Meanwhile, Vianne wages a quiet resistance of her own after her Jewish neighbor is deported, leaving a little son behind. Her last name means nightingale, but it seems subtlety is as unknown to her as intelligence is to the Nazis.
#The nightingale kristin hannah code
Then she starts leading downed airmen to safety, using the code name Nightingale. Perhaps they felt they had nothing to lose at that point. She goes out of her way to defy the Germans and is rewarded by being recruited into the French resistance. Vianne’s story was fascinating because she had to walk a fine line and because she didn’t automatically know who was right and who was wrong. Smitten, the Germans sit down to talk to her, all suspicion gone. How beautiful? When two German soldiers spot a poorly disguised Englishman, they approach to question him. She’s a stereotypical teenaged Mary Sue – belligerent, reckless, desperately in love with a bad boy she can’t have, and, of course, heartstoppingly beautiful.
How I wish I could leave it at that without having to think of Isabelle to describe her for this review. Making Vianne’s life that much more difficult is her younger sister, Isabelle Rossignol. She has to draw on the dwindling resources of her farm – and her own courage, which proves greater than she expects – to keep her daughter fed and safe, and to placate the occupiers. Soon the country is occupied and German soldiers are billeted in Vianne’s village, one of them staying in her house. He’s leaving his wife and child to join the army, and given that this is France in the late 1930s, we know it’s not going to end well for his side. The novel starts with Vianne Mauriac, a sheltered housewife, saying goodbye to her husband, a postman. Too bad I couldn’t have the one without the other.
On the other hand, I don’t plan on rereading it very often, because a certain major aspect of the story was fingernails-on-a-chalkboard grating. The Nightingale is a book I’ll hold on to because I enjoyed quite a lot of it.