Scan barcode
A review by brandonpytel
The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
4.0
This isn’t usually a book I would read, but it was strongly recommended by a friend, and it didn’t seem too much of a commitment, so I went for it. About 50 pages in, I was a little skeptical. It’s not that the subject matter isn’t interesting — a book set in France during the outbreak of WWII is as interesting as it gets — but it definitely had a best seller vibe that trended toward popular fiction and away from (and how can I say this without sounding like a snob?) literary.
Love stories are hard to write without defaulting toward cliché, but Hannah’s dialogue is sometimes cringy and her themes aren’t necessarily subtle: “Why was it so easy for men in the world to do as they wanted and so difficult for women?” That and the cliches seemed to muddle what could’ve been a richer relationship between Vianne, our protagonist, and her husband, Antione.
But what it lacked in literary flourishes, it made up in a fast-moving plot. As the war unfolds around them, Vianne and her more rebellious sister Isabelle try to both survive and contribute — Isabelle who dons the name Nightingale, becoming entrenched in an underground liberation movement that transports downed Ally airmen; and Vianne who raises Sophie and eventually several Jewish children, despite Nazis lodging in her home.
Ultimately a book about memory and past, love and loss, the fast-pace plot keeps you invested in the book while forgiving some of its more cliché approaches to emotions. And when Antione does return, Hannah seems to fall into a more natural description of human connections, one that is tragic and real than the earlier parts of the book: “In the months since Antione’s return, they were placating at love and both of them knew it.”
What started as a journey of endurance, ends as a tale of survival, with Isabelle being sent to a concentration camp, Vianne suffering near-starvation, amid her efforts to save Jewish children. The horrors start piling up, and death, violence, and cruelty seeps through each page, in a way that was only surface level earlier on.
The book becomes one of memory, bookended by an older Vianne, recounting her sister’s heroism and her own struggles: “She was crying for all of it at last — for the pain and loss and fear and anger, for the war and what it had done to her and to all of them, for the knowledge of evil she could never shake, for the horror of where she’d been and what she’d done to survive… ‘I have spent a lifetime running from it, trying to forget, but now I see what a waste it all was.’”
The final 50 pages or so is what bumped this up a star, from another bestseller to a book that cuts through emotions, telling the story of two innocent sisters that have gone through World War II and all its horrors.
Love stories are hard to write without defaulting toward cliché, but Hannah’s dialogue is sometimes cringy and her themes aren’t necessarily subtle: “Why was it so easy for men in the world to do as they wanted and so difficult for women?” That and the cliches seemed to muddle what could’ve been a richer relationship between Vianne, our protagonist, and her husband, Antione.
But what it lacked in literary flourishes, it made up in a fast-moving plot. As the war unfolds around them, Vianne and her more rebellious sister Isabelle try to both survive and contribute — Isabelle who dons the name Nightingale, becoming entrenched in an underground liberation movement that transports downed Ally airmen; and Vianne who raises Sophie and eventually several Jewish children, despite Nazis lodging in her home.
Ultimately a book about memory and past, love and loss, the fast-pace plot keeps you invested in the book while forgiving some of its more cliché approaches to emotions. And when Antione does return, Hannah seems to fall into a more natural description of human connections, one that is tragic and real than the earlier parts of the book: “In the months since Antione’s return, they were placating at love and both of them knew it.”
What started as a journey of endurance, ends as a tale of survival, with Isabelle being sent to a concentration camp, Vianne suffering near-starvation, amid her efforts to save Jewish children. The horrors start piling up, and death, violence, and cruelty seeps through each page, in a way that was only surface level earlier on.
The book becomes one of memory, bookended by an older Vianne, recounting her sister’s heroism and her own struggles: “She was crying for all of it at last — for the pain and loss and fear and anger, for the war and what it had done to her and to all of them, for the knowledge of evil she could never shake, for the horror of where she’d been and what she’d done to survive… ‘I have spent a lifetime running from it, trying to forget, but now I see what a waste it all was.’”
The final 50 pages or so is what bumped this up a star, from another bestseller to a book that cuts through emotions, telling the story of two innocent sisters that have gone through World War II and all its horrors.