The Nightingale

There's a lot of WWII fiction out there. So no matter how much I say I don't want to read any more of it, I always end up with another WWII novel on my shelf waiting to be read. This one was nominated in my book club last year, although we ultimately didn't choose it. Partly because everyone was feeling a bit burnt out on WWII stories. But shortly after that, Book Riot highlighted it as one of the top rated books on Goodreads. So when I saw it at the library book sale a few weeks later, I picked it up almost without thinking. And then I spent almost a year pointedly not reading it. Even though I knew it was going to be good.

And it was good. It was completely fantastic. The novel follows two sisters in France during the German occupation. They are polar opposites, and they never really get along. But each ends up working for the resistance in her own way. Despite their antagonism, they end up taking strength from each other to make it through impossible circumstances.

This is a book about war and doing what you have to do and trying to live a life you won't regret and living with regret and hoping that it's not to late to heal or make amends or fall in love. It was incredibly readable (the 500+ page book about terrible, brutal things only took me three days to read while I had house guests) and heartbreaking and uplifting and absolutely everything you'd expect from a solid WWII book.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shadows of Self

Let's dive right into the biggest problem I had with this book, which is Sanderson's treatment of Lessie. Wax's lady-love, in a classic case of fridging, gets killed in the prologue of The Alloy of Law , giving Wax a reason to return to the big city and mope around for a while. She turns back up in the prologue of this book, which details how she and Wax met. And at first I was excited to get a bit more backstory. I wondered if maybe all the prologues would be about her, letting her be more than the awesome woman who died to give Wax some man-pain. This turned out not to be the case. Instead, the prologue was just there to remind us that she existed. Until it's revealed at the very end of the book that she's been alive all along, having faked her own death on God's orders. (It makes slightly more sense than that.) This comes up just in time for her to die in Wax's arms again, sending him into a fresh bout of grief plus bonus loss of faith in God. That'...
Read more

Specials

I have to admit that the conclusion to this trilogy felt a little flat to me. There were definitely some good things, and I still think the series as a whole is good and tackles interesting questions with some good nuance. I even liked the actual ending of the story. But so much of this book felt like a rehash of the second one that I felt a little bored by the end of it. Once again, Tally has had her brain rewired, and once again she sets out into the wilderness where he solitude helps her figure out what she actually wants. The love triangle sort of fizzles out and the stakes are revealed to be not nearly as high as it seemed. What felt like a worldwide conspiracy is mostly confined to one city, and Tally's role shifts. She does help save the world, but it's more about preventing a war than ushering a grand revolution. Which isn't to say that the revolution doesn't happen. But it's not the complete overthrow of society that the rebels wanted. And that's pr...
Read more

Parable of the Sower: The Graphic Novel

This is one of my favorite books, so I clearly had to read the graphic novel version. It's a good story to revisit every now and then, and this edition makes that a lot easier. Since so much of the information is conveyed through images, reading it is a lot quicker. Of course, this being an adaptation, a lot of things got left out. I know the story well enough to have recognized all the omissions. The story still works well, but I'll always think the original has more depth.   Overall, it's a good adaptation of a really important novel. And if the new format helps it reach new audiences, that can only be a good thing.
Read more