CBR16 Book 27: "In Memoriam" by Alice Winn

Page count: 379 pages

Rating: 4.5 stars

CBR16 Bingo: Liberate (our protagonists are fighting in World War I to keep the world safe from the Germans)

Official plot summary, because I finished this book in early April:

It's 1914, and talk of war feels far away to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood and the rest of their classmates, safely ensconced in their idyllic boarding school in the English countryside. At seventeen, they're too young to enlist, and anyway, Gaunt is fighting his own private battle - an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, the dreamy, poetic Ellwood - not having a clue that Ellwood is in love with him, always has been. When Gaunt's German mother asks him to enlist as an officer in the British army to protect the family from anti-German attacks, Gaunt signs up immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings for Ellwood.

The front is horrific, of course, and though Gaunt tries to dissuade Ellwood from joining him on the battlefield, Ellwood soon rushes to join him, spurred on by his love of Greek heroes and romantic poetry. Before long, their classmates have followed suit. Once in the trenches, Ellwood and Gaunt find fleeting moments of solace in one another, but their friends are all dying, right in front of them, and at any moment they could be next.

I read about this in a book review in a Norwegian newspaper months and months ago and thought it sounded interesting. I put myself on the waiting list for it and completely forgot about it until my hold came in, and I had to actually look up why I'd wanted to read this book in the first place. Two public school boys who secretly love one another and can't realise their feelings for each other until they're also soldiers in the First World War? Well, that sounds like a laugh fest, doesn't it? 

Obviously, this book is utterly harrowing and made me cry a bunch of times. Throughout the book, there are fictional snippets of the school newspaper from the boarding school Gaunt and Ellwood attended, which include lists of the fallen and injured, and looking at the ages of most of them (very few over the age of 25) is just heartbreaking. Because the world is a depressing and terrible place, I tend to read a lot of light-hearted escapism. This certainly wasn't that. It is a beautiful novel, though, showing so much of the banality of war and how utterly awful trench warfare was. Ellwood and Gaunt were wonderful protagonists, and it was very difficult not to get attached to them, and a number of their friends and acquaintances, most of whom die horribly over the course of the novel. I'm not going to lie, I actually had to peek at the final pages of the book to see if both protagonists survived, just so I wouldn't be too emotionally compromised if one of them didn't make it. I'm not going to spoil here what the outcome is - you'll have to read the book for yourself. 

It's remarkable to me that this is a debut novel. Maybe it's deeply unoriginal and derivative if you've read a ton of novels set during World War I, but I haven't, so to me, this was beautiful, and difficult to put down (even when I wanted to, because if I wasn't reading, then characters couldn't keep dying) and very sad. I highly recommend it. The young men in this are clearly fictional, but they are also obviously modelled on actual men who sacrificed so much. Now I'm going back to closing my eyes tight and holding my hands over my ears going la-la-la-la-la with regard to all the horrifying conflicts currently happening right now in various parts of the world, because my sanity can only take so much. 

Judging a book by its cover: This is the cover of the book I got from the library, and I just don't think it in any way captures anything about what this book is about. This looks like it's a book about young men who work in the stock exchange or something, not a harrowing tale of bravery, camaraderie, trauma, and love during the First World War. There is another cover of the book in black and white, with the bombs flying over the battlefield looking almost like fireworks which is very striking and evokes the feel and content of the book so much more.  

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

CBR3 Book 79: "The Wild Rose" by Jennifer Donnelly

Publisher: Hyperion
Page count: 640 pages
Rating: 4 stars
Date begun: October 2nd, 2011
Date finished: October 8th, 2011

The Wild Rose is the third book in Jennifer Donnelly's Rose trilogy, and while it can be read independently of the other two, it will be best appreciated if the reader has read the other two novels in the series, The Tea Rose and The Winter Rose, first. As these two books are among my absolute favourite books of all time, I advise everyone to run out and read them, then come back and read this review.

On the eve of the First World War, Seamus "Seamie" Finnegan is a famous polar explorer, and the toast of the Royal Geographical Society. He's been on expeditions with Shackleton and Amundsen, and his sister Fiona wonders when he will finally settle down. Yet Seamie can't seem to forget the woman he loved, and lost eight years earlier, when they attempted to climb Kilimanjaro together. Willa Alden, little sister to his best friend, nearly died, and ended up losing one leg just below the knee. She disappeared shortly after, and he believes she's never forgiven him for having her leg amputated. When he meets the charming and kind minister's daughter, Jennie Wilcott, who attends suffragette's marches with his sister, Seamie convinces himself that he loves her, and that she's the right person to finally make him forget Willa.

Willa is numbing the her physical and emotional pain with morphine in a little village at the foot of Mount Everest, dreaming of climbing it, and taking spectacular photographs of the landscape that she sends back to the RGS. She supports herself by guiding European explorers in the area, and tries to forget her old life as best she can. When she finally gets a pile of letters letting her know her father is dying, she has no choice but to return to England, and facing the family and the man she left.

The Wild Rose concludes the trilogy about the Finnegan siblings, begun in The Tea Rose. As well as the story of Seamus and Willa, the book features Seamie's older siblings Fiona and Sid, and their families, and chronicles their lives in the period just before, during and after the First World War. The main story line concerns Willa, Seamie and the German playboy and industrialist Max von Brandt, who also loves Willa. Seamie becomes a captain in the Navy, and Willa travels through Egypt and North Africa with Tom Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia.

To say that this book was eagerly anticipated by me would be an understatement. I absolutely adored the two previous novels in the series, and waited for years for this concluding volume to be released. The two previous books, especially The Winter Rose, engrossed me so much I would forego food and sleep to get through them, I loved the story and the characters so much. The Wild Rose was not quite so gripping, but it was still a very comforting read, and Donnelly is a wonderful writer. While I found Seamie's story the least exciting of the three Finnegan siblings, it was very nice to be able to see how the lives of Fiona and Sid and their families had progressed, and I'm glad the story was concluded in a satisfying manner. Like the previous novels, the book depicts life in working class London at the turn of the century excellently, and Donnelly clearly does excellent research, with her strong, capable heroines travelling to a number of exotic locations and living adventurous and interesting lives.