by Kristin Hannah

This book will be a little difficult to synopsize because it’s got so many details and intertwining stories. This book had me sobbing at the end, crying in the lamplight and trying not to wake my husband with my sniffling. I tend to stay away from historical fictions or any books that are going to make me cry, because I don’t like to cry, but the reviews and recommendations for this book were so great, I decided to give it a try.

At the very beginning we have an old woman, combing through her things as her son is helping her move since she can’t live alone anymore. We don’t know who this woman is, but we get a couple clues that lead you to assume her identity later in the book (which I was wrong about!). The book then flashes back to a beautiful scene in France, a young couple and their daughter, living on a small farm. The couple, Vianne and Antoine, are happily married and living a peaceful existence while war looms over them. When Antoine is called to join the fight, Vianne has to learn to care for herself, their home, and their daughter all while things get steadily worse and worse. When the Nazis eventually take over Vianne’s small village she has to try to survive and keep her young daughter safe.

We also get the story of Vianne’s much younger sister, Isabelle. Isabelle is stubborn, beautiful, and doesn’t want a normal life. When the war starts to rage, she is insistent that she must help and cannot idly sit by while people are dying. Regardless, Isabelle’s father sends her to live with Vianne, but in her journey to Vianne’s home, Isabelle is introduced to just the beginning of the horrors of the Nazi’s invasion into France. Isabelle does get to Vianne, but the two couldn’t be more different. Vianne refuses to break the rules and follows any orders given, even to the detriment of her neighbors and friends. While Isabelle is fearless, defiant, and angry. Isabelle runs back to Paris and starts helping downed airmen across the border to safety, thus her code name: The Nightingale.

The book alternates between Vianne, Isabelle, and the mystery older woman 50 years in the future. Both women show bravery, tenacity, and the incredible will to survive and their stories unfold to reveal that both of them ended up heroes. The details of the horrors of the every day lives for people under the Nazi rule is heart-wrenching, gut-wrenching, and a hard pill to swallow. This book forces you to look not only from an outside view of what happened to people, but from what someone experiencing it in real-time may have felt; their fear, their love and their loss. You read of people whose lives were uprooted, turned upside down, their family snatched away from them. There were those who were persecuted, prosecuted, tortured and killed.

Because this book is so detailed and many of those details give way to bigger story lines, I can’t really divulge much more without spoiling things so I will just say that with intertwining stories of sisters, love, and war this book was very hard to put down. I wholeheartedly recommend this book! The ending was not what I thought it was going to be and it was beautiful and heartbreaking. Please read this book and thank me later.

Rating: 10/10