The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

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Where to begin? Kristin Hannah uses such descriptive writing to create the perfect setting for The Nightingale. I've never been to France but could see Carriveau and Paris so clearly in my mind. (No surprise, I felt the same way while reading The Great Alone. 

Without giving too much away, the story follows Vianne and Isabelle. Two sisters that find very different but equally immeasurable hardships and rewards during WW2 and the Holocaust. After every ugly moment, every inhumane thing they'd witnessed and experienced, they state over and over that they are the lucky ones. The volumes of which that statement speaks, is heartbreaking. To know that in real life, as well as in this work of fiction, the atrocities they bore are more agreeable than many of their neighbors and friends and an entire generation of Jewish families is almost hard to accept. It's also important that we do.

Vianne and Isabelle are two French born, Catholic women. Women that many people would believe to survive, without incident, the Holocaust. It simply isn't and wasn't true. It touched every life, even the ones that weren't the direct targets of the Nazis hatred. Perspective of those events through different sets of eyes is worth thinking about and discussing.

Books like this one allow those of us that are privileged and fortunate enough to grow up and exist in a generation of people that will never know about the holocaust the ability to gain insight, knowledge and respect for that period of time and for our own future.

I encourage everyone to read this book. Read this book and then pick out the very real places and events and then investigate and research the truth in those things. It's important to know why and how human beings should never allow something like this happen again.

Favorite Quotes:

"In love, we find out who we want to be. In war, we find out who we are."

"I know that grief, like regret, settles into our DNA and remains forever a part of us."

"The father who went off to war was not the one who came home. She had tried to be loved by him, more important, she had tried to keep loving him. But in the end, one was as impossible as the other."

"I always thought it was what I wanted, to be loved and admired. Now, I think, perhaps I'd like to be known."

"And as afraid as she was of risking Sophie's life, she was suddenly more afraid of letting her daughter grow up in a world where good people did nothing to stop evil."

"Men tell stories, women get on with it."

"Wounds heal, love lasts, we remain."

Genre:

Historical fiction, WW2 Fiction