To put it mildly, these stories are gripping.

This is a well-written, incredibly valuable book. Highly recommended.

[Norland] gives [these women] a platform to talk directly to the reader[,] thereby revealing the women's double and even multiple lives, full of contradiction and inner conflicts caused by the complexity and long duration of the war years. The Saigon Sisters is a substantial collection of thoughts, memories, moments of pain and joy in individual lives.

The literature on the war in Vietnam includes hundreds of first-person sources by men on all sides in the conflict, but fewer than a dozen books about women are in print. Thus this collection of oral history interviews by Norland (formerly, US Department of State) is an important contribution.

It is quite easy, and motivating as well, to imagine a course on Vietnamese history after World War II that includes only work by women and with The Saigon Sisters as a pivotal work connecting them all. As Norland's powerful oral-history recounting of the lives of this 'band of sisters' demonstrates, friendship and independence required vigilance but endured despite decades of war.

To read a good group biography is to come out with a different level of appreciation for the ways, trivial and tremendous, that humans influence one another... Norland tells the stories of nine [Vietnamese women] who chose to stay, and who, after spending their childhoods secretly dreaming of Vietnamese independence, found surprising ways into the resistance.