24, 771.

That is the number of reviews that The Nightingale has on Amazon when I began writing you, 85% of which have given the book 5 stars. YES, 5!! I am one of them. It was so good! A teary eyed, tragically beautiful kind of good.

You can tell it is going to be worth the read when you see the popularly-highlighted marks on page 1 of your ebook. Can you even imagine opening up a physical book to the first page and finding some 10,000+ underlines, in a whole array of highlighting tools. Like all the others I was hooked by that page too.

“In love we find out who we want to be, in war we find out who we are.” 

Note: In reading a story about love and war you’ll find out how emotional you can get over fictitious characters, consider yourself warned.

Why I loved it:

The Nightingale is about family, bravery, risk, belief, and sacrifice. It is fictional but it paints a very real picture of how heartbreaking WWII was. Its pages are able to beautifully highlight the extreme amount of endurance and courage that women faced amidst German occupation, a group that isn’t often recognize for the heroins that they are. The book put it perfectly,

“Men tell stories… Women get on with it. For us it was a shadow war. There were no parades for us when it was over, no medals or mentions in history books. We did what we had to during the war, and when it was over, we picked up the pieces and started our lives over.

The Nightingale offers a chance to think about how many should have made it into the books.  The ones that still deserve a parade and medals. I can’t imagine how traumatic it must have been to send your husbands and sons off to fight only to wait while your life, your community, your friends, your country all fall apart. It hurts to think of the many hundreds of thousands of people that it literally devastated. I have read other novels depicting that era and tragedy, but this one somehow felt more sincere

It had everything to do with the quality of the writing. Standing ovation to Kristin Hanna.  Her imagery and metaphors are tangible. You will hold your breath with Isabella.  Your heart will break with Vianne. You will fall for Gaëtan. You will need tissues and no distractions, so you may wan to put the rest of life on hold for a day.

Trust me, The Nightingale is worth your time.

Erika

p.s.