The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

"Birdsong. A nightingale. She hears it singing a sad song. Nightingales mean loss, don't they? Love that leaves or doesn't last or never existed in the first place. There's a poem about that, she thinks. An ode."
                -Isabelle's hallucination, from the novel

What can I say about this novel? It is a gripping story told beautifully! Rates a 5, for sure. The plot was so compelling I could hardly put it down---read it in only a few days.

Though the beginning setting is Oregon, 1995, a flashback soon takes the reader back to 1939 and the village of Carriveau, France. Two sisters, Vianne and Isabelle Mauriac, about as different as siblings can be, must learn to deal with the ominous arrival of the Nazis. Vianne has a daughter she must protect at all costs while Isabelle is an impulsive and defiant 18-year-old, unwilling to yield to Nazi occupation. Both sisters end up involved in the French Resistance---Isabelle, quickly and wholeheartedly and Vianne, reluctantly at first, but then with great courage. Both women exemplify selflessness, resilience, determination, compassion and love.

This novel reminded me so much of Beneath a Scarlet Sky by Mark Sullivan which I read very recently. In it Pino Lella becomes involved heart and soul with the resistance movement in Italy during Nazi occupation, beginning by leading Jews through an "underground railroad" of sorts through the Alps into Switzerland. Isabelle undertakes similar risky missions in The Nightingale with numerous treks through the Pyrenees. Though Isabelle is a fictional character and Pino is an actual person, both demonstrate great courage and show that heroes can be people you would least expect---women, before they were given much credit, and teenagers.

Both these novels are emotionally intense so maybe you'd want to read something light and humorous in-between. Just saying.....
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The Nightingale was very popular with our Page Turners: average rating a 4.7, highest of 2017 to this point. We had a wonderful discussion including some personal reflections about duty, war and prejudice. In answer to questions provided by the publisher, most of us agreed that both sisters did what they had to do and we admired them both. We acknowledged that even though the Mauriac women were fictional characters, there would have been numerous real women who performed the kind of heroic deeds described in the book. Some of us did not realize the degree to which the French people suffered during this terrible time. We thought that the narrative structure of the novel, switching settings, as I described earlier, added intrigue and some relief from the intensity of the 1939 story. We were kept guessing as to the narrator almost to the end! If you like historical fiction, this one's a winner!