The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

Kristin Hannah’s enthralling novel The Nightingale explores the impact of the German occupation of France in WWII on the lives of two sisters, Vianne and Isabelle Rossignol. The book opens with Vianne, now an elderly woman living in Oregon, viewing artifacts from her life during WWII, a life that she never shared with her surgeon son because it would cause them both grief and despair. 

Hannah then transports the reader to 1939 and the story of how each sister responded to the escalating tensions in France. Vianne, the older sister, struggles with her rambunctious, bold, and brash younger sister who suffers from grief over their mother’s death and the pain of their father’s abandonment. Hannah fully captures the complexity of the sisters’ relationship. As the Nazis begin their occupation of France each sister responds to the ensuing horror differently, but both heroically. Though Vianne believes her sister leaves their small village in the Loire Valley to pursue a love affair, Isabelle actually joins the Resistance and smuggles downed pilots from France over the Pyrenees into Spain. Isabelle’s code name is The Nightingale.

Vianne’s courage is just as compelling. While Vianne’s husband is off fighting the Germans in Russia, Vianne wrestles with the agonizing choice of whether to abandon the family farmhouse when the local Nazi commandant takes over a room in her home. She decides to stay in this sadistic situation. When the Jews in the village are being rounded up, her best friend Rachel begs Vianne to save her son Ari. Vianne does so at great risk and raises Ari as her own. Saving Ari gives Vianne the courage to participate in a clandestine effort to help other Jewish children escape extermination. 

The novel depicts the methodical and incremental cruelty enacted by the Nazis in French towns. Jewish citizens are forced to accept one humiliating edict after another, each time hoping that that it will be the last. Initially, Jews are only able to stand in the food lines after all the non-Jews. Then they are prohibited from working certain jobs and, before long, all Jews in Vianne’s village have been rounded up and put on trains to the concentration camps. Though some villagers attempt to defend their Jewish neighbors, the Nazi’s brutality affects every person. It is a horror show. 

The end of the novel is quite satisfying as Vianne does get her wish. I won’t reveal the specifics, but Vianne’s son finally learns about his mother’s prior life. She says, “I have spent a lifetime running from it, trying to forget, but now I see what a waste that it was.” Kristin Hannah's ambitious story explores family dynamics, the horrors of the Holocaust, the brutality of the Nazi occupation, the bravery of some people and the cowardice of others, the important and often-unacknowledged role of women in wartime, and the way extraordinary circumstances reveal a person’s moral character. As Vianne states at the end of the book, “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.”