Nicole Reads: The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

This book is brought to you by my mother-in-law, Joy! She shipped her copy all the way down to California for me to enjoy, along with some treats for my husband and I. Isn't she sweet? When we went back to WA for a couple of weeks last month, I vowed I'd finish this big ol' read and return it to her. I failed at that first part, but couldn't justify bringing it back to CA just for the last ~150 pages. Lucky for me, the library has some copies, and one was available for me after just a couple weeks.

Quick description: sisters Vianne and Isabelle are living in a French village at the start of WWII. Vianne is reserved and reasonable, a schoolteacher and mother whose husband is fighting in the war. Isabelle is young and impulsive; having run away from finishing school for the last time, she takes shelter with her strait-laced older sister. The war progresses and their lives diverge and mutate in unimaginable ways. Vianne's husband is taken as a prisoner of war, and a Nazi officer billets in her home. Isabelle joins a resistance group in Paris and takes on increasingly risky operations to fight German forces.

This is a story of the ways women fought in the war, and explores sisterhood and all the friendship and conflict that comes with it as well. It's also about the secrets we keep and the lies we tell to survive, not just in the present moment, but throughout our lives.

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I'll be honest, part of the reason it took me so long to finish this book is because it took me a long time to start it. It's a slow start, and I felt a little lost at first with so many characters being introduced and displaced in the confusion of war. That may have been intentional, to mimic the disorienting and rapid change of the times. Unfortunately for me, it kind of hindered my ability to get into the story. I'd read maybe 10-15 pages at a time, not touch the book for days, come back confused, repeat. I'll let my short attention span take the blame for that bit. Even so, I found that things picked up about 120 pages in, and from then on I was all in. So if you plan on reading this, be better than I was and really devote yourself to getting through that first chunk.

I'm not big on historical fiction. Mostly I like memoirs, contemporary fiction, short stories, or the classics. It's a hard line to walk between having authentic and accurate details and compelling story-telling. I tend to get annoyed by seemingly forced references or italicized jargon sprinkled into conversation. Sometimes I think authors try a bit too hard to relate to current events, or to give us a dry history lesson, or to prove to us that they did their research. All of that is well and good, and I appreciate all the work that goes into that; however, it's the overt nature of those attempts that ends up distracting from the story itself.

All that said, I really feel that this book did a great job at incorporating real-world inspiration and providing historical context, while still telling a lovely story that resonates in the present day. Kristin Hannah is a gifted writer, and in "The Nightingale" you can tell how much research and work she put into it, but she presents it in an easy and effortless way that doesn't take away from the reader's experience.