The Résistance Between Us is a tough, realistic account of a conscientious life ultimately well--lived. It is serious fiction, far closer to the literary vein of Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Française than any of today's World War II fiction novels-and not unlike the visual integrity of the film, The Saving of Private Ryan.
However, if you enjoyed reading All the Light We Cannot See or Kristen Hannah's Nightingale, or you value sweeping epics like Gone With the Wind, you are sure to be fascinated with this novel.
The narrator/heroine, Ingrid de Vochard Fellner, is an alluring, wealthy widow-a philanthropist-who lives in the small, fictional town of Duchamps, along the Doubs River, at the heart of a small part of Occupied France, located somewhere near the real city of Besançon, and within sight of the Jura Mountains.
As the book opens, the Doubs River delivers two dead bodies to Ingrid's riverbank one morning, and she discovers them, a young couple with yellow stars on their coats. An encounter there with the coordinator of the local Résistance compels her to join the group. She shields Jews and political refugees in her basement while they wait to pass to Italy and Switzerland. She entertains the enemy upstairs to guarantee the safety of her Old Testament visitors downstairs.
"This is my time to honor unwanted guests," writes Ingrid, "and pray for the day I can make them go home. Pardon my scorn, but these guests are the enemy. Not the Germans I grew up with, nor the man I married and lost. The enemy is a rigid, twisted, oddly obedient criminal lot everyone fears."
Nearly as quickly as she becomes a Resistante, she wants to leave the Underground. Dieter, local leader, tells her, "I can't burden you. It's too dangerous. Anyone who does this has to be strong and self-contained. You act from unconditional love--or anger must propel you. Either way, it's a commitment from the heart. You reap gratification in the precise manner you live the terror. You can't have one without the other. If you think twice about it, you're not cut out for it."
Then he tells her once she's in, she can't get out.
So Ingrid hides the agony she lives with as Gestapo stop by on covert raids. Her neighbors and friends suspect she's a collaborator because the Nazis come to visit; these neighbors and friends hate her for it, and gossip widely.
She lives through lessons that assault her body, mind and soul. Then she does all the things she said she never, ever, would. And her home no longer yields comfort.
We know what she's lost in this clandestine battle; we enter her world and applaud any success over the monsters who stalk and abuse her.
Liberation comes at book's end. However, Ingrid stands alone in a courtroom, head shaved, tondue and pariah-charged with Treason. Neither Resistants nor her betrayers know the truth. What transpires spirals into a wild climax. Ingrid is left poised for a rough road to forgiveness in Book Two--and a passionate atonement in Book Three.
