The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

In the historical fiction novel The Nightingale, a French woman named Vianne Mauriac faces the start of the Second World War with great fear. First, her husband is drafted by the French army. After France falls and is partitioned, a German officer is "billeted" at her family home, meaning that he comes to live with her. Then her sister, who is just 19, leaves to join the Resistance. Vianne manages to survive in a world where civil order increasingly breaks down, food is harder and harder to get, and the oppressive practices of the occupying German forces become more dangerous for civilians.

This book is, in some ways, a departure for Hannah, who's written women's fiction in the past. However, at its heart, The Nightingale is about loss and forgiveness, and about the healing of families torn apart by loss and bereavement.

This book was an easy and very entertaining book to read, even though it's 448 pages.  The sentences are short.  Although the opening of the book, the exposition, initially moves along at a seemingly slow pace, it soons picks up and becomes a very dramatic and suspenseful novel, full of close and too-close calls.  The combination of the suspense of the novel, the heroic subject matter, and the short sentences make it a perfect book group book.

One review I read opined that Hannah does not quite have the style for a subject matter this serious (https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kristin-hannah/the-nightingale-hannah).  I too, felt a lack when the relationships of the two sisters to the men they loved were explored.  The language and the content seemed similar to that of a romance novel.  But, this issue could be viewed the other way: that by presenting these men-women relationships in a very familiar way, Hannah succeeded in making history accessible to many more readers.

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