The Nightingale – Kristin Hannah

In the quiet village of Carriveau, Vianne Mauriac says goodbye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front. She doesn’t believe that the Nazis will invade France…but invade they do, in droves of marching soldiers, in caravans of trucks and tanks, in planes that fill the skies and drop bombs upon the innocent. When a German captain requisitions Vianne’s home, she and her daughter must live with the enemy or lose everything. Without food or money or hope, as danger escalates all around them, she is forced to make one impossible choice after another to keep her family alive.

Vianne’s sister, Isabelle, is a rebellious eighteen-year-old girl, searching for purpose with all the reckless passion of youth. While thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she meets Gäetan, a partisan who believes the French can fight the Nazis from within France, and she falls in love as only the young can…completely. But when he betrays her, Isabelle joins the Resistance and never looks back, risking her life time and again to save others.

With courage, grace and powerful insight, bestselling author Kristin Hannah captures the epic panorama of WWII and illuminates an intimate part of history seldom seen: the women’s war. The Nightingale tells the stories of two sisters, separated by years and experience, by ideals, passion and circumstance, each embarking on her own dangerous path toward survival, love, and freedom in German-occupied, war-torn France–a heartbreakingly beautiful novel that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the durability of women. It is a novel for everyone, a novel for a lifetime.

Goodreads

Disposition

Another book club pick! Kristin Hannah has written so many books, yet somehow I have never read any of her work. For some reason, I generally prefer lesser known authors, I always worry that if they are well known authors for a wide variety of separate work, that they will become very formulaic and predictable, which is probably what led me to never read any of Hannah’s books before now. I love historical fiction, and with it being based in the World War II era, I am definitely intrigued!

Editorial

I could not put this book down. It was that good. In fact, now that I am looking on Goodreads, every single one of my friends who have read this book have given it a minimum of 4.5 stars. I loved it so much that I even sent a copy to my mother-in-law in England, whom also loved it and finished it in just a few days. I take back everything I said about Kristin Hannah, and the potential of her being too “main stream” and formulaic, she has proven me very wrong. (In fact, this book has even made my “Ideal Bookshelf”!) Hannah instantly sucked me into the story of two sisters (Vianne and Isabelle) and their very different (and often conflicting) roles during a Nazi occupied France. I could relate to both sisters for very different reasons. On one hand, being a mother myself I could identify with Vianne and the decisions she made in order to protect herself and her daughter. On the other hand, to my truest core, I wished I could be Isabelle, with the ability (albeit often careless ambition) to fearlessly find a way to fight for change. Yet their differences ebb and flow, often driving them apart, often bringing them together. While set in a time of war, loss, and cruelty, there is also love, that ever changes and comes in expected and unexpected places. It is a love story that goes far beyond the normal realms of romantic and familial.

 
“If I have learned anything in this long life of mine, it is this: in love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.”

In stark contrast to the love, is of course loss, which Hannah definitely makes you feel. Until I read this novel, I never fully thought about the effects that World War II had on people outside of the concentration camps. Clearly, the concentration camps are the worst kind of evil, and horrors that any human should ever experience, but “The Nightingale” made me realize how horrible the war was in all aspects. I never grasped what it would be like to live with rations, with military being able to occupy your house at will, the far reaching powers that are used in attempt to meet a military force’s goals, and in an effort to control a population on a large scale. Couple that with the fact that so many women were left unprotected, both in the lack of female rights at the time, and that their husbands/fathers/sons were often lost to the war themselves, and it is impossible not to feel their struggle. The helplessness of the situation, which lasted for years.

“She shook her head, wishing she could cry, but there were no tears in her. This news had emptied her. She couldn’t even breathe.”

Despite all of the sadness and loss, Hannah manages to continually provide hope. The strength shown by  women is so well portrayed in this novel, and it saddens me that many of these stories were lost after the war. If you need a good “girl power” book, then this is definitely for you. The emotional strength of women never ceases to amaze me. What women may lack in strength to their male counterparts, they more than make up for in their emotional strength, and perseverance.

 
“Men tell stories. Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war, and when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started our lives over.”