The Nightingale

Look, this book has beautiful moments, but it smells like sweat. I started this book early last year, but was bored so I stopped. I started again because it is a book club read. The story in this book as a story alone, was great for me. I loved Isabelle's brazen bravery and her love for Gaëtan. Vianne got there at like 3/4 of the way through. The delivery of this story, however, was not fantastic. I'm not a fan of Hannah's writing style and choices with descriptive passages. She described it as smelling like sweat at least ten times and it was distracting. It was grating how often Isabelle was described as beautiful because of the importance assigned to her being beautiful. When she used it to maneuver around the Nazis, how it was part of her eulogy, and how despite going through a concentration camp, she remained beautiful... As if it mattered. The settings were hard to keep track of because the weather didn't make sense. Snow appeared and disappeared frequently within the same day. The ending was obviously the best part, but it didn't make up for the rest of the book for me unfortunately. This was a meh.