The Nightingale: A Novel, by Kristin Hannah

I was one of those children who’d happily go to bed at whatever ungodly hour my parents wanted us four kids to. Because that meant I could read until my eyelids sagged or the flashlight batteries died, whatever came first. Of course, I’d be cat-tired the next, yearning for a nice warm quilt and sunny window overlooking the snowy backyard.

Reading immersed me in completely different worlds, ones that I could never go to, as would be the case if I read a historical novel or a place like Queen Elizabeth II’s London, far away and out of reach due to the cost of an airplane ticket.

I no longer find many books that keep me up all night and willing to call in sick for prior engagements the next day, just so I can finish a book.

But you suspect, don’t you, after reading these few words, that I found one.

Running over a thunderous 570 pages, Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale is not a one-night stand, that’s for sure. There’s no galloping through this paean to the human spirit, the resiliency exploding like bombs, albeit quiet and unseen. Just sudden and unexpected.

Through a story interwoven between two French sisters – Vianne and Isabelle Rossignol – the reader learns more about the War than battles and BBC broadcasts listened to with sound turned low, ears cupped with hands old and young.

Rosignol means “nightingale” in French, but it can also mean a raucous person. And one of the sisters certainly lives up to that name.

Told from the points of view of both sisters chapter by chapter, The Nightingale haunts the reader long after the 570th page turns. Their story blurs the line between collaborators and resistants.

I was born after the War, yet it colored life in small, almost imperceptible ways, even though most Americans – save those who went overseas and fought – were not personally touched other than by some shortages of goods and foods.

Novels such as The Nightingle remind us of what war can mean for those caught in its claws, both then and now, as a seemingly endless and futile war rages on in Ukraine. Newspaper and Website headlines fill up with the illicit doings of a narcissistic former president and his cultic followers. Well and good that the news should focus on that, for even though it all seems unrelated to what people suffered during World War II, the very continuation of democracy, freedom of the press, and freedom of movement, of life itself, all this hangs on the law – based on facts, not myths or lies.

It hangs on paying attention and recognizing the danger facing us if we fail to do.

A slow and thoughtful reading of The Nightingale brings it all out in the open, albeit through a fictional lens.