Let's Bust a Recap : The Nightingale

The Nightingale was not on my list for 2025, but it's been sitting on my shelf for years. I've lost count of the people in my real life who have personally recommended this book to me, not to mention the hordes on the internet who have raved about it since it came out. It's been a contender for my book list for the last three years at least, but it's never quite made the final cut. And then at the end of February, I happened to catch one of my Goodreads friends unboxing her copy of the brand new 10th anniversary edition on one of her social media accounts. 

What?! The Nightingale is already ten years old? That can't be! But sure enough, a quick Google search revealed to me that this internationally best-selling book was published in February of 2015 and after doing a little recall of my own, I've had a copy sitting on my shelf for at least seven of those ten years. I did not think twice: I went straight to my shelf, pulled down my copy, and sat down to start reading. I must have had at least eight other books in progress, but I was immediately swept away into WWII occupied France.

"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."

This is the opening line of Kristin Hannah's powerful novel of two sisters and the very different choices they make during the course of Word War II. Vianne, married with a small daughter, is living a quiet, comfortable life in a small village before her husband is conscripted and eventually taken as a prisoner of war. Her younger sister Isabelle has been in and out of finishing schools, and as the Germans occupy France, her father sends her to Vianne in the country, but Isabelle is hungry to take an active role in the resistance movement. Fiery Isabelle can't understand her sister's quiet seeming acceptance of their new reality, especially when a German officer is billeted in Vianne's home. As the sisters' paths diverge, we follow each of them along their impossible journeys to cope with the war and watch them grapple with how to make sense of and live with integrity in the midst of such inconceivable evil. While their decisions take them in very different directions, both display heroic bravery in the heartbreaking circumstances they find themselves in.

And wow. What a story. I couldn't put The Nightingale down, and neither could my mom, and then neither could my dad. Hannah based the Isabelle character on a Belgian woman named Andrée de Jongh and the Vianne character on countless French women who put themselves in harm's way to save others. Her thorough research lent an authenticity to her story that broke my heart several times over. My parents and I discussed at length the impossible situations people found themselves in during the war and how they coped with it all. It boggles my mind to this day the depravity that humankind is capable of and how so many people during the war couldn't believe the things that were happening were even possible, much less that those things would happen to them. 

The content of this story is hard to stomach—at one point I was actually hyperventilating I was so upset, and my dad called me after he finished admitting that it made him cry—but the book is so well-written and the story so compelling that it isn't any wonder The Nightingale turned Kristin Hannah into a household name despite the fact she's been putting out a new novel every year or two since 1991. I fully understand why my friends have all been pestering me to read her work. As it happens, I've collected four of her other books since the massive success of The Nightingale, but The Nightingale is the first I've read. Upon finishing the book, my mom immediately borrowed Winter Garden and read that one too. 

After we had all finished it, I asked my parents which they would choose if they had to recommend either The Nightingale or All the Light We Cannot See (another novel set in occupied France during WWII). My mom couldn't decide, but my dad immediately said The Nightingale. Safe to say, we all would recommend both of these books without question. As the saying goes, "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" and books like these help us remember. 

Have you read any of Kristin Hannah's books? Which one should I read next?