The Nightingale

Stunning, exciting, emotional. Touching. Incredible moments of beauty and desolation. One of those books you need a while to recover from. And maybe a shower.Sure, it’s not a strictly accurate account of true events like the excellent in a different way [b:Moonless Night 34725 Moonless Night The Second World War Escape Epic B.A. ‘Jimmy’ James https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348187279l/34725.SY75.jpg 34696], but what it is is a captivating, tearful, poignant, inspiring, devastating, emotional story about love, bravery, and regret in the face of unimaginable adversity. Hannah has folded together many aspects of the occupied French experience and woven a poignant and deeply touching tale.It’s magnificent. Raw, painful, traumatic even, but ultimately… I feel a sense of closure here. I’ve been through family trauma myself and I think that closure, acceptance, and moving on are what happy endings in the real world actually look like. So I hesitate to call it a sad book, despite it being full of sadness.I cry easily at movies and almost never otherwise, but this book brought tears to my eyes in the final chapters. Is it sad? Heart-wrenching yes. Maybe that’s the same thing, I think perhaps my capacity for sadness has been mined so deeply over the years that I can’t tell the difference. A sad but victorious ending? A sad but inevitable ending? I don’t know. Something about it felt right, and what’s right can’t be sad, can it?