Kristin Hannah
The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah opens in 1995 in Oregon when an elderly woman receives an invitation to attend a celebration in France honoring those who were instrumental in helping others escape from France during the German occupation in WWII. Her connection with the French resistance is suggested but never fully revealed until the end of the novel.
The narrative then shifts to France from the years 1939 to 1945. Two sisters, Vianne and Isabelle, are caught up in the tragedy of war. Vianne’s peaceful existence in her small farm in the Loire Valley is interrupted when her husband is called up to fight the advancing German army. She struggles to survive with her young child, Sophie. Isabelle, an eighteen-year-old firebrand who has been expelled from various finishing schools, joins the French resistance to German occupation. Both girls are estranged from their father.
The threads alternate between Vianne and her experience with the German occupation of her village and Isabelle’s resistance activities. Vianne witnesses the Nazis tightening their stranglehold on the village. She witnesses public executions and deportation of Jews. She sees mothers separated from their children. She experiences harsh winters in threadbare clothes and waits in long queues to obtain what little food there is. Survival is a daily challenge. To make matters worse, she is required to take first one German officer and then a SS officer to billet in her home.
Meanwhile, Isabelle has become increasingly active in the French resistance. Realizing she is putting her sister and niece in grave danger because of her political activities, she moves back to Paris, assumes the code name, ‘Nightingale’, and embarks on the dangerous role of escorting downed allied pilots across the Pyrenees to Spain. Her success attracts the attention of the Nazis who are willing to go to extreme measures to capture the Nightingale.
Throw into the mix various love interests. Vianne loves her husband but then finds herself seriously attracted to Herr Captain Beck, the Wehrmacht officer billeted in her home. And Isabelle, not surprisingly, falls in love with a French revolutionary.
Although the story line is engaging, the novel is more closely affiliated to fantasy than to serious historical fiction. The scenes of sexual tension between men and women are stretched to generate dramatic effect. Cliches abound. The narrative is littered with unrealistic dialogue; one-dimensional, stereotypical characters; exaggerations; gushing sentimentality; improbable coincidences; and highly unlikely chance encounters. At one point, Isabelle encounters a downed RAF pilot in full uniform hiding in a street in Paris. Somehow, he has managed to evade capture in a city that is swarming with Nazis and the SS and, yet, he doesn’t have the wherewithal to hide from a young woman. And when Vianne’s daughter is seriously ill and there’s no medicine to be had anywhere, the Wehrmacht officer billeting in her home hands her some antibiotics which he has, somehow, managed to locate and have in his pocket. And on it goes.
The story line may be engaging, but realistic historical fiction it is not.