Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Having just finished All the Light We Cannot See I was looking for another highly rated piece of literary fiction. I was drawn to this book because of the abundance of reviews. I felt compelled to write this review for the other readers like me who are drawn to highly rated books with a certain set of expectations. The introduction, the modern day reflection, is really good and left me with high expectations for the rest of the book. When the story itself began I came to realize three things. 1) this is a (flimsy) romance novel - not literary fiction 2) the setting is arbitrary. All the Light We Cannot See occurring during WW2 is a relevant point and integral to the story. In Nightingale WW2 is just a weak representation of "war-time". It could have just as easily taken place during any other real (Civil War) or fictional (cf. War of the Ring in Lord of the Rings) 3) the story itself (excluding the first chapter), had a very formulaic and unrefined prose. It was very easy to read because of how simple the writing was, and you could set a metronome to the sentence structure of. "Isabelle did this. Vianne did that. There were aeroplanes in the sky." It's not a horrible style for storytelling, but it lacks sophistication. All that being written. * If you are looking for a romance novel that is easy to read and doesn't force you to think too much then this is probably a great read - I don't read that genre and I don't claim to be a good judge of it. * If you are rather looking for challenging literary fiction that is thought-provoking then this is not a good book for you.