The Nightingale

The Nightingale begins in 1939, on the eve of war, as Antoine Mauriac and his neighbor Marc de Champlain, prepare to say good bye to their wives, Vianne and Rachel (best friends since childhood), and their daughters, Sophie and Sarah (a second generation of best friends), and head to the front. None of them believes war truly awaits, but as they and the rest of Carriveau's residents soon discover, await it does.

One person who understand war with Germany is Vianne's father, Julien, who returned from the last one a broken, bitter man. Despite his younger daughter's pleas to remain with him, he packs Isabelle off to Carriveau to live with Vianne and Sophie, much to the women's dismay. While Vianne pines for Antoine and struggles to face the war without him, Isabelle is determined to fight, seeking out the Resistance and escalating her role.

Overall, The Nightingale is a wonderful read. Kristin Hannah has created multi-faceted characters who grapple with the black of collaboration and the white of resistance and all of the shades of gray in between. Their choices, too often, are imperfect, both because they are human and because war has removed the luxury of good choices from their lives.

My only quibble with The Nightingale is not even a quibble with the book, per se. It is that The Nightingale is one in a long line of novels set in wartime France whose protagonists and, the majority of characters, are actively involved in the Resistance. (All the Light We Cannot See and The Paris Architect are other examples of this style.) The truth, though, is much more complicated: ultimately, very few Frenchmen (and women) were involved in the Resistance; recent numbers suggest there were 10,000 active members of the Resistance in 1942. By 1945 the number had grown to roughly 200,000, still a very small segment out of a population of 40 million. Authors want to create characters whom readers like, no doubt, but taken collectively, these works simply fuel the (false) belief that all good Frenchmen actively resisted the occupation.