Kristin Hannah’s novels get a lot of love online, so I have been thinking about reading one for awhile but have been hesitant to because I find over-hyped books do not live up to my expectations. Then I found this beautiful 10th anniversary edition of The Nightingale with sprayed edges in Costco and had to buy it. Damn, this book is good. It actually made me cry, which does not happen very often when I read books.

The Nightingale is about two French sisters, Vianne and Isabelle Rossignol (Rossignol is the French word for “nightingale”, which is important later in the story), and their experiences in occupied France during WWII. Hannah opens the novel with a common plot device: in 1995 on the Oregon coast, an old woman, who is either Vianne and Isabelle – it is up to the reader to figure it out as the story progresses, is dying of cancer and moving into a care home. The only thing she really wants to take with her is a trunk full of memories from her life in France. The story then alternates between Vianne and Isabelle’s perspectives as young women during the war years.

Vianne, who is ten years older than Isabelle, has a husband and a young daughter and lives in a small town outside of Paris. Her husband leaves to join the French army against the German army. History tells us that it did not take long for the French army to capitulate and for France to become occupied by Nazis. Vianne’s husband ends up a prisoner of war while Vianne is left to fend for herself and her daughter. Meanwhile, Isabelle is a seventeen-year-old girl who has just been expelled from yet another boarding school. She returns home to Paris to her father, an alcoholic suffering from PTSD after his experience in WWI, who is not happy to see her. As the Nazis march into Paris, Isabelle has the half-baked idea that she will stay in Paris and somehow fight against them, but her father forces her to leave the city and go to Vianne’s home.

Vianne and Isabelle do not get along, not just because of the vast age difference between them, but because after their mother died, when Isabelle was just four years old, Vianne was too stuck in her own grief to be a good sister and give Isabelle the love that their father did not show them. When the Nazis occupy Vianne’s town, she is forced to have a Nazi soldier billet in her house. This is too much for Isabelle, who finds it increasingly difficult to hold her tongue around the Nazis, while Vianne will do anything to keep her daughter safe, even if that means sending her sister away before she gets them into trouble.

Vianne and Isabelle are two completely different women with vastly different reactions to the Nazi occupation, but I found that I could not judge either woman. Isabelle is young and impetuous, and her youthful foolishness can easily be mistaken for bravery. She rushes headlong into joining the French resistance without really considering what it could mean for herself and her family if she is ever caught. When Allied airmen start becoming stranded in France, she has the idea of helping them escape France by leading them over the Pyrenees Mountains into Spain, and as the “Nightingale” she becomes a figure hunted by the Nazis. On the other hand, Vianne does not consider herself a strong person or brave, so she accepts the Nazi occupation for what it is so long as nothing bad happens to her daughter. Isabelle scorns Vianne for her politeness towards the Nazis, and it does not help Vianne’s reputation in town that the Nazi billeting at her house is handsome and does not seem to be that bad of a person, but I think it is too easy to judge a person who does not react to the same situation the way you want them to. That is what I was thinking about as I read this novel. What would I have done if I lived in France during the war, if my home was invaded by the enemy? Do I think that Isabelle’s resistance is the only right response to occupation? Or would I take the path of least resistance and keep my head down like Vianne, knowing it is more likely to help me survive the war? I have been fortunate enough to have never lived in a war zone, so I have no idea what I would do. The thing about war, though, is that it changes people, and both Vianne and Isabelle find themselves becoming different people as the war progresses, which helps them to understand each other better.

I have read many novels set during WWII, but I have not read much from the perspective of people whose countries were occupied by the German army. Hannah has done an amazing job of recreating the Nazi occupation of France in The Nightingale. The deprivation and starvation ordinary French citizens experienced while the Nazis took all their food and ransacked their homes is harrowing to read about. It is amazing that anyone survived the war with how little food they had to eat, especially through the cold winters. The French government, for what it was at the time, also played a role in the deportation of French citizens of Jewish ancestry to concentration camps, so the horrors of the genocide of Jewish people, homosexuals, disabled people, political prisoners and other “undesirables” is also featured in this novel. Amazingly, the character of Isabelle is inspired by an actual French woman who helped airmen escape over the Pyrenees mountains. The Nightingale is a stellar piece of historical fiction and for me, a surprisingly affecting novel. I highly recommend reading it.