UPDATE: Hot n Humid

UPDATED with actual quote at the end, so you know I wasn’t exaggerating 

Kristin Hannah’s new novel The Women is a bizarre mix of  A Field Guide to Dressing War Wounds and a Harlequin Nurse-n-Doctor Romance: 

“She looked up from debriding the soldier’s sucking chest wound—he was just a boy!— to meet the surgeon’s smoldering eyes… And yet, she knew that under the sterile medical gloves sensitively holding a Kelly clamp, a wedding ring graced his manly hands .”

[—not an actual quote, but close!]

The author has done her research – – and is a little too eager to pile it on. Did you remember Tab diet cola was stylized T small-a capital-B? 

“Back in her hooch, she relished an ice-cold TaB.” Did anyone actually spell it that way?

Still, it’s an acceptable distraction it is, stuck home with a bum knee and below-zero temps. 

First, an old friend from the art college library, RMcG,  is in town and I’m going out for coffee, but the rest of the day it’s me and “Frankie”, naive plucky daughter of the country club set, as she holds the hands of dying young African American soldiers, ponders the US’s role in SE Asia,  and leans her tired head on the blood-stained scrubs of the disturbingly handsome Dr What’s-His-Name in a steamy (“steamy”, get it?) MASH unit in Vietnam.

Quote UPDATE

Okay, here’s what I mean— 

Nurse (Frankie McGrath) goes into a tailspin about her feelings for Doctor (Jamie) after a shift that ends with them gazing at each other over a dead soldier:

Then they leave the operating theater and stand talking in the rain…

Oh, the problems of a nurse in Vietnam! “Is this horror, or is it love?”

How’s a girl to know???