March 13, 2017

On My Bookshelf: The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah

The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah follows the lives of two sisters in occupied France during WWII. Despite the struggles of everyday life, both women risk their lives to save others. Read on for more of my review and ideas for classroom application.
The basic plot from Amazon: In love we find out who we want to be.

In war we find out who we are.

FRANCE, 1939

In the quiet village of Carriveau, Vianne Mauriac says goodbye to her husband, Antoine, as he heads for the Front. She doesn't believe that the Nazis will invade France … but invade they do, in droves of marching soldiers, in caravans of trucks and tanks, in planes that fill the skies and drop bombs upon the innocent. When a German captain requisitions Vianne's home, she and her daughter must live with the enemy or lose everything. Without food or money or hope, as danger escalates all around them, she is forced to make one impossible choice after another to keep her family alive.

Vianne's sister, Isabelle, is a rebellious eighteen-year-old girl, searching for purpose with all the reckless passion of youth. While thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she meets Gäetan, a partisan who believes the French can fight the Nazis from within France, and she falls in love as only the young can … completely. But when he betrays her, Isabelle joins the Resistance and never looks back, risking her life time and again to save others.

With courage, grace and powerful insight, bestselling author Kristin Hannah captures the epic panorama of WWII and illuminates an intimate part of history seldom seen: the women's war. The Nightingale tells the stories of two sisters, separated by years and experience, by ideals, passion and circumstance, each embarking on her own dangerous path toward survival, love, and freedom in German-occupied, war-torn France--a heartbreakingly beautiful novel that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the durability of women. It is a novel for everyone, a novel for a lifetime.
The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah follows the lives of two sisters in occupied France during WWII. Despite the struggles of everyday life, both women risk their lives to save others. Read on for more of my review and ideas for classroom application.

Why I liked it: In The Nightingale most of the chapters alternate between two sisters, Vianne and Isabelle, whose experiences during the war are equally interesting. Interspersed with in the third person narratives are a few chapters written in first person. It is not clear which sister is speaking in those chapters until the very end of the novel.

I found myself sympathetic to both sisters, even when their struggle was against each other. Both sisters are complex characters and realistic; neither one is always good or always right.

Classroom application: The novel would be appropriate for upper high school. It includes violence and some sexual violence. The novel could be paired with a unit on WWII or the Holocaust in a history course, or used as an option for literature circles or book clubs focused on the Holocaust.

Both sisters take heroic action during the war, though in very different ways. Isabelle helps downed RAF airmen escape France while Vianne helps to hide Jewish children. Their father also takes part in the resistance by forging identity paperwork. Students could research the efforts of partisan groups during the war to fight against the Nazis and to rescue Jews.

The novel portrays the difficulties of everyday life in occupied territory as well as the experience of being held in a concentration camp as a political prisoner. Both of these aspects of the book could be supplemented with primary source documents. There are a few scenes where Isabelle is tortured for information similar to the main characters in Code Name Verity (also set during WWII) and The Orphan Master's Son (set in North Korea). Students could research the Geneva Convention and its rules about the treatment of political prisoners and also examine the US's use of torture to obtain information.

If you are interested in purchasing a copy of The Nightingale for yourself, you can find it on Amazon here.

You can find all of my teaching resources for the Holocaust here.

Note: The Literary Maven is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com.

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