Hardcover, 440 pages
English language
Published Feb. 3, 2015 by St. Martin's Press.
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 good-bye 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, searching for purpose with all the reckless passion of youth. While thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she …
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 good-bye 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, searching for purpose with all the reckless passion of youth. While thousands of Parisians march into the unknown terrors of war, she meets Gaëtan, 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.
I gave up partway through. The story has merit, but the storytelling is utterly lacking in sophistication. The book might be good for young readers who are interested in the subject matter.
This is a book laden with gut punches and familiar tropes of WW2. The writing is heavy-handed in big chunks, and you can guess the broad trajectory of the plot. Regardless, I thoroughly enjoyed the book.
Pick it up for a familiar-yet-good WW2 story and blaze through it all quickly.
This novel had been awaiting my attention just long enough that I'd forgotten all that I'd heard about it. It took me by surprise in many ways. So many different stories came out of WWII, but not many of them focus on heroes who happened to be women. At a certain point in this story, I thought I knew how things would end, basically. Nope...touching, haunting, sad, redeeming, AND surprising.
I'd recommend Kristin Hannah's The Nightingale to anyone.
Excellent read.
A beautifully written, heartbreaking piece of historical fiction. Set in World War II France during the Nazi occupation, we follow the lives of two sisters who both deal with the war in very different ways. Young, impulsive Isabelle rushes headlong into the Resistance, while her older sister Vianne is just trying to keep her daughter alive until her husband returns from the Front.
This book will leave you emotionally shredded, for sure. So much sadness and senseless death. War is never an easy read and especially when it involves the atrocities committed by the Nazis in WWII, but Hannah does a wonderful job weaving the lives and stories together in a way that might just leave you curled up in a ball crying. It's that good. Do yourself a favor and read it while you are alone so you can absorb yourself in the storyline and then take a little …
A beautifully written, heartbreaking piece of historical fiction. Set in World War II France during the Nazi occupation, we follow the lives of two sisters who both deal with the war in very different ways. Young, impulsive Isabelle rushes headlong into the Resistance, while her older sister Vianne is just trying to keep her daughter alive until her husband returns from the Front.
This book will leave you emotionally shredded, for sure. So much sadness and senseless death. War is never an easy read and especially when it involves the atrocities committed by the Nazis in WWII, but Hannah does a wonderful job weaving the lives and stories together in a way that might just leave you curled up in a ball crying. It's that good. Do yourself a favor and read it while you are alone so you can absorb yourself in the storyline and then take a little time to decompress. I suggest having something light-hearted on hand to immediately read as a tonic afterwards.
This kept popping up on my recommendations list and I kept ignoring it because in the last few years I've read, "The Invisible Bridge" and "All the Light We Cannot See" and "Code Name: Verity" - so I was somewhat "meh" on reading something set in Europe during WWII. This book has a slightly different twist on things. The premise isn't as clever as "All the Light We Cannot See," but it was written as a page-turner and casts a different light on Paris and the French Resistance. I found it easy to read and looked forward to picking it up at night. High literature, it is not.
