Two Sisters, Two Forms of Resistance

 

The Nightingale  —  Kristin Hannah

The Nightingale follows two French sisters during the German occupation, Vianne, who stays behind to protect her home and daughter through compromise and quiet survival, and Isabelle, who joins the resistance and takes on increasingly dangerous work smuggling downed Allied airmen out of the country. Hannah uses the split between the sisters to dramatize two legitimate, and legitimately different, responses to occupation, rather than privileging one as more heroic than the other.

The book's central strength is its refusal to make Vianne's path the lesser one; her chapters, dealing with billeted soldiers, food scarcity, and the moral compromises required simply to keep her daughter alive, carry as much weight as Isabelle's more overtly dramatic resistance work. That balance is part of why the novel has remained one of Hannah's most widely read books.

The prose leans toward the sentimental in places, and the plot occasionally relies on coincidence to move its two storylines toward each other. Those are familiar trade-offs in commercial historical fiction, though, and they haven't diminished the book's reputation as one of the more effective popular novels written about the French resistance in recent years.

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