Author : Kristin Hannah
Genre : Historical
Publisher : Macmillan Audio
Narrator : Polly Stone
Listening Length : 17 hours 19 minutes
Rating : ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Narrator: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Kristin Hannah’s Nightingale is about 2 French sisters in World War II. When Hitler invades France, Vianne Mauriac the elder sister is living happily with husband Antoine and daughter Sophy in the small village of Carriveau. The younger and more impetuous sister, 18 year old Isabelle, is in a finishing school having been rusticated from several different educational institutions. She does not last long at the Finishing school either and makes her way back to her widower father in Paris. When the Nazi soldiers march into Paris, Isabelle’s father sends Isabelle to Vienne for safety, but once there Isabelle chafes to join the active fight against the Germans.
As the occupation grows and German atrocities rise along with the targeting of Jews – first foreign-born and then all – many of whom are friends and neighbors, both sisters’ lives take very different paths. Vianne, meeker and responsible for Sophy with Antoine gone off to fight, asks no questions and tries to keep her head down, and deal with the situation a day at a time, even when that entails having a German officer “billet” in her home. Isabelle meets up with the underground protestors and becomes initially the secret distributor of resistance literature, and later comes to be known as The Nightingale, responsible for getting downed British and American Allied pilots back to safety.
I haven’t read/heard Kristin Hannah’s work before but The Nightingale is a great introduction. Although World War tales are not my cup of tea, The Nightingale is compelling reading. Hannah details out her storylines – the events in the book are major world events – and fleshes out her characters with great care, so that we know them intimately and are with them on their rocky roads. Her words show us the progression of evil in visceral detail – poverty, hunger, oppression, families being separated and taken to “work” camps in Germany, being hunted and targeted for one’s religion – and the changes it brings in the two sisters.
Narrator Polly Stone is fantastic. She gives each of the sisters their distinct personalities and even does the male voices well. This is a big book – lots of detail, most of it minutiae and personal – and while I may not have been able to maintain the momentum had I read it, it was a compelling listen because of Stone.
