Kristin Hannah is one of my favorite authors who often write stories about normal individuals, and how these “small” characters play in the society. The women characters she portrays all represent a part of women in the real society. Sometimes, I can even find my own shadow and personality in some of her characters. Out of all her novels, my favorite one is “The Nightingale”, which is a historical fiction book. Historical fiction is my favorite genre, which put fictional characters and their stories in real time periods. These stories build me bridges that allow me to time travel to different historical periods, and “live” in places and time periods that are unbelievable for myself to be in touch with in my daily life.

Before reading “The Nightingale”, I dislike history since I thought it is unnecessary for me to learn about these affairs that do not link with my daily lives. Yet, after taking literature courses about this book, a new gate opened for me that I started to see the charm of historical novels.

Talking about this book: "The Nightingale" takes place during the tumultuous World War II, when Nazis were attacking France. The two protagonist sisters in the story are both French. The author not only described the stories of these two small individuals, but she also made me see the cruelty of war to ordinary people from their eyes. Most importantly, the book also depicts how these two ordinary women made a series of extraordinary actions by their self. Elder sister Vianne is a girl who was lack of love, so she must rely on others in order to live. It is such an unbelievable thing that such a dependent housewife is the one who endured humiliation, and helped as many people as possible to survive. She was so courageous that she even killed the officers of her enemy. While reading her stories, I was really motivated because she stepped out her comfort zone even though the process is super tough. I even felt that I should work harder because the stress and challenges in my daily life are just so negligible and unimportant comparing to hers.

Moving on to the second protagonist—Isabel. She was 18 years old, and was unwilling to suffer oppression in silence during the war. She ultimately rescued one hundred pilots with the code name "Nightingale", and nobody could ever believe that she had just turned to be a grown-up. Her personality really affected me that I started to do things without being affected by stress and timidity.

Although this is only fiction, I'm sure that in that tumultuous time of war, there are many ordinary but powerful small individuals like Vianne and Isabel. "Women can be weak and vulnerable, but they can also be resilient." Although their names were not written down, they deserve to be remembered. The author created the stories of these two characters in order to show readers that the credit in war is not only due to those upper classes and men in textbooks or history books. Even if people say, “Women are useless in war. Your job is to wait for us." In fact, behind every war there are thousands of brave women who take risks to defend their dignity and their country in their own way.