Book Review: The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden

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“Reality was a crumbling thing, a rotten tree.”

📚

This captivating WWI historical novel opens in January 1918 as decorated former combat nurse Laura Iven struggles to adjust to life back home in Halifax, Canada, after being wounded and discharged. With her parents deceased and her house rendered rubble, Laura has nothing left but her brother, Freddie, still fighting in Flanders.

When she receives strange and cryptic news of Freddie’s death, Laura immediately returns to duty, volunteering at a private Belgian hospital with the goal of discovering the truth. Upon arrival, she hears rumors of haunted trenches and an enigmatic hotelier with the ability to help soldiers escape and forget. Is Freddie dead, or is he still out there, alive but at the mercy of sinister forces? And are their lives and the planet at large ruined beyond retrieval, or can they find something worth saving?

Shifting between brother and sister, The Warm Hands of Ghosts weaves an intense and harrowing account of warfare melded with hauntingly beautiful speculative elements that produce a story equal parts hellscape and dreamworld — one where love drives existence and survival, beauty hides among rot and ruin, and redemption and refuge come in unexpected places.

It’s an immersive, moving, gorgeous, and horrifying tale of trauma, bravery, and longing; sadness, devotion, and forgiveness; and choice, remembrance, and fate where vengeful fury wears a pretty face, hate corrodes self and soul, sanity teeters upon a shadowy precipice, forgetting traps rather than comforts, and anguish manifests as unrelenting specters — an utterly original approach to mind, memory, and the facets that make and break an individual, a prophetic and resonant narrative of a world doomed to repeat its worst mistakes.

❤Amanda

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