love, loss and recovery. Hannah says her aim is not to write “great literature” but to craft compelling stories.
“What people choose to read is not necessarily what they’ve been told to read,” Hannah says. Among her own favorites are “Gone With the Wind,” “The Thorn Birds,” and “Anna Karenina.” “I have always loved best the big emotional epic female-driven novel that takes me to another time and place,” she says.
While romantic, traditional love still threads through her tales, Hannah now turns her focus to other relationships—sisters, best friends, parents and children. Bonds built and broken, misery, tragedy and recovery set against different backdrops.
“I don’t think my neighbors even know I’m a writer.”
Kristin Hannah
“‘Firefly Lane’ is my UW book,” Hannah says of her 2008 best-seller that features two best friends over 40 years. It is, she admits, the most personal and autobiographical of her books. It draws details from her 1970s-era childhood in Snohomish and her college years at the UW. The characters cross Red Square to hear lectures in Kane Hall and hang out at the HUB. One majors in communication, just like Hannah did. The other contends with breast cancer, like Hannah’s mother. The book, which sold more than 1.2 million copies, gave the author a chance to explore and understand her mother’s experience as well as to spend some time in the “REI-clad” Seattle in which she came of age.
But it was “The Nightingale” that became a professional turning point. “It’s the book where I found my voice, my footing and my future,” Hannah told The New York Times last year. It covers an important time in world history and takes inspiration from real stories of women in the Resistance. Like those women, her characters rescue Jewish children from the Nazis and help downed Allied airmen escape from France. In taking on the subject, Hannah manages to provide a rarer, women’s point of view of World War II.
Hannah’s most recent novel, “The Great Alone,” features a 1970s Alaska homesteading family. It’s a tale of human struggles and survival set in a beautiful and dangerous landscape. The book, released last spring, shot to the top of The New York Times Best Seller list and was a Washington Post “notable work of fiction” of 2018. Both “The Nightingale” and “The Great Alone” have been optioned by Tri-Star Pictures.
She has surpassed her mother’s vision, becoming an internationally famous author with a massive fan following—her rare book signings are typically jam-packed. Even so, Hannah, in classic Northwest fashion, has kept a low profile at home. “I don’t think my neighbors even know I’m a writer,” she says.
With plenty of books behind her, she is now shifting her pace. “For years and years and years, I wrote a book every year,” she says. “Now I’m taking 2 to 2 1/2 years, with a break in between.” Still she is halfway through her next work of fiction, she says, waving toward an inked-up notepad. “It’s a historical novel about two women, and it’s set in America,” she says, demurring when asked for more detail.
In fact, she’s ready to get back to work, she says, waving goodbye from her front door. “I’ve got writing to do.”
An Interview with Kristin
Hannah
Kristin Hannah
December 4, 2022
On the novel-writing process
On writing historical fiction
Kristin Hannah has published 24 books that traverse eras and geographies, spanning far beyond California and the Pacific Northwest where she grew up. From occupied France during World War II to the dust bowl during the Great Depression, Kristin’s powerful prose and careful research conjure vivid, rich settings. And whether they’re part of the French resistance, pursuing the American dream or simply seeking a better life and hope for the future, Kristin’s characters grapple with themes and challenges that are deeply relevant today: nature and environmental disaster, female courage, the lessons we pass onto the next generation, and the beauty of the human spirit. There’s a lot we can all learn from her writing.
Ahead of our live Q&A with Kristin Hannah for members of The Novelry, we asked the New York Times bestselling author a few of our own burning questions.
Kristin has had tremendous success – you’ll regularly see her titles in the front windows of your local bookstore. She’s had huge hits like Winter Garden, Home Front, Firefly Lane (which you may have seen adapted into a hugely popular series on Netflix) and The Nightingale, which is getting its own movie production! Her new novel, The Four Winds, was published last year to great acclaim.
So, if you want to see how bestselling author Kristin Hannah crafts unforgettable characters, stirs up dust storms and great plains in your mind, researches different eras and places and, above all, holds onto the joy of creating, you’re in luck. Read on for our much-anticipated Kristin Hannah interview.
On the novel-writing process
Hello Kristin! How do you know when you’re ready to move on from research and planning and start writing the first draft?
It’s always a tricky proposition, moving from research to writing. Mostly because research is a comforting, comfortable space for me. It’s like being a student again; I gather information, collect facts and stories. I’m doing what I love most: reading.
I love following historical rabbit holes and taking left turns and finding tidbits of gold that I never imagined. As I do this, the story – or, at least, a story – begins to take shape. I take copious notes and research as long and as deeply as I can, given the time constraints that come with being a commercial writer.
These are the months when I let theme become my guide. I ask myself why I have chosen this time period, this setting, and I let the research deep into my subconscious, and I begin to shape it into a story.
When I have written a lengthy synopsis that has a very clear beginning, middle, and ending, then I know it’s time to take the plunge and get out my yellow notebook and write the first sentence.
That’s an exciting moment. What’s your favourite stage in the writing process?
This is easy for me. I love editing, and I don’t mean line editing and polishing prose and trying to be a better writer. I mean hack-and-burn-this-isn't-working-try-something-else kind of editing.
During this part of the process – and I never fail to come to this moment in a book, a moment where I realise (or am told) that a fundamental piece of my vision for the story is either flawed or not good enough – I roll up my sleeves and reimagine the story altogether. I change characters and backstories and plot points, anything that might be wrong.
For example, in my novel The Great Alone, the first drafts of the novel were set in the modern day, with an unreliable male narrator in Alaska, who was trying to uncover the truth about a decades-old crime involving a girl he once loved. In the final draft, the novel was about a young girl coming of age in a dangerous family in Alaska in the 1970s. The thing that stayed the same: the setting and the girl, Leni. It was always a novel about the beauty and danger in Alaska and a look at the kind of people who choose to live there.
Is the process of writing sequels different for you?
Honestly, I have only written one sequel. Fly Away was a follow-up to Firefly Lane, and although I had long imagined it, I didn’t really love the process of writing about characters I already knew.
I have a sequel to The Four Winds kind of banging around in my head, but I don’t know when I’ll take the plunge, if ever...
You write such vivid protagonists. How do you get to know your characters?
Creating characters is a beautiful, messy, chaotic, magical process for me.
As I said in speaking about my process, when I finish my research and begin a novel, I have a very firm grasp of who I think my main characters are and what I expect their story to be, but we know what they say about best-laid plans. Mine, at least, often go askew.
So, the character I begin to create is not necessarily anywhere close to the character I actually create. It’s a process of evolution, really. Writing and re-writing scenes, unearthing the backstory needed to keep a character on track and in trouble and searching for something.
The most important component of creating characters, for me, is dialogue. I learn who my characters are by what they have to say, and what they think and believe to be true, about the choices that make sense to them.
There’s an old adage about getting one’s character up a tree and forcing them higher and higher, which is just a way of explaining that increased conflict heightens tension and reveals character.
Do you think there’s a unifying theme or question throughout your writing?
There are themes and questions that I return to again and again. It’s my version of therapy, I believe. It’s obvious from my body of work that I am interested in women's lives and history, and the power of the relationships between women.
On writing historical fiction
Why do you think you enjoy writing about the past?
In my career, I began writing historical fiction – love stories, mostly – and then I moved on to novels about modern women, stories that looked at women’s inner lives, our struggles and our triumphs.
In the past decade, I have focused primarily on lost women’s history. I am fascinated – and irritated – by the amount of women’s history that has been lost or marginalised. I want to find these stories and breathe life into them and celebrate the enduring durability of women and our ability to survive and even thrive in the darkest of times.
I love focusing particularly on how motherhood and sisterhood and friendship give us strength in the times that test us most profoundly.
Which era has been your favourite to write about?
I do not have a favourite era. I absolutely adore whatever time and place I’m writing about, and then I let that one go and move on to something else.
That’s one of the things I love most about writing: the constant change. I can go from dark, majestic Alaska, to wartorn France, to the Dust Bowl in America and each day I discover something new that surprises and astounds me.
How do you research different historical eras?
Reading everything I can find on a given topic/era/situation, and then interviewing – or reading first-hand accounts of – the people who lived during my time period.
You really need all the generalised research to understand the complexities of an era – the social and political landscape – but it is from memoirs and interviews that a world really comes alive for me.
Also, travel. It’s not crucial to travel to one’s setting, but it is helpful. And fun!
And finally…
You gave up your work as a lawyer to focus on writing. How did you decide it was time to become a full-time novelist?
The universe answered for me. I was a young lawyer, pregnant for the first time, and I had a difficult pregnancy, which required me to remain bedridden for five months. It was a time when there was no internet and very little on television, and so there wasn’t much to do.
I thought – since I loved reading – that I would try my hand at a novel. Silly me, I thought it would be easy. By the time I figured out exactly how difficult it was, I was hooked. Obsessed, really. I love writing. Even when it’s going badly, I love the process.
So, I gave myself six years to get published (by my son’s first-grade year), and I sold my first novel when he was about three. I’ve never looked back and never stopped writing.
Were you involved in the adaptation process for Firefly Lane and The Nightingale? What does it feel like to see your work on screen?
I wasn’t much involved with Firefly Lane, but I’m looking forward to December 2 and seeing season two.
I was more creatively involved with the script for The Nightingale, and I have to say they ultimately came up with a stunningly beautiful script for the story. I can’t wait for people to see it someday.
Members of The Novelry can enjoy a creative writing class with Kristin Hannah in the Catch Up TV area. If you’d like to write your own book, start today with the creative writing courses where you get to choose the best writing coach for your story.
Byline: Eliot Schrefer, Special to USA TODAY
As the Dust Bowl ravages Texas, one woman must make a choice: Leave the farm that has been her family's livelihood or stay and risk succumbing to cyclones of dirt.
Kristin Hannah's absorbing new novel begins just a few years before, when it seemed as if Elsa Wolcott might finally have a peaceful, fulfilling life ahead. After a rough childhood with parents who didn't love her, she met Rafe Martinelli, the soulful and handsome son of Italian immigrants. Unlike any other person in her life, he made her feel valued. She moved in with his family, and together they made a healthy living, raising two children while they worked the earth.
There are greater forces in the world than love and dedication, however. "The Four Winds" (St. Martin's Press, 464 pp., ***1/2) plays out against the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl that together gutted the American economy and turned beloved farms into ruins. As the Texas panhandle parches out, Elsa watches their crops wither and has to send her children scrambling through the dirt to find any scrap potatoes that might remain in the fields. Meanwhile, her parents-in-law sweep and sweep, trying to rid the house of ever-accumulating dust. Hannah's writing is at its strongest when she takes us into the vivid hardships of the drought, as overuse of the land results in storms of topsoil that flay skin from muscle and fill the bellies of staggered cattle with dirt.
Elsa is resilient, and readers will be drawn to her devotion to her children and her tireless efforts to keep her family well, efforts that bring her to pack them up and head west. On the journey she has to contend not just with the hardships of picking cotton for pitiful wages, but with the weaker wills of the men around her, who abandon family or run ruthless corporate farms that exploit their employees.
Along the way, Elsa develops a greater consciousness of the plight of laborers in Depression-era America, joining them in protests against the larger political and economic engines that exploit people and land alike, leading to the Dust Bowl in the first place.
"The Four Winds" is epic and transporting, a stirring story of hardship and love that is likely to lead to a film adaptation (Hannah's previous best-selling novel, "The Nightingale," is getting a film adaptation later this year starring Dakota and Elle Fanning). At times this book feels a little too ready for Hollywood. While most of Hannah's writing is specific and surprising, the novel's beating heart weakens a little in the last section as it falls into familiar crowd-pleaser story beats, with a simplified villain and a quick epiphany just in time to give a rousing speech. But these ninth inning fumbles do little to diminish the overall power of this majestic and absorbing story that turns attention to the unsung women of the Dust Bowl, who "worked from sunup to sundown, too, toiled on wheat farms until we were as dry and baked as the land we loved."
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 USA Today
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Schefer, Eliot. "Hannah's epic 'Winds' honor Dust Bowl resilience." USA Today, 8 Feb. 2021, p. 08B. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A651146904/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f91c6099. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.
Byline: Ron Charles
By Kristin Hannah
St. Martin's. 464 pp. $28.99
- - -
Labor is hot. Look for the union label in the pages of a bestselling novel lately, and you might find it.
Last fall, Jess Walter published "The Cold Millions," a terrific story about union organizers in Spokane, Washington, in the early 20th century. The Washington Post named it one of the top 10 books of 2020.
And now comes mega-seller Kristin Hannah with "The Four Winds," an emotional novel about efforts to organize migrant workers in California during the Depression.
Admittedly, literary fiction is not the surest bellwether of American cultural attitudes. But with income inequality soaring even as union membership plummets, Walter and Hannah are leading readers back to an era when desperate workers linked arms to fight for their income, their honor, their very lives.
"The Four Winds" begins in northwestern Texas in 1921. Elsa Wolcott is the eldest daughter in a middle-class family that treats her like an ugly heirloom. Her unloving parents keep Elsa cloistered in her room reading, insisting she's too weak to endure any social interaction. At 25 - a hopeless spinster! - she's constantly reminded that "no man of note wants an unattractive wife."
But Elsa is about one strip of yellow wallpaper away from a nervous breakdown. Her heart is a thumping muscle of unsatisfied longings and unrealized ambitions. Like Jane Eyre, she fumes with the exasperation of a passionate woman long dismissed and repressed. "If she didn't do something soon, something drastic, her future would look no different from her present," Hannah writes. "She would stay in this house for all her life" with novels as her only friends.
Inspired by the scandalous story of Fanny Hill, Elsa sews a red dress that shows her knees and storms off for a night of romantic adventure. She gets what she wants - for a few seconds, at least - but it turns out that novels have provided her with a very limited understanding of how sex actually works.
This great storm of sighs and shame is mere introduction designed to transform Elsa from Imprisoned Virgin to Outcast Mother. Expelled from the confines of her bedroom and the enervating control of her parents, she emerges as a classic Hannah heroine girded for the harrowing adventures ahead
When "The Four Winds" picks up again in 1934, we're deep in the Great Depression, and Hannah lets her story bake under the cloudless sky. A conspiracy of bad weather, bad agriculture and bad government gradually desiccates the entire area, bringing one farm after another to ruin.
The evaporation of water, the withering of seedlings, the boredom of unemployment - such calamities are not easy to dramatize, but as the drought grinds on, Hannah makes the heat radiate off these pages. And for sheer physical terror, she swirls up apocalyptic dust storms, ordeals of gritty insistence that last for days, transforming the landscape, burying homes and filling lungs. Faced with the possibility of starvation, Elsa must decide whether to stay on her land or head off to California, that oasis of milk and honey with jobs aplenty.
Clearly, while Elsa was reading "Sense and Sensibility," Hannah was reading "The Grapes of Wrath." Elsa keeps reminding people that she's a Texan, not an Okie, but the echoes of Steinbeck's classic are sometimes so strong that I expected to see the Joads' Hudson Super Six chugging along the road. Like Tom and his family, Elsa discovers that the paradise she expected to find is no such thing. California is overwhelmed by impoverished people desperate for work and food. With no safety standards, labor regulations or minimum wage - all those pesky burdens that Republicans are still whining about - giant farm owners are free to treat their laborers as brutally as they want. The country is entranced by the pernicious lie that providing government aid would weaken workers' initiative.
Of course, when "The Grapes of Wrath" appeared in 1939, much of America was crippled by the poverty that Steinbeck had reported on for the San Francisco News. A few months later, when Congress began hearings on wages and farm regulations, his novel felt devastatingly current.
Hannah's negotiation with this 80-year-old material - during a global pandemic that's weighing on our economy - is necessarily more complicated. She's examining a traumatic era in American history while also using it to reflect on the current scourges of xenophobia and economic exploitation tearing through the United States.
Then as now, demagogues scream about the dangers of socialism while ignoring the damages of crushed lives and spirits. In lines that sound tragically contemporary, Hannah describes 1930s citizens crouching in fear and resentment, conflating poverty with immorality. "The schools and hospitals were overrun, they said, unable to survive the demands of so many outsiders. They worried about bankruptcy and losing their way of life and being made unsafe by the wave of crime and disease they blamed on migrants."
Like Steinbeck, Hannah attends to the economic and political forces killing these workers. "This is America," a young woman tells Elsa. "How can this be happening to us?" Migrant children are effectively excluded from public schools. Hospitals refuse to treat laborers. Any talk of resistance or organizing is beaten into silence by bat-wielding police. And Hannah offers a particularly powerful illustration of the way the company store traps farmworkers in a cycle of consumption and debt - an almost quaint version of the insidious credit industry that enslaves millions of Americans today.
But if Hannah demonstrates a socialist's faith in the need for stronger controls over the powers of capital, she still makes a bad Marxist. After all, her primary interest in "The Four Winds" remains Elsa's potential for independence. Yes, the fight to unionize the farmworkers eventually provides the story's climactic action - and its frosted-lens romance - but the real focus is always Elsa's struggle to be brave, to understand that "courage is fear you ignore." This is, almost from the first page, a story about Elsa's efforts to cast off the crippling limits imposed by her parents and be the person she wants to be.
In fact, despite the strong echoes to "The Grapes of Wrath," Hannah may be working closer to 19th-century melodrama. The heroines of "The Four Winds" are purely heroic; its villains wholly evil. Hannah never risks ambiguity; her pages are 100 percent irony-free. And she moves with a relentless pace. Her prose, so ordinary line by line, nevertheless accumulates into scenes that rush from one emergency to the next - starving! beating! flooding! - pausing only for respites of sentimentality. (There's a little boy in these pages so sweet he could be ground up to flavor 8 million cupcakes.)
Despite Hannah's extraordinary commercial success, the snob in me wonders what this indefatigable author could produce if she endured a little tougher editorial criticism and gave herself a little more time. (She's published 24 novels in 30 years.) But that would mean fiddling with the well-oiled machine that reliably produces such marketable passion. I confess, I spent too long rolling my eyes at the flat style, the shiny characters and the clunky polemics of "The Four Winds" before finally giving in and snuffling, "(BEGIN ITAL)I'm(END ITAL) not crying - (BEGIN ITAL)you're(END ITAL) crying!"
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Charles, Ron. "Book World: Melodrama is in 'The Four Winds'." Washington Post, 28 Jan. 2021, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A649904716/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ed84b6e8. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.
In ''The Four Winds,'' the author of ''The Nightingale'' and ''The Great Alone'' takes readers back to another era of environmental disaster, economic collapse and fresh starts.
Growing up in California and the Pacific Northwest, Kristin Hannah never wanted to become a novelist. It was a career for dreamers, she thought, kids who took creative writing classes and scribbled stories from the time they were 6.
''I just wasn't that person,'' she said in a video interview from her home outside Seattle. ''Until I was in my third year of law school and my mother was dying of breast cancer. Every day I would visit her and complain about my classes. One afternoon, my mother said, 'Don't worry, you're going to be a writer.'''
This was news to Hannah. The two decided to write a romance novel set in 18th-century Scotland. ''That was her choice,'' Hannah said. ''I would have written horror. But it gave us something to talk about.''
In 1985, the day she wrote the first nine pages -- her inaugural foray into fiction -- she received a call from her father, telling her she needed to get to the hospital. There, before her mother died, Hannah, then 24, had a chance to whisper, ''I started.''
But she put the book on hold and resumed her original plan, practicing law at a Seattle firm -- until, she said, ''a few years later, I went into labor at 14 weeks and was bedridden until my son was born. I realized that I probably wouldn't have more children and I wanted to be home for the first few years. So I thought, I'll try writing a book.''
But not the one she started with her mother. ''That was a terrible, terrible book,'' Hannah said. ''It's now in a box that says 'Do Not Publish Even After Death.'''
She published her debut novel, ''A Handful of Heaven,'' in 1991. It was a historical romance set in Alaska -- a place she returned to almost three decades later in ''The Great Alone,'' which sold two million copies in the United States.
Hannah experienced an even bigger breakout hit with ''The Nightingale,'' her 2015 historical novel, which sold 4.5 million copies worldwide. Her books have now been translated into 43 languages, her name is an anchor tenant on best-seller lists, and you would be hard-pressed to find a book club that has not discussed one of her novels. Of her mother's long-ago prediction, Hannah said, ''I tell you, this woman is somewhere with a martini and a cigarette telling all her friends, 'I told you so.'''
Hannah, 60, lives with her husband; her son is now grown. Gone are the days when she had to squeeze in bursts of writing around naps and school hours. She works from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. most days, writing drafts in longhand on yellow legal pads. ''I can write in my backyard, by the fire, on the beach, on an airplane,'' Hannah said. ''It helps to be disciplined, but I also believe creativity follows discipline.''
Her 24th book, ''The Four Winds,'' which comes out on Tuesday, seems eerily prescient in 2021, with its Depression-era tale of blighted land, xenophobia, fear of contagion -- and determination to join forces and rebuild. Its message is galvanizing and hopeful: We are a nation of scrappy survivors. We've been in dire straits before; we will be again. Hold your people close. Her publisher, St. Martin's Press, is planning an initial printing of 1 million copies.
''I wanted to tell a quintessentially American story,'' Hannah said. ''The Dust Bowl was the greatest ecological disaster in American history and that, combined with the partisan divide of the Great Depression, really spoke to me.''
The protagonist of ''The Four Winds'' is Elsa Martinelli, a single mother of two who, in 1935, leaves a parched family farm in Lonesome Tree, Texas, for California. She is unmoved by brochures promising milk and honey in the ''Land of Opportunity.'' She needs steady work and fresh air for her son, who is recovering from ''dust pneumonia,'' a then-common ailment on the Great Plains. (Readers who feel inconvenienced by cloth masks may feel differently after spending time with characters who wear gas masks in their homes.)
In the San Joaquin Valley, the Martinellis trade one set of terrible circumstances for another. Work is scarce. Locals are cruelly suspicious of newcomers, who they believe carry disease. Nobody will rent to ''Okies,'' as migrants were known -- regardless of whether they were from Oklahoma -- so the family settles into a squalid camp on the banks of an irrigation ditch.
How Elsa claws her way out is the crux of ''The Four Winds.'' Friendship is a lifeline, as it is for many women in Hannah's books, including the pair in ''Firefly Lane.'' On Wednesday, Netflix begins streaming its television adaptation of that book, starring Katherine Heigl and Sarah Chalke.
''I deeply value my female friendships. That's something that has been reinforced in this pandemic,'' Hannah said. ''So it made sense to me that Elsa finds a mother and a girlfriend. Those relationships give her the power to stand up for herself.''
One of Hannah's closest friends is her writing partner of more than 30 years -- the novelist Megan Chance, whom she met early in her career at a lunch hosted by a local writers' group.
''We were both in the bathroom at the same time. We traded phone numbers at the sink and decided to read each others' manuscripts,'' Chance said in a phone interview. ''It was this instantaneous connection, the most weirdly fated meeting I've ever had.''
They started talking on the phone every day, honing their work according to writing advice from authors such as Dwight Swain, Jack Bickham and Robert McKee. ''Our process changes every couple of years depending on what we're writing and what's going on in our lives,'' Hannah said, ''but generally I'll give Megan 150 or 200 pages, and that's the beginning.''
''I think our critiques would devastate other people,'' joked Chance, whose latest novel is ''A Splendid Ruin.'' ''But there's also this trust. We know each others' histories. When Kristin calls me and says 'I'm feeling this way,' I go, 'You always feel that way.' And she'll go, 'I do?' Kristin knows story better than any person I've ever known. She has it in her bones.''
In 1993, Hannah had another fortuitous encounter -- this time at a hotel bar during a romance writers' convention, where she met her now-longtime editor, Jennifer Enderlin, who is the president and publisher of St. Martin's Publishing Group.
In a phone interview, Enderlin traced Hannah's many reinventions throughout her career -- from mass-market romance writer to hardcover author to book-club best seller to spinner of historical sagas. ''With 'The Nightingale,' she went from being considered 'women's fiction' to being considered a literary novelist,'' Enderlin said. ''She has an instinct for why something worked; she's analytical and intuitive at the same time.''
As she worked on ''The Four Winds,'' Hannah was inspired by Dorothea Lange's photographs, especially ''Woman of the High Plains'' -- ''You can see how tired, afraid and heroic she is all at once'' -- and by the writings of Sanora Babb, an aspiring journalist who documented life in migrant camps for the Farm Security Administration only to have her own novel in progress scooped by ''The Grapes of Wrath.''
''She took copious notes on conversations with residents, what they cared about and what they were having trouble with,'' Hannah said before describing how Babb's boss funneled these observations to John Steinbeck. ''Amazing, right?''
She smiled ruefully. ''I'm devoted to putting women in the forefront of historical stories. To telling women's stories.''
''The Four Winds'' includes a few lines from Babb's novel, ''Whose Names Are Unknown,'' which was finally published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 2004: ''One thing was left, as clear and perfect as a drop of rain -- the desperate need to stand together ... They would rise and fall and, in their falling, rise again.''
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PHOTOS: ''I'm devoted to putting women in the forefront of historical stories,'' says the author Kristin Hannah, above. At left, in a family photo from around 1968, she is holding a book. ''The Four Winds'' is her 24th book. (PHOTOGRAPH BY RUTH FREMSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2021 The New York Times Company
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Egan, Elisabeth. "A Resilient Nation of Scrappy Survivors." New York Times, 1 Feb. 2021, p. C4(L). Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A650245603/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a62427e2. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.
The Four Winds. By Kristin Hannah. Feb. 2021.464p. St. Martin's, $28.99 (9781250178602).
With this emotionally charged epic of Dust Bowl-era Texas and its dramatic aftermath, the prolific Hannah has added another outstanding novel to her popular repertoire. In 1921, Elsa Wolcott is a tall, bookish woman of 25 whose soul is stifled by her superficial parents. By 1934, after marrying Rafe Martinelli, a young Italian Catholic who was the first man to show her affection, Elsa is a mother of two who has found a home on her beloved in-laws' farm. Severe drought and terrible dust storms affect everyone in this proud family, and they are all forced to make tough choices. This wide-ranging saga ticks all the boxes for deeply satisfying historical fiction. Elsa is an achingly real character whose sense of self-worth slowly emerges through trying circumstances, and her shifting relationship with her rebellious daughter, Loreda, is particularly moving. Hannah brings the impact of the environmental devastation on the Great Plains down to a personal level with ample period-appropriate details and reactions, showing how people's love for their land made them reluctant to leave. The storytelling is propulsive, and the contemporary relevance of the novel's themes--among them, how outsiders are unfairly blamed for economic inequalities--provides additional depth in this rich, rewarding read about family ties, perseverance, and women's friendships and fortitude.--Sarah Johnson
HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Hannah is a consistent best-seller, and this sharply relevant tale of a past catastrophic time will exert a particularly strong magnetic force.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2020 American Library Association
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Johnson, Sarah. "The Four Winds." Booklist, vol. 117, no. 4, 15 Oct. 2020, pp. 32+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A639876166/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8ed7bd13. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.
Byline: SARAH LAING; Special to The Globe and Mail
The Women, Kristin Hannah's harrowing novel about the mostly forgotten story of the American nurses who served in Vietnam, has had extraordinary word-of-mouth buzz since it made its debut in February. For Hannah, a former lawyer who's written more than 25 other novels, many of them bestsellers too, this one feels like the biggest book of her career, and the achievement of a lifetime.
"I felt that way from the very inception," she says from her home in the Pacific Northwest. "I was well aware that this was a special idea, and that if done correctly, it was important as well. It could make a difference in people's lives and start a conversation that I felt was long overdue."
In some ways, this is a story that has been with Hannah since she was in elementary school in Washington State, growing up against the backdrop of the Vietnam War - the protests, the friends whose dads came home to a country that treated them like criminals rather than heroes, the silver bracelet with a shot-down pilot's name on it that she bought as part of a fundraiser to raise awareness about the prisoners of war being held captive. (Colonel Robert John Welch never did come home, but he does appear as a minor character in The Women.)
In 1997, she first pitched the idea of a book about Vietnam to her editor.
"That was the time when it was really felt very strongly that no one in America wanted to talk about the Vietnam War, to read about it, to revisit that time," she says. "My editor said that it was better to wait - and it turned out to be great advice, because I was too young. I needed a few more circles around the sun to be ready to take on a topic of such complexity."
It wasn't until 2020, in the early days of the pandemic, that Hannah finally felt the time had come.
Hannah talked to The Globe and Mail about watching the unrest in America which reminded her of the Vietnam era again.
This could have been a straightforward history of nurses in the Vietnam War, but you chose fiction.
Why?
The strength of fiction is to take history, and really personalize it, plunge the reader into it and allow them to step into the shoes of historical characters in a very fully engaged and emotional way. The hope is that reading fiction, especially historical fiction, creates empathy with those characters and makes you understand them.
One of the most gratifying things about this book has been the number of veterans and their families who have come to one of my events or written letters to tell me how much it means that this book is allowing them to tell their stories again.
That makes me think of someone who I saw post about this book on social media, who wrote, 'I never understood why my mom would cry every time something about the Vietnam War came on the news or on TV - but now I get it.' What a gift for a novelist! That makes me so proud, but mostly just happy for the vets, you know.
Do you feel like this book is changing anything in a tangible way?
We know that these veterans are aging, and as we lose them, we lose their stories. Hopefully people read this book and ask themselves about the treatment of veterans from the Vietnam War and all wars. It's a universal truth that if we as countries are going to ask people to risk their lives and make the sacrifices that men and women and military families make, we really need to care for them fully when they come home.
Is there something about our particular geopolitical moment that makes this book feel quite immediate and pressing for a lot of people?
Readers are making the same link, and having the same sense that I did, which is that with all of this chaos and turbulence in America and in the world, it's a reminder that we've been here before. These protests are not a new thing.
When you sit down at your computer ... I actually write longhand! I originally started working on a computer, and then more than 15 years ago, I went back to my lawyer roots and started writing on yellow legal pads with a gel-tip pen. I just found that I enjoyed the writing process so much more when I wasn't sitting at a computer.
What do those legal pads look like?
Are they all full of scratched words, crossed out paragraphs?
Of course there are scratched out parts, pages ripped out, but for the most part, the pen and the pad allow me to bypass the seductiveness of the delete key and I can get into the flow of just plain storytelling. I throw a lot of stuff away, so for me the first draft is really just about finding the story, finding the characters, the plot. The more I can get out of my own head, and the more I can silence my inner critic, the better and more fun the process is.
I remember when I first picked up the book I thought the war chapters would be the toughest to read, but when Frankie, the main character, got home it would all be fine. But it was the reverse.
That's what I thought when I went into the story. I realized in the writing of this that the war experience is one thing, but then coming home and dealing with what you've seen and done, layered on with the fact that you're back from an unpopular war where there's no gratitude for your service and there's no one out there to help you. And as a further layer, now you're also a woman and you're invisible. I came to realize that actually, Frankie was not going to be broken by the war. She was going to be broken by coming home.
As a reader, this book really got under my skin, had a real emotional impact. What was it like for you, sitting with this material day in and day out?
The hardest part for me as a writer is not recreating this or writing these scenes. It's reading the memoirs of the people who actually went through it. I had such respect for them, and I wanted to be authentic and realistic in order to show the world what they had been through. I had to make those scenes as visceral as they were because these women came home, and over and over again, they were told that there were no women in Vietnam, and how can you have trauma if you weren't in combat? It was important for me to show that this is combat, whether you're carrying a gun or not.
How do you follow a book like The Women? Are you scribbling away on a legal pad as we speak, or are you just letting yourself breath for a bit and enjoy this?
I'm enjoying it for a minute, but I'm also ready to be looking at something else. But you're right.
It is difficult to follow up a book that has had a reaction like this.
Maybe you don't? Maybe your next one is a light rom-com set on a beach.
I keep threatening to write a fantasy novel, so who knows?!
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The Globe and Mail Inc.
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Laing, Sarah. "Kristin Hannah tells an often-forgotten story; Bestselling author's The Women shines light on Vietnam War nurses, a topic she's always wanted to write about." Globe & Mail [Toronto, Canada], 22 June 2024, p. R10. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A798562463/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=bb4b0b1e. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.
Byline: Beatriz Williams
"The Women" follows a San Diego debutante into a world of gut wounds and napalm. But the real challenge comes when she arrives home.
THE WOMEN, by Kristin Hannah
A few chapters into "The Women," I experienced a wave of déjô 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. This was the generational narrative, told and retold in classics like "Born on the Fourth of July" and "The Things They Carried" - the ballad of the boomer, a masculine coming-of-age cri de coeur.
Now 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.
The familiar beats snare you from the outset. When the sheltered San Diego debutante Frances "Frankie" McGrath's adored older brother is killed in action in 1966, she's inspired to enlist as an Army nurse. "Women can be heroes, too," her brother's friend tells her. Frankie laughs. Her flag-waving, emotionally constipated parents are not amused.
Dumped in-country without adequate training, Frankie learns the ropes from seasoned nurses and battle-scarred male doctors who propel her past internalized insecurities with barks of no-nonsense encouragement: "Damn it, McGrath! We don't have time for fear. You're good enough. Do it!"
Indeed, there's something special about Frankie. Within months, she becomes an experienced trauma nurse, confronts the horrors of gut wounds and napalm with courage and compassion, rages against the naïve indifference of her family and friends back home - and attracts the devotion of handsome, tormented, unexpectedly married men.
Hannah is in top form here, plunging the reader into the chaotic miseries of the combat zone. She deploys details to visceral effect, whether Frankie's performing an emergency tracheotomy during a mortar attack or sipping Fresca in the O Club afterward, while an evocative soundtrack of the Doors, the Beatles and the Turtles plays in the background. ("Music followed the smoke, infusing it with memories of home. 'I wanna hold your ha-aa-aa-nd.'")
With Hannah confidently in control, we swoop above the jungle canopy in a Huey chopper, peppered by sniper fire, and skid across the Mekong Delta on a pair of water skis. The historical scenery is rendered with such earnest authenticity that the few millennialisms - "girl squad," for instance, snapped me back to the present day, as did a pair of kids named Kaylee and Braden - jar precisely because the author otherwise recreates this world so convincingly.
But 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.
In the end, I was struck not by the way "The Women" radically reshapes the contours of our Vietnam narrative, but instead by how vividly the novel affirms them. Hannah may not offer any revolutionary takes on the war and its aftermath, but she gathers women into the experience with moving conviction. And maybe this story's time has come again. Over dinner one night, I described "The Women" to my college-age daughter - a young woman with her finger on the cultural pulse - and she perked right up.
"Wow, the Vietnam War," she said. "You don't see much about that."
THE WOMEN | By Kristin Hannah | St. Martin's | 480 pp. | $27
Beatriz Williams's latest novel is "The Beach at Summerly."
PHOTO: (PHOTOGRAPH BY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 International Herald Tribune
http://international.nytimes.com/
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Williams, Beatriz. "Kristin Hannah's New Novel Puts Combat Nurses Front and Center in Vietnam." International New York Times, 7 Feb. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A781592287/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0228cfb7. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.
''The Women'' follows a San Diego debutante into a world of gut wounds and napalm. But the real challenge comes when she arrives home.
THE WOMEN, by Kristin Hannah
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. This was the generational narrative, told and retold in classics like ''Born on the Fourth of July'' and ''The Things They Carried'' -- the ballad of the boomer, a masculine coming-of-age cri de coeur.
Now 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.
The familiar beats snare you from the outset. In 1966, after her adored older brother leaves for a ''cushy'' assignment on a ship, the sheltered San Diego debutante Frances ''Frankie'' McGrath is inspired to enlist as an Army nurse. ''Women can be heroes, too,'' her brother's friend tells her. Frankie laughs. Her flag-waving, emotionally constipated parents are not amused.
Dumped in-country without adequate training, Frankie learns the ropes from seasoned nurses and battle-scarred male doctors who propel her past internalized insecurities with barks of no-nonsense encouragement: ''Damn it, McGrath! We don't have time for fear. You're good enough. Do it!''
Indeed, there's something special about Frankie. Within months, she becomes an experienced trauma nurse, confronts the horrors of gut wounds and napalm with courage and compassion, rages against the naïve indifference of her family and friends back home -- and attracts the devotion of handsome, tormented, unexpectedly married men.
Hannah is in top form here, plunging the reader into the chaotic miseries of the combat zone. She deploys details to visceral effect, whether Frankie's performing an emergency tracheotomy during a mortar attack or sipping Fresca in the O Club afterward, while an evocative soundtrack of the Doors, the Beatles and the Turtles plays in the background. (''Music followed the smoke, infusing it with memories of home. 'I wanna hold your ha-aa-aa-nd.''')
With Hannah confidently in control, we swoop above the jungle canopy in a Huey chopper, peppered by sniper fire, and skid across the Mekong Delta on a pair of water skis. The historical scenery is rendered with such earnest authenticity that the few millennialisms -- ''girl squad,'' for instance, snapped me back to the present day, as did a pair of kids named Kaylee and Braden -- jar precisely because the author otherwise recreates this world so convincingly.
But 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.
In the end, I was struck not by the way ''The Women'' radically reshapes the contours of our Vietnam narrative, but instead by how vividly the novel affirms them. Hannah may not offer any revolutionary takes on the war and its aftermath, but she gathers women into the experience with moving conviction. And maybe this story's time has come again. Over dinner one night, I described ''The Women'' to my college-age daughter -- a young woman with her finger on the cultural pulse -- and she perked right up.
''Wow, the Vietnam War,'' she said. ''You don't see much about that.''
THE WOMEN | By Kristin Hannah | St. Martin's | 480 pp. | $27
Beatriz Williams's latest novel is ''The Beach at Summerly.''
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PHOTO This article appeared in print on page BR17.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The New York Times Company
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Williams, Beatriz. "Coming Home." The New York Times Book Review, 18 Feb. 2024, p. 17. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A782850490/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b5ef7bf4. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.
Hannah, Kristin THE WOMEN St. Martin's (Fiction None) $27.00 2, 6 ISBN: 9781250178633
A young woman's experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances "Frankie" McGrath's older brother--"a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften"--who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it's a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that's impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. 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. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother's best friend. 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.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Hannah, Kristin: THE WOMEN." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2023, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A774415283/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=4536ab3c. Accessed 25 Aug. 2024.