The Nightingale is the story of two sisters caught up in Nazi-occupied France, and how they survive – and fight back – in their own distinct ways. Viann’s top priority is survival, for both her and her young daughter, as life gets increasingly difficult as the war continues, while Isabelle, the younger, feistier sister, joins the Resistance and finds a way to fight more actively as the Nightingale. Except their real last name is Rossignol, which literally means Nightingale, so it feels a little weird […]
What in the world is the purpose of this book? I am genuinely curious.
This review will contain spoilers, so if you want to avoid knowing all the details of the sparse and meaningless plot, maybe skip the first couple of paragraphs. Holden Caulfield is a self-important, spoiled and worthless little shit. At the start of the book, he is cooling his heels at the fourth boarding school he’s been expelled from because he just can’t be bothered to even try to apply himself (having failed four out of five subjects completely), and generally bitching about how phony his […]
Not Atonement, But Still Great
Well damn. This book, you guys. This book will maybe haunt me. As far as war-related novels that I will remember, it ranks only behind Atonement. I appreciated that it was, I feel, a really well-told story. Others have reviewed it for CBR before, but if you aren’t familiar with it, here’s a quick synopsis. A young girl Marie-Laure is blind and lives with her father, a museum curator, in Paris before the war. They flee when Paris is invaded by Germany. Werner is a […]
Growing up in war – a surprisingly delightful read!
So people have been raving about this book for years and, as per usual, I am so late to the station that the train has already traversed the planet and come all the way back to drop its passengers off. It wasn’t until a friend literally pressed the book into my hand and commanded me to read it that I finally did. This time I should’ve gotten on the train sooner. So why didn’t I? Well people kept raving about the book, but every time […]
A River Runs Through It…..My Latest Book Club WWII HistFic
This is my book club’s choice for this month. We’ve done plenty of WWII historical fiction, but none quite this epic…it spans 1915-1952 in the town of Burgdorf, Germany. Trudi Montag is a Zwerg (dwarf) woman living in Burgdorf with her father Leo who owns the pay-library. At the start of the novel, Trudi is 4 years old and newly realizing that her stature sets her apart and makes her undesirably “outsider”. Trudi also discovers that she is a natural storyteller, and her position in the […]
The Boobs that Launched a Thousand Ships (or just one really nice cathedral)
The historical fiction I enjoy the most manages to take significant events from the past and show their effects on the average person. It’s all well and good to say “the peasants suffered,” but it’s much more effective to actually hear from the peasants themselves. This book manages to both give voice to the everyman while still keeping the reader in the heart of the political intrigue going on during the period. The period, in this case, is 1135-1154 CE in England; a period known […]
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