Scan barcode
A review by oleksandr
The Healer's War: A Fantasy Novel of Vietnam by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough
4.0
This is a memoir of an American nurse during the war in Vietnam with slight fantasy elements. I read is as a part of monthly reading for December 2020 at Hugo & Nebula Awards: Best Novels group. The book won Nebula for the Best novel in 1989.
This is a story of Lt. Kitty McCulley, a young woman, who joined the US war effort “One reason I hadn’t minded coming to Nam so much at first was that I had already talked to a lot of bewildered boys my age who didn’t want to go but saw no other choice. It seemed unfair that they had to serve, just because they were men of the right age. Like discrimination.” Coming to the hospital, which cared for moth the US soldiers and local population, she saw all the injustice of this war, with amputees in pain, locals disregarded or even sent to their likely death to local hospital… among patients she met an old Vietnamese, who is rumored to be some kind of healer/saint with supernatural powers (which haven’t saved him from losing feet to shrapnel). He sees in her a kindred spirit and gives an item of power…
While there is a kind of fantasy, it can actually explained away in magic realism innuendos, and the main power of the book is as a fictional memoir. The author was in ‘Nam and it is partially based on her own experiences, even if some adventures are clearly fictionalized to make a story more dynamic.
I planned to read something about that war for a long time and this book is exactly what I wanted – not a military history, but a civil US witness of it. Recommended if you have similar plans. It is not an easy read, but worth it.
This is a story of Lt. Kitty McCulley, a young woman, who joined the US war effort “One reason I hadn’t minded coming to Nam so much at first was that I had already talked to a lot of bewildered boys my age who didn’t want to go but saw no other choice. It seemed unfair that they had to serve, just because they were men of the right age. Like discrimination.” Coming to the hospital, which cared for moth the US soldiers and local population, she saw all the injustice of this war, with amputees in pain, locals disregarded or even sent to their likely death to local hospital… among patients she met an old Vietnamese, who is rumored to be some kind of healer/saint with supernatural powers (which haven’t saved him from losing feet to shrapnel). He sees in her a kindred spirit and gives an item of power…
While there is a kind of fantasy, it can actually explained away in magic realism innuendos, and the main power of the book is as a fictional memoir. The author was in ‘Nam and it is partially based on her own experiences, even if some adventures are clearly fictionalized to make a story more dynamic.
I planned to read something about that war for a long time and this book is exactly what I wanted – not a military history, but a civil US witness of it. Recommended if you have similar plans. It is not an easy read, but worth it.