Book Title: The Nightingale
Author: Kristin Hannah
Genre: Historical Fiction
Page Count: 564
Started/Ended Date: February 8 – February 13
Total Reading Time: 9 hours 3 minutes

FRANCE, 1939

In the quiet village of Carriveau, Vianne Mauriac says good-bye 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, searching for purpose with all the reckless passion of youth. While thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she meets Gaëtan, 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.

This book was an easy read in terms of length but not in terms of content. This book starts as World War 2 is kicking off and follows two sisters as France is occupied by the Nazis. Both sisters take different approaches to surviving the war and I think this has to do with their initial interactions with the Nazis. For Isabelle, she is immediately thrown into action as she is among a group of civilians who are attacked by Nazi planes and bombs while fleeing Paris. She meets a man in this chaos, whom she teams up with to get to her sister’s home in Carriveau. During this journey, she immediately falls in love with him and decides that she wants to fight however she can.

Vianne, on the other hand, is more under the impression that if she and her daughter just keep their heads down, they will get through the war. Vianne’s first meeting with a Nazi was as he was moving into her home. He showed up at her doorstep and said he now lived there, too. However, he seemed like a respectful man and maybe even nice. He helped Vianne send care packages to her husband who was a prisoner of war, he snuck chocolate and other treats to her and her daughter, he even gave Vianne the heads up to tell her best friend and neighbor, a Jewish woman, that she should attempt to escape with her children because they were sending every Jew to concentration camps.

Isabelle joins a secret resistance group that works to save Allied airmen who have been stranded in Nazi-occupied France by helping them escape through the Pyrenees mountains. Isabelle’s character is based on a real Belgian woman named Andrée de Jongh, who, between 1941 and 1942, personally escorted 118 people to safety. In the book, Isabelle is eventually caught and is sent to a concentration camp. She survives long enough to be rescued but dies shortly after.

Vianne gradually begins to resist in her own way, by taking children from Jewish families, creating new identities for them, and hiding them away either with other French families or at an orphanage. She keeps note of who these children really are and where they are now so that she can reunite the families after the war. Vianne’s story seems to be inspired by Irena Sendler, a Polish social worker who is estimated to have saved over 2,500 children.

I really loved this book. I’ve read a lot about the Holocaust and World War II, but I’ve never learned what it was like for those in France or anywhere in Europe. I think I tend to think of World War II Europe being just Nazis and the Jewish people they targeted. But, of course, there were other European civilians who were watching it happen, some just watching and some resisting in various degrees. Of course, this book isn’t a true story, but it is inspired by real events. It opened my eyes to how terrifying and how hard it was to survive. Not even to survive the Nazis but just to survive the winters during war when they didn’t have enough rations for food or clothes to keep warm.

It was also eye-opening to see how bravery can be defined differently in these situations. For Isabelle, she was risking her life, escorting Allied air-men through the mountains, sending messages for the resistance, and even harboring fugitives from the Nazis. Where as Vianne was brave in doing what she needed to do in order to keep her daughter and other children alive. Isabelle may have been the more flashy hero who, in the end, would posthumously receive an honor for her bravery, but Vianne went through hell and made it possible for her children and other children to survive the war.

What did you think of this book? Let me know in the comments!