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The Nightingale by Sam Lee review – a heartfelt love letter to the songbird

The folk singer offers a lyrical homage to the endangered migrant bird whose uniquely beautiful song he has been communing with up close for years

A few years ago, a group of friends and I followed Barbara Dickson, the Scottish pop star turned folk singer, into a wood deep in the green heart of Kent. We were there as part of Singing With Nightingales , an immersive experience run by another folk singer, Sam Lee . It was night and we had no torches. We came to a small clearing where we sat, silent, until from far off, then closer, and then so close that the sound seemed to be the voice of the very trees around us, a nightingale sang. After listening to its otherworldly carolling for a while, Lee and Dickson took turns singing back to the nightingale, old shanties and folk songs, praising the beauty of its voice, recognising the importance of its role in that bright space where culture and nature meet.

Now Lee, a tousle-haired former Mercury prize nominee (for his 2012 debut album, Ground of Its Own ), has turned from song to prose with The Nightingale: Notes on a Songbird , a beautiful, lyrical, heartfelt book about the songbird. Part nature writing, part memoir, part miscellany, every page of this book benefits from the incredible intimacy that Lee has built up with the bird over the years of his “undoubtedly romantic and whimsical” pilgrimages to listen to, and sing back to, nightingales.

At a time when it feels as if every week brings the latest H Is for Hawk wannabe to the overstuffed natural history sections of our bookshops, nature writers need to be able to call upon the authority of lived experience to bring authenticity to their work. Lee has devoted almost a decade to the nightingale, finding new ways of engaging with this great harbinger of spring, of representing it in song and in words. The Nightingale is buoyed along on the tide of Lee’s enthusiasm, and if the prose is occasionally asked to carry a little more emotion than it can bear, or if the language deepens to a twilight shade of purple, it is not only forgivable, it’s almost the point. As Lee points out, nightingales are so gaudily extravagant in their singing, so strangely able to utter “every possible character, tone and temperature imaginable”, that any attempt to describe their song in words is doomed to fail.

This might have been a melancholy book. The British population of nightingales has declined from hundreds of thousands in the 1960s to the 5,000 or so left now. The causes of this diminution are numerous, from the climate crisis and industrialised agriculture, to the explosion of muntjac deer numbers in the UK, to changes in farming practices in the birds’ African wintering grounds. Lee is clear that without coordinated action, “in my lifetime I will see these birds extinguished from our land”. His Singing With Nightingales project provides a model for how we might help the bird stage a recovery, by winding it firmly back into our national cultural identity.

Lee ends by imagining that, in the not-too-distant future, every year, when “spring is firmly stirring from its winter sleep”, families might get together to “do a Nightingaler” – seeking out the birds in the woods in May. There, they would stop and bask in the unique beauty of the nightingale’s song, and reflect upon how wonderful it is to “hear this bird again after a long, cold winter”. From this recognition, this intense noticing, a movement to conserve the birds might grow. Certainly my appreciation of however many nightingalers are left to me will be for ever heightened by the time I’ve spent with this generous, sensitive book about our most glorious songbird.

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THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring  passeurs : people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the  Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s ( I Found You , 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Pub Date: April 24, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | SUSPENSE

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THE TATTOOIST OF AUSCHWITZ

by Heather Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 4, 2018

The writing is merely serviceable, and one can’t help but wish the author had found a way to present her material as...

An unlikely love story set amid the horrors of a Nazi death camp.

Based on real people and events, this debut novel follows Lale Sokolov, a young Slovakian Jew sent to Auschwitz in 1942. There, he assumes the heinous task of tattooing incoming Jewish prisoners with the dehumanizing numbers their SS captors use to identify them. When the Tätowierer, as he is called, meets fellow prisoner Gita Furman, 17, he is immediately smitten. Eventually, the attraction becomes mutual. Lale proves himself an operator, at once cagey and courageous: As the Tätowi erer, he is granted special privileges and manages to smuggle food to starving prisoners. Through female prisoners who catalog the belongings confiscated from fellow inmates, Lale gains access to jewels, which he trades to a pair of local villagers for chocolate, medicine, and other items. Meanwhile, despite overwhelming odds, Lale and Gita are able to meet privately from time to time and become lovers. In 1944, just ahead of the arrival of Russian troops, Lale and Gita separately leave the concentration camp and experience harrowingly close calls. Suffice it to say they both survive. To her credit, the author doesn’t flinch from describing the depravity of the SS in Auschwitz and the unimaginable suffering of their victims—no gauzy evasions here, as in Boy in the Striped Pajamas . She also manages to raise, if not really explore, some trickier issues—the guilt of those Jews, like the tattooist, who survived by doing the Nazis’ bidding, in a sense betraying their fellow Jews; and the complicity of those non-Jews, like the Slovaks in Lale’s hometown, who failed to come to the aid of their beleaguered countrymen.

Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-06-279715-5

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018

RELIGIOUS FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Heather Morris

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BookBrowse Reviews The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

Summary  |  Excerpt  |  Reading Guide  |  Reviews  |  Beyond the book  |  Read-Alikes  |  Genres & Themes  |  Author Bio

The Nightingale

by Kristin Hannah

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• Historical Fiction
• 1940s & '50s
• Generational Sagas
• Dealing with Loss
• Adult-YA Crossover Fiction
• Jewish Authors
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• War Related
• Top 20 Best Books of 2015

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The Nightingale captures the epic panorama of WWII and illuminates an intimate part of history seldom seen: the women's war.

Winner of the 2015 BookBrowse Fiction Award BookBrowse readers were challenged and moved by Kristin Hannah's unique World War II novel, The Nightingale . Each and every one of our member reviewers rated it 4 or a 5 stars. What makes the story of two sisters in Occupied France so different from other World War II novels? Why did our reviewers feel so connected to it? Kristin Hannah has reached a new level with this strong and enduring cast of characters and themes. I would challenge anyone to read The Nightingale and not feel deeply moved by its message. I felt proud of these women, struggling to survive in times of war and wondered what I would do to save my family, my freedoms and all that I hold dear. Beyond that question looms another: "Do I have that deep core of bravery so desperately needed in the darkest of hours?" Relevant today and always, this story will stay with me a long time. It has my strongest recommendation (Virginia W). The Nightingale is easily the best book I have read in a very long time. I became a woman in occupied France and steeled myself as each new horrible circumstance confronted me (Nancy L). This is a story of love and sacrifice during the horror of the German occupation of France. It is a story of love - particular of family - and how sad and beautiful it can be (Marjorie W). This is a very special book! (Cam G) Our readers felt that Kristin Hannah's focus on women during World War II was unique: The Nightingale is about two sisters who lived in France during World War II, and weaves back and forth through time, with most of the emphasis in the '40s during the war. I have read many World War II books but few that place special emphasis on the heroism and courage of women fighting the war in their own ways (Colleen L). Kristin Hannah is known for her contemporary fiction so I was blown away by this meticulously researched work of historical fiction set in France during WWII. It speaks to the strengths of women who were willing to put their lives on the line because it was the right thing to do (Lisa G). Hold the phone, cancel appointments and have some tissues handy for a well-researched novel of the very disturbing years of Nazi occupied France. It is not only about the occupation, but about the brave women who risked their lives and lives of their families to save strangers (Kathy G). And her take on the Holocaust novel genre is unique as well: I was skeptical that The Nightingale was yet another novel about the Holocaust, but do yourself a favor and read this one. The characters are so richly developed that the reader can't help but keep turning the pages! (Diane D) A wonderfully told story, totally engaging - and the saddest part is that even if it is fiction, we know too well the awful truth of what happened, and that the author has embedded that truth in this novel (Arden A). Hannah was particularly good at introducing lesser known historical events from World War II: the exodus from Paris, the Vichy collaboration with the Nazi's, the betrayal of the Parisians by the French Police, the events at the Velodrome d'Hiver (see " beyond the book "), retaliation against French resistance, and the dangers of the Pyrenees escape routes (Sherilyn R). Our readers found the story to be relevant to today: In these days of beheadings and innocents caught up in war zones, this is an essential book to read. Kristen Hannah's The Nightingale transcends the pages of historical fiction and poses the question, "When evil is everywhere around you, what would you do?" (Gwen C) A well-written book that helps us remember this period of history and all the extremes people went through. It is important to remember the contributions of the women of that time. Reflecting on my life makes me realize how much I have taken for granted (Sandra C). A thank you to Kristin Hannah for this awesome book written not a moment too soon - as so few people who will recognize the truth in it are left. May this story keep their experiences alive even longer. Memories matter. Love lasts. We remain. What a brilliant message (Lesley F). And they wholeheartedly recommend The Nightingale : I would heartily recommend this novel to anyone who loves historical fiction. It is well-researched and presents a solid look at the French Resistance (Colleen L). I recommend this book to lovers of historical fiction and to others who enjoy a book that promises to captivate! (Frances B) I have read many books about World War II - fiction and non-fiction - but never anything like this. The sense of place, the relationships between the women, their children and the German soldiers in the town make this a story you will remember for a long time. I recommend it for a different perspective on the toll of war (Eve A). I recommend The Nightingale if you like sister stories, France, romance and history (Barbara Z). Everyone – everyone – needs to read this book, to get into the parts of the characters, and try to feel just an iota of what they felt during this time in their lives (Annie P).

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Review: The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

I stayed up late to finish The Nightingale  by Kristin Hannah. I couldn’t put the book down until I knew the ending and now I can’t stop thinking about this phenomenal book. I’m in awe of the range of Kristin Hannah’s storytelling with her vivid descriptions. This is a powerful, beautiful and heartbreaking read.

Sometimes when I read fiction, I remind myself that whatever tragedy happens in the book, it’s still fiction. But while  The Nightingale is a fictional description, it’s still based on a very real, horrible war. And Kristin Hannah doesn’t shy away from descriptions of the hellish war and its devastating impact.

The story revolves around two sisters who are vastly different: Vianne and Isabelle. They are estranged from each other and both are on very divergent paths. Vianne is a loving wife and mother who works as a school teacher and always follows the rules. Isabelle is a rebellious eighteen-year-old who feels she must join the French resistance against the Germans. While they’re both as different as can be, they both take their own active role in resisting the Nazis.

Let’s take a closer look at each sister:

Isabelle is steadfast in her beliefs and she would not yield for anyone. She’s also dealing with her internal struggle of abandonment, first by her father who left the girls behind after their mother died and then with Vianne who found stability with her husband and sent Isabelle away to boarding school.

Isabelle is a beautiful, young woman, which means that men underestimate her time and time again. In fact, when she takes on the biggest risk of her life — guiding airman out of France — she’s able to use her gender and looks to her advantage. No one expects a young woman to actually become a resistance fighter. People doubt a women’s ability to take on a daring mission, which in turns, allows Isabelle to evade any suspicion. She adopts the codename the nightingale and the enemies assume the codename is for a man.

Isabelle is dynamic, courageous and so strong and I rooted for her every step of the way. And in fact, Hannah says that she based Isabelle on a real person: a 19-year-old Belgium woman who help create an escape route out of Nazi-occupied France. Incredible.

While Isabelle’s story, for the most part, is an epic adventure, Vianne’s is consistent terror. After the capture of her husband, Nazis take over her town. Her number one priority is protecting her daughter Sophie at all costs.

When a Nazi officer moves into her home (Captain Beck), I feared what was going to happen to her. However, he is respectful to her and their relationship took a different turn than I expected, almost romantic at times. She lives passively with him, even when he forces her to reveal the names of Jewish and Communist teachers at her school, which includes her best friend next door.

I was frustrated with Vianne’s complicity but also felt for her as she was in an impossible situation. Vianne does find her inner strength (literally) and eventually takes the big role of forging false identity papers for Jewish children so they can be kept safe. Vianne found her inner hero after all but she had to go through some absolute horrors to achieve it.

Society expectations (and misperceptions) of women is a big theme of the novel. Other major themes include the bond and messiness of sisterhood, love and sacrifice, the resilience of the human nature and the fragility of life. I question character choices, I cheered when they succeeded, I felt devastated when they didn’t — I grew attached to these characters.

Is The Nightingale a good book club book? Absolutely. 

There is so much to dissect with this novel. I’ll have my book club questions up soon and you might need two sessions dedicated to this one.

The Nightingale is an important read so make sure and add this to your TBR list.

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The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

Title: The Nightingale

Author: Kristin Hannah

Publisher: St. Martin’s Press

Genre: Historical Fiction, World War II

First Publication: 2015

Language:  English

Major Characters: Vianne (Rossignol) Mauriac, Isabelle Rossignol, Julien Rossignol, Wolfgang Beck, Sturmbannführer Von Richter, Gaëtan Dubois, Rachel de Champlain, Sophie Mauriac, Ariel (Ari) de Champlain, Antoine Mauriac

Theme: The changing nature of love in wartime; ways of expressing (or failing to express) love; loyalty; gender inequality and cultural expectations; complicity with evil; the humanity of enemies; what makes a life worth living

Setting: Carriveau, France; Paris, France; Oregon, USA; various French towns; Spain; Germany

Narrator:  Third Person from  Vianne’s and Isabelle’s point of view

Book Summary: The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

FRANCE, 1939

In the quiet village of Carriveau, Vianne Mauriac says goodbye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front. She doesn’t believe that the Nazis will invade France…but invade they do, in droves of marching soldiers, in caravans of trucks and tanks, in planes that fill the skies and drop bombs upon the innocent. When a German captain requisitions Vianne’s home, she and her daughter must live with the enemy or lose everything. Without food or money or hope, as danger escalates all around them, she is forced to make one impossible choice after another to keep her family alive.

Vianne’s sister, Isabelle, is a rebellious eighteen-year-old girl, searching for purpose with all the reckless passion of youth. While thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she meets Gäetan, a partisan who believes the French can fight the Nazis from within France, and she falls in love as only the young can…completely. But when he betrays her, Isabelle joins the Resistance and never looks back, risking her life time and again to save others.

With courage, grace and powerful insight, bestselling author Kristin Hannah captures the epic panorama of WWII and illuminates an intimate part of history seldom seen: the women’s war. The Nightingale tells the stories of two sisters, separated by years and experience, by ideals, passion and circumstance, each embarking on her own dangerous path toward survival, love, and freedom in German-occupied, war-torn France–a heartbreakingly beautiful novel that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the durability of women. It is a novel for everyone, a novel for a lifetime.

Book Review: The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah is a historical fiction, set in German-occupied France during WWII . Spanning the years of the war, this riveting story follows two sisters, Vianne and Isabelle, as they struggle to survive and persevere through the Nazi invasion. Their parallel stories are as different as their personalities, but are just as suspenseful, complicated, and emotional. As the reader, you get to see the war that was taking place on the home front from each sister’s unique vantage point. It is a heart wrenching, beautiful and tragic story.

As the older sister, Vianne feels responsible for keeping her younger sister, Isabelle, safe. When the occupation begins, Isabelle is sent to stay with Vianne in the country, being cast out of Paris by her father. Vianne’s husband, Antoine, has been called to report to the Army, leaving Vianne and their young daughter, Sophie, behind. As the Germans invade Paris, Isabelle begins the trek to her sister’s home, witnessing the atrocities committed by the invading troops firsthand.

“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.”

By the time that Isabelle arrives on Vianne’s doorstep, she is determined to join the resistance and make a difference. Young and impulsive, Vianne is certain that her younger sister will get herself, if not all of them, killed. Their relationship is tenuous, at best, and Vianne struggles to get through to her strong-minded sibling.

Vianne is naive, having not witnessed the actions of the invading Nazis, as her sister had. She believes that if they keep their heads down and don’t draw attention to themselves, they’ll be okay. She follows the rules and tries to reign in Isabelle’s defiant behaviors before it is too late.

However, as time passes and the occupation grows increasingly difficult, the sisters go their separate ways. Each of them sets out on a different course, trying to survive the best way they know how. Despite the distance between them, each sister ends up fighting the Nazi invasion in different ways. The bold and daring Isabelle actively assists allied airmen in their escapes, while the mild-mannered Vianne begins helping hide away Jewish children.

“Men tell stories. Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war, and when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started our lives over.”

While there was romance in The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah, it took a back stage to the war story. However, this gripping story held my attention from start to finish. This is a beautifully written, inspiring story. I loved every minute of it!

Although The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah is considered fiction, it is firmly planted in well-researched truth. Isabelle’s character is based on the late Andrée de Jongh (1916-2007) , an amazing woman who repeatedly risked her life helping British and American servicemen escape on foot from Nazi-occupied Belgium and France.

Sadly, Andrée de Jongh is only one of the many quiet heroes that our future generations will likely never know if not for inspired authors like Kristin Hannah.

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah offers a story of women surviving in unthinkable circumstances – the underestimated gender finding a way to take action. It shows readers that at times protectiveness requires dangerous risks, fear often proceeds acts of bravery, and those who may appear weak can indeed possess incredible strength. I didn’t want this book to end because it’s not just about the ravages of war, it’s also about love, life, and rebellious courage.

“Some stories don’t have happy endings. Even love stories. Maybe especially love stories.”

These women, who had everything (and everyone) to lose, put it all on the line to help others. I have been spared from the direct horrors of war, but I asked the same question that Ms. Hannah herself asked in an interview about her book,  “I found myself consumed with a single, overwhelming question, as relevant today as it was seventy years ago: When would I, as a wife and mother, risk my life — and more important, my child’s life — to save a stranger? ”

Most of us wouldn’t. But which is worst: The fear of the risk or the fear of letting children grow up in a world where good people do nothing to stop evil?

The author’s writing skills are powerful as she captures the heart-breaking devastation that the Nazis inflicted onto their community. It was so hard to read about the Jewish women and children rounded up and deported. With a high dose of adrenaline, fear, and courage and told beautifully and respectful, The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah is a must read for anyone who likes Historical fiction books.

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Book review: The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

• October 24, 2018
• Fleur Morrison
• Book Reviews

I have read a lot about World War II, from brutality of the concentration camps in The Tattooist of Auschwitz to the ‘what ifs’ of Life After Life and the preservation of a French treasure in All the Light We Cannot See . Despite their common theme, somehow each writer reveals a different side of the war. So it is with Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale .

The story takes place in France from the start of the World War II, in a household that has already felt the pain of one World War.

At first, as the reality of another war emerges, Vianne, whose father returned from World War I a different man to the one who left, is in denial that another war could be on the doorstep. But her husband, Antoine, is soon called to enlist. From then on, Vianne is fighting to protect her daughter – a mission that is in many ways impossible. The war reaches their farmhouse as German troops claim parts of France, leading to constant fear, food shortages and many disturbingly close encounters with the enemy.

At the same time, Vianne’s sister, Isabelle, refuses to stand aside and watch France ruined by the German forces, joining the resistance and putting herself, and even Vianne and her daughter, at risk.

The experience of the family in wartime France was fascinating and at times, heart breaking, as Hannah uncovers the great hardships the French faced during this war, and the constant threat from the German soldiers. It was a perspective that I had not seen until The Nightingale . I never realised how much France itself was a battleground on an everyday level.

It is hard to imagine a book about World War II not being a story of deep sadness and loss, and this is certainly the case with The Nightingale . No characters emerge from the experience unchanged, or unharmed. Some of the losses were enough to make me cry into the pages, which is a rare sign of the power of a book. I enjoyed the combination of the historical and the personal that can be found in many books about the world wars.

However, The Nightingale was also a book of hope, and a celebration of the role that women played in the war, doing all that they could to keep their families alive and fighting for their country. It is an important message and a reminder of the everyday horror of war, not just on the frontline, but for anyone caught in the wide shadow that the war cast.

The Nightingale is one of the best books on war that I have read for some time, among many worthwhile and moving books of the time.

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The Nightingale book review

Posted August 5, 2022 by Jordann @thebookbloglife in 3 star , book reviews / 0 Comments

In love we find out who we want to be.In war we find out who we are. FRANCE, 1939 In the quiet village of Carriveau, Vianne Mauriac says good-bye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front. She doesn’t believe that the Nazis will invade France…but invade they do, in droves of marching soldiers, in caravans of trucks and tanks, in planes that fill the skies and drop bombs upon the innocent. When a German captain requisitions Vianne’s home, she and her daughter must live with the enemy or lose everything. Without food or money or hope, as danger escalates all around them, she is forced to make one impossible choice after another to keep her family alive. Vianne’s sister, Isabelle, is a rebellious eighteen-year-old, searching for purpose with all the reckless passion of youth. While thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she meets Gaëtan, a partisan who believes the French can fight the Nazis from within France, and she falls in love as only the young can…completely. But when he betrays her, Isabelle joins the Resistance and never looks back, risking her life time and again to save others. With courage, grace and powerful insight, bestselling author Kristin Hannah captures the epic panorama of World War II and illuminates an intimate part of history seldom seen: the women’s war. The Nightingale tells the stories of two sisters, separated by years and experience, by ideals, passion and circumstance, each embarking on her own dangerous path toward survival, love, and freedom in German-occupied, war-torn France—a heartbreakingly beautiful novel that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the durability of women. It is a novel for everyone, a novel for a lifetime.

I have had this book on my list for such a long time and it took me a little while to get into. I’m still not convinced that it was worth the time. I have such mixed feelings about The Nightingale as a whole, part of me really appreciates the story and the characters. However I’m still not sure it was worth the time and effort it took to read it. There were definitely moments where it felt like a long slog to read. I think the pay off at the end didn’t make up for it unfortunately.

Characters in The Nightingale

The Nightingale follows two sisters, Vianne and Isabelle, who are trying to survive in occupied France during WWII. I really wanted to love the pair of them and see some kind of relationship or understanding grow. Which I thought was the point of the book. However there was so much going on around them that their relationship seems to get left behind. Plus other things seem to take precedent. I did enjoy how much back story we got. It didn’t feel as though their lives were only just beginning with the start of the war which can be an issue with other similar books.

By the ending the things I wanted to happen hadn’t and there were moments that were just skipped. Although what happens is supposed to be sad and heartbreaking and it could definitely be viewed that way, there wasn’t enough of a connection for me to actually sob. Which is what I expected to happen. I just think there was so much potential with all of the characters lost by having such a rushed ending. There could have been a lot more said and done if there had been more time.

The Bad Bits

I’ve touched on the fact that The Nightingale wasn’t the easiest book to get through. In fact it struggled to hold my attention and there were bits where I thought I was going to DNF. I had seen so much hype surrounding this book and I thought it was going to be an easy win for me. But actually I found that a lot of it was info dumps and dense writing. Nothing actually really happens throughout and although that can work if the characters hold the story together this one it fell flat. If there had been more time spent building a relateable character base the monotony wouldn’t have felt out of place.

The Good Bits in The Nightingale

The Nightingale did however fill a gap I had been searching for which was a WWII story told from a new perspective. I adore historical fiction from this era but I struggle with some of tropes and the endlessly repeated storylines. The Nightingale felt like a breath of fresh air. The one thing I adored was the new look and the different ways the characters dealt with the war around them. It was fantastic to see how a totally new group of people were impacted. I really appreciated how detailed the storyline was and just how much history was packed into the story.

What’s next?

I will continue to try and find the perfect WWII read. Hopefully find some new favourites in the long run. However, I might give it a rest for the next couple of books and see if that makes any difference to my enjoyment level. Definitely hope to find something great soon.

If you have any WWII recommendations, then please let me know! I’m sure I have space on the never-ending list of books I have to read!

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‘The Nightingale’ Review: A Song of Violence and Vengeance

Jennifer Kent follows “The Babadook” with a harrowing, politically charged tale of sexual and racial brutality in 19th-century Tasmania.

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By A.O. Scott

Tasmania in the 1820s, as depicted in “The Nightingale,” is a ladder of cruelty. Nearly every human relationship is defined by domination and subjugation, a system of absolute violence organized under the banner of civilization and the British flag. In the rough settlement where the movie begins, British soldiers rule over convicts who have been “transported” from England and Ireland. The soldiers, abused and humiliated by their superior officers, are also engaged in a brutal war of conquest with the Indigenous Tasmanians, referred to as “the blacks.”

Jennifer Kent, who wrote and directed this rigorous, relentless film, surveys this landscape with clear-eyed fury. “The Nightingale” is a revenge story, one that draws on familiar Victorian Gothic and Hollywood western tropes. It’s the tale of a wronged woman, and of white men in hostile territory. Its themes are justice, innocence and the boundary between barbarism and decency. But to say that Kent offers a revisionist take on traditional genres would be like calling “The Babadook,” her terrifying debut feature, a revisionist children’s movie. Part of her brilliance as a filmmaker lies in her mastery of the cinematic canons she subjects to thorough critical scourging.

The heroine is Clare (Aisling Franciosi), an Irish convict with a diffident manner and a beautiful singing voice. She lives on a small farmstead with her husband, Aidan (Michael Sheasby), and their baby daughter. The family, and everyone else around them, is at the mercy of Lieutenant Hawkins (Sam Claflin), the ambitious young commander of the local garrison, who is eager for a promotion to Launceston, a bigger, more established town near the island’s northern coast.

Hawkins sees himself as a man of taste and refinement. He appreciates Clare’s singing, and silences the vulgar catcalls of some of his men when she performs at their mess. He also rapes her, an assault repeated and compounded with acts of savagery that are horrifying but not, in his environment, entirely surprising.

Clare survives the attack and decides, against all reason and advice, to seek payback. Without much hope of finding justice through official channels — a magistrate vaguely promises to file a report of some kind — she takes matters into her own hands, setting out for Launceston with a rifle and a horse. (Hawkins, worried that his promotion is in jeopardy, is on his way there with several of his men.) She also hires an Aboriginal guide named Billy (Baykali Ganambarr), since the trackless forests are too dense and dangerous for a white woman to navigate on her own.

Clare’s place in the Tasmanian social hierarchy places her above Billy just as surely as it ranks her below Hawkins and his soldiers, and she treats her new companion with high-handed, racist condescension. For much of their journey, she addresses Billy as “boy,” treating him as a servant or worse even as her survival and sanity depend on him.

She keeps him in the dark about the true purpose of their journey. Not that anyone would take them for a posse in pursuit of an officer and his retinue. The long middle of the film switches back and forth between the unlikely hunters and their unwitting quarry, using their mishaps and chance encounters to cast a hard, sharp light on the racial, sexual and class violence that are central, in Kent’s account, to the founding of modern Australia.

“The Nightingale” is a movie thick with horror and heavy with feeling. Tasmania is in a state of war between what Billy calls “white fella” and “black fella,” a conflict waged without mercy or morality. The whites are engaged in a genocidal campaign that justifies itself as a counter-insurgency. Hawkins is a monster, but hardly an anomaly, and his increasingly sadistic behavior reveals the true face of British authority.

Billy and Clare slowly evolve toward an understanding of their common status as outsiders. English is neither one’s mother tongue, which is both a sign and a source of potential solidarity. Their political education in the necessity of anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal resistance happens in fits and starts, and sometimes in ways that feel a little obvious. Occasionally they utter programmatic statements that seem meant to instruct the audience in the meaning of the ordeal we are witnessing. But there isn’t much danger of misunderstanding.

Though “The Nightingale” is an effective history lesson, it is even more powerful as an ethical inquiry into the consequences of violence and the nature of justice. The length of the movie can feel oppressive — the chase is grinding, its resolution repeatedly deferred — and Kent’s shooting style is deliberately claustrophobic. The screen is a tight almost-square, and Franciosi’s face often occupies it in confrontational close-up. We can’t look away from Clare, from what happens to her or what she sees.

The punishment is the point. This is a difficult movie because the questions it raises are not easy. There are sentimental and reassuring movies about vengeance, and comforting stories about the resistance to historical oppression. This isn’t one of those. You might say it’s too angry. Or too honest.

The Nightingale

Rated R. Endless cruelty. Running time: 2 hours 16 minutes.

A.O. Scott is the co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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Featured Review

Is the nightingale historical fiction or a true story.

Non-Fiction

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah (St. Martin’s Press) begins with a backstory of an elderly woman in Oregon planning to return to France. At that time we don’t know what her role was in World War II, but figure it was highly traumatic.

Flashback to 1939. Two sisters lost their mother when they were young. Their father is a World War I veteran—traumatized, distant, almost indifferent to their lives. The younger Isabelle is shipped off to various finishing schools where she can’t seem to finish because of her rowdy insubordination. The older, Viann gets pregnant and is married off at the age of 17. Both girls are angry at their harsh father but Isabelle also hates Viann for not taking her in and keeping her in boarding schools.

As the war begins Viann’s husband is ordered to report to the army, leaving Viann alone with their daughter. Isabelle escapes from another school and tries to rejoin her father who owns a bookstore in Paris.

France loses the war and is occupied by German troops. Isabelle, consistent with her rebellious demeanor joins the French resistance and spends the war escorting downed allied pilots through the Pyrenees Mountains to Spain. Viann’s home is requisitioned by German forces and she is forced to live with a Wehrmacht captain and later a Gestapo or SS officer.

The Wehrmacht guy is pleasant and Viann finds herself attracted to him although nothing ever happens between them. He is killed and an SS officer moves in. The SS man rapes Viann repeatedly up until when the Germans evacuate France in 1944. In the end there is a cute twist of reconciliation and martyrdom that leaves the reader with a warm feeling.

A great read right? Not for me. I was so appalled by the numerous historical errors that I almost put the book down in the second Chapter. Here are a few clear mistakes:

Isabelle is inspired by Edith Cavell, the British nurse who was executed by the Germans for spying early in World War I. According to Isabelle nurse Cavell rescued hundreds of down allied pilots. Nevermind the fact that there weren’t hundreds of allied planes in the air in 1914, she did help some British soldiers cutoff by the advancing forces of the Kaiser return to British lines—perhaps a picky point but if a character was truly fascinated by the story the character would surely know something as basic as who it was Cavell was executed for assisting.

Hannah uses a fictional town, Carriveau, as the setting of her book. Here is where the plotting begins to run into problems. She has Isabelle leave Paris for the south just before the Germans arrive so Carriveau has to be south of Paris and near the Loire valley. But in order for it to be full of Nazis it can’t be in the Vichy zone of France which was not occupied by Germany after the Armistice. Although Carriveau is a small town the writer has to lever a large German contingent in it and therefore invents a Luftwaffe airbase. Why the Germans would establish an airbase south of Paris for the battle of Britain is never explained. Because there’s no explanation—it would have been ridiculous.

Herr Captain Beck is introduced as a Wehrmacht officer but apparently has time to spare for making lists of Jews, homosexuals, and freemasons living in Carriveau. At this point in the war rounding up these “undesirables” was the job of the SS and the Gestapo, not the Wehrmacht. Wehrmacht officers saw postings in occupied France as practically a vacation and were under strict orders from army command to treat French civilians with upmost civility. Hitler hoped that good behavior would minimize resistance. Wehrmacht officers would consider it beneath their dignity to round up Jews.

Certainly occupied France was no picnic for the French and many people went without, but there was essentially no resistance movement to speak of until it began to look like Germany might lose the war. Nevertheless Isabelle seems to be the first kid on her block to join the resistance.

At one point a sympathetic Beck sees Viann’s child is sick, leaves and amazingly returns with antibiotics for respiratory illnesses. Nevermind that oral antibiotics were not available until about 1946.

Ms. Hannah also never once refers to Beck as “German”. He is always labeled a “Nazi” as are all the occupying soldiers. In 1940 only 7 % of all Germans were members of the Nazi party. With military success those numbers did rise, but many Wehrmacht officers who were happy to enjoy the fruits of victory, nevertheless despised the Nazi party and the SS. The German military’s nickname for the SS was asphalt soldiers. From her descriptions of Captain Beck as the nice guy who sneaks additional food to Viann and her family it seems highly unlikely that he would be a true “Nazi.”

A friend of Viann’s daughter trys to escape to unoccupied France and has her chest “riddled with bullet holes.” Yet somehow she survives long enough to return to the village and die in her mother’s arms. No adult let alone a child could survive multiple chest wounds from a high-powered military rifle or machine gun. A child would be lucky to survive one in the chest, let alone be “riddled.” That’s why they use firing squads to kill deserters. The victim is going to die on the spot.

Central to the plot is Ms. Isabelle’s work in the underground escorting downed allied pilots out of France to the Pyrenees Mountains. Precious little detail is offered on how this is accomplished other than giving Isabelle fake identity papers. There is no mention that the girl has any mountain climbing experience – the Pyrenees are up to 11,000 feet high- or that she was particularly athletic – or what they did with pilots who had been wounded or how they were able to stroll a few hundred miles out of the country.

The Nightingale ends with a lovefest gathering of the relatives of pilots “saved” by Isabelle 60 years after the war. The unsophisticated reader is left with the impression that Isabelle saved the pilots’ lives thereby indirectly creating the lives of the pilots’ children who are among the gathering in Paris. The scene is a mirror image of the ending of Schindler’s List.

Has Ms. Hannah never watched Stalag 17 or The Great Escape? on late TV? One would not have to do much research to realize Germany did not shoot captured pilots. Airmen were valuable for intelligence and for the most part they were well treated by the Luftwaffe to the extent that Germany had the capacity to feed and house its prisoners. Keep in mind—Germany was attacking Britain at this time. Did they want their pilots summarily shot after they parachuted into Britain?

Probably the worst howler of all was when Isabelle, while walking around Paris after work one evening, comes upon an RAF pilot in full uniform who relates that he was shot down near Reims and has somehow made his way 140 kilometers into a city swarming with Germans. Did he take a train? Or did he rent a car from Hertz? Hitchhike? This is another point at which I nearly threw the book in the trash, but decided there had to be something to justify “Best Seller status” and 22 other novels by Ms. Hannah.

If you like sweet sentimentality with a memorable plot twist The Nightingale is a good read. If you want historical fiction that is reasonably accurate don’t touch this book.

Steve E Clark as seen in the New York Times is Author of Justice Is for the Lonely and Justice Is for the Deserving. Kristen Kerry Novels Of Suspense. Steve is also a prominent medical malpractice trial attorney in Oklahoma. Want to know more about Steve Clark or read more reviews? Learn more about Steve on his website www.SteveClarkAuthor.com

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