Tore me apart. A portrait of a forgotten American, a nurse who served in Vietnam and whose life never rises to anything of note. The narrator, along with the rest of American society, almost overlooks the woman's complex story. Once the narrative begins to unfold, you almost want to look away, too, but you can't. I think this is a tale of uniquely American suffering. A story of beauty and horror and fragility and hopefulness, and so easily plastered over by dominant narratives that it might get lost. ( )

Women in war. Beautifully written. A character and subject you'll never forget. ( )

The title "For Rouenna" comes from the kind of inscription authors often write in the flyleaf of a book when asked for an autograph from a reader/fan. The title character, Rouenna Zycinski, was one of those readers, although she admits to the unnamed narrator that she is not really much of a reader. But Rouenna had remembered the narrator from their shared impoverished childhoods in "the projects" of Staten Island. The narrator had gone on to college and became a successful writer, the kind invited by colleges to be a visiting writer-in-residence. Rouenna had gone to nursing school, financed by the army, and then was thrust into the maelstrom that was the Vietnam war as a combat nurse.

Reading "For Rouenna" was like being sucked without warning into a whirlpool of events and emotions. It is one of those simply un-put-downable reads. It is also one of the most unique takes on the Vietnam war that I've ever read. And I've read a lot of books about that war - both fiction and memoirs. I know that there are probably a number of books out there from women who served in Nam, but I confess I haven't really read many. Until this book, this fictional treatment of what it might have been like - must have been like. Rouenna is an unforgettable heroine, and an unlikely one. But you quickly learn that the women were just as susceptible to PTSD and the effects of Agent Orange as the male combatants were, because Rouenna finds herself going through "the change" at the young age of 39 - a known effect of exposure to the poisonous dioxins of Orange. As they become reacquainted, she tells the narrator of the excitement and shared military experiences of Vietnam, and how it was probably the best year of her life. Women were a much-desired commodity and in short supply in Vietnam, so Rouenna had made the most of it.

There are plenty of flashbacks and stories of Vietnam, but the frame of the story is thirty years later and Rouenna is fifty-ish and fat, an obese size 18, living alone, and knowing she'll probably stay alone, this after years of easy pick-up sex and always thinking that one day she'd be married and have kids.

Here's the thing. I'm a guy, and this is a book about women, about friendships between women. And yet it simply pulled me along at a nearly breakneck pace, with a narrative that grabs you by the scruff of the neck and shakes you. And shakes your preconceived notions of what it's like to be a woman too. Here's this red-faced, solitary obese woman who most people wouldn't give a second look on the street, and yet she's got this amazing and compelling story, which finally gets told - too late - by our unnamed narrator. For some reason I thought of the closing lines from another favorite book, Mark Harris's classic baseball novel, Bang the Drum Slowly, in which the narrator, Henry 'Author' Wiggen, says of his late friend Bruce, "From here on I rag no one."

Rouenna was a person who mattered. Read this book. ( )

Poignant story of a woman searching for answers about an acquaintance that leads into the past and the Vietnamese War. ( )