Michaela Swedberg

Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale, winner of the 2015 BookBrowse Fiction Award, is a heartbreaking story of two sisters caught up in the terror of Nazi occupied France throughout World War II. Exquisite in its presentation, style, and storyline, The Nightingale is a riveting book about humanity, strength, and, most importantly, love during a time of great fear and hatred. Kristin Hannah, winner of the 1996 National Reader’s Choice award, takes her audience on a heartbreaking journey through World Ware II in the perspective of the women of France, vividly detailing the struggles of the their war away from the frontlines of the battlefields.

The story of The Nightingale begins in 1995 and focuses on an older woman who is moving out of her house and into a retirement home. Her son helps her pack and it becomes evident that the woman’s state of health is quickly declining due to cancer. As she packs, she finds pieces of memorabilia from her life and she begins to think about the events of her past, which takes the audience all the way back to 1939 in France.

The story told in the flash backs focuses largely on the Rossignal sisters: the older sister Vianne, the rule follower, and the younger Isabelle, the headstrong rebel. Their father, changed by the Great War (World War I) had abandoned them at a young age after their mother passed away and ever since then a rift had formed between the two sisters. The story first focuses on Vianne, who eventually marries her childhood sweetheart, Antoine, and gives birth to a daughter, Sophie. Her ideal life in the country with her small family is peaceful and happy until Antoine is mobilized and sent to the frontline when France declares war on Nazi Germany. The first few months of the war pass without word from her husband and her anxiety only grows when France surrenders to the Nazi forces, which quickly invade France and begin to run the country. Vianne and Sophie’s lives are changed again when a young Nazi officer, Captain Beck, is ordered to billet in their home, making it his own.

The story then focuses on Isabelle, a young woman of nineteen years, who has been kicked out of an impressive number of finishing schools. Her outspoken nature gets her into trouble more often than not and she eventually travels to Paris where her father resides. He immediately sends her away and she reluctantly travels to her sister’s home in the small country town of Carriveau. Along the way, she meets Gäetan, a handsome young rogue with a mischievous personality and she falls in love with him quickly. However, she also experiences the brutality of the German military for the first time during a massacre of Parisian refugees and it fuels her hatred for the enemy.

When France surrenders, Isabelle has arrived at Vianne’s home and she is livid that the Nazis have occupied her country. She begins to deliver French resistance propaganda to the houses in the village and finally runs away to Paris in order to further her involvement in the movement. She becomes the Nightingale, a French spy wanted by the Nazis for sneaking downed Ally airmen across the Pyrenees Mountains into Spain in order to return them to their home countries.

Meanwhile, Vianne struggles to deal with the Nazis occupying her hometown, eventually having to take in her best friend’s son, Ari. His mother was deported for being a foreign Jew and his sister was killed in a German massacre, forcing Vianne to take him in, change his identity, and care for another child. A new officer, Von Richter, is now billeting in her home and he abuses and rapes her often. Despite the extremely dangerous situation of her home life, Vianne begins to hide and rescue Jewish children at the nearby convent, procuring false identities for them before they are found.

Throughout the war, Vianne and Isabelle meet occasionally but they are never together for long. They find that love does not come easily to them anymore and in all of the violence, hatred, and poverty they spiral towards emotional catatonia, struggling to make sense of their lives. The two women fight the war in their own way and eventually come into themselves, a theme encapsulated in the very first paragraph, “In love we find out who we want to be; in war we find out who we are.” Vianne and Isabelle, caught up in a man’s world, also find that women must fight in different ways.

Kristin Hannah’s purpose in writing The Nightingale was to detail the struggles of the women’s war in France and across Europe during World War II. The book celebrates the strength and power of women during such difficult periods of history and puts a face on their part of the battlefield. While the men were out on the frontlines or imprisoned in foreign countries, their wives and children faced the hardships of malnutrition, loneliness, and terror in their own homes everyday as the war dragged on. They were taken into the streets and shot on sight, raped and abused by Nazi soldiers or officers, forced to give up their friends and family members, and beaten physically and emotionally into submission by their enemies on their own turf. The Nightingale puts France’s personal fight to survive into perspective and shows the incredible amount of suffering its citizens experienced during the war.

The style of Kristin’s writing is riveting and vivid with detail. Her evocative style brings the scenes to life and makes the reader feel almost a part of the story. The realistic descriptions bring out the peace of the countryside in the first chapter, the terror of being caught during Isabelle’s close calls, and the complete devastation that concentration camps brought down on their prisoners. The characters become incredibly important to the audience and they don’t feel forced into the story so empathizing with them is easy. Their humanity is so evident throughout the storyline that the reader has no choice but to fall in love with each and every one of them.

The Nightingale is an amazing story full of vivid detail, themes of love and hatred, and it brings its readers to their knees with its despairingly beautiful story. The tragic situation of France during the early 1940’s comes to life in this wonderful novel with heart wrenching descriptions and emotions. Kristin Hannah makes her audience face the realities of World War II and I highly recommend it although it is guaranteed to make any audience shed a few tears. It is, without a doubt, one of the best novels of 2015.