The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

Narrated by Polly Stone

This is the story of two sisters in Vichy France during World War II. The older sister, Viann, is a school teacher and a young mother in a small village; having been more or less orphaned at age 14, she has found love and a life that she loves for herself and wants nothing more than to live that life, quiet and safe. The younger, Isabelle, is a rebellious girl who keeps getting kicked out of the various boarding schools their father, a Great War veteran and a coldly distant father, keeps sending her to. She's not willing to accept anything life hands her if it doesn't meet her standards, and doesn't see why she should be quiet about it. When the Germans invade France, each sister copes in her own way.

Viann’s husband goes off to fight in the war, so she is left taking care of their children, and teaching at the local school, and keeping up the house, with its orchard and vegetable garden. With all of these responsibilities, and with the husband she adores and relies on far away, her response to the Germans is to keep her head down and just survive, and keep her children alive, the best she can. As time goes on, though, she finds herself compelled by her own conscience to extend what protection she can offer not just to her own children, but to the son of her best friend, who is Jewish, and then to other Jewish children whose parents have been deported to the concentration camps.

Meanwhile, Isabelle is far too outspoken for her own good. After Paris is occupied, she ends up living with her sister. But she can’t bring herself to be polite to the German officer billeted at her sister’s house, or to hold her tongue when she sees atrocities being committed. Apparently she never heard of discretion being the better part of valor. When a villager catches her defacing Nazi signs, he recruits her into the local resistance. At first she just distributes pamphlets, but eventually she rescues a downed English pilot by guiding him, on foot, through the Pyrennes mountains to Spain. Having done this once, she sets up a route and does it repeatedly, under the code name "The Nightingale" and earning the irate and abiding interest of the SS.

I have my quibbles with this book. There are a couple of places near the beginning where the timeline just seems wonky and people behave as if things have been going on for weeks and months that have only been happening for a few days at most; a good editor would have corrected that. Isabelle is far too loose a cannon to be an effective member of a resistance that has to fly under the radar at all times, and Viann’s difficulties and losses feel overly sentimentalized—Isabelle’s, too, toward the end of the book. Not that they aren’t horrific difficulties and losses, but that being the case, they should stand on their own and not be sentimentalized, played to jerk tears out of the reader.

Nevertheless it’s a good read. Knowing about the way the Nazis treated the French in order to break them, and the degree to which they succeeded, is one thing; living it vicariously through an absorbing story is something else again. The author paints a vivid, complex portrait of life in a country brought to its knees, not neglecting either the humanity or the inhumanity of the invaders, nor the strengths or weaknesses of the invaded.

Recommend—especially if you plan to see the movie, which I understand will be released next year.