This is the second book by Arden that I’ve read, and I have to say she’s a very good author when it comes to capturing a historical setting and the historical psyche. I can nitpick details here and there, however in comparison to most fantasy historical novels, this is amazing.
That said, in the end the narrative and the book’s theme didn’t quite cohere together. I’ll talk about this later.
One last detail if you’re deciding to read this book. I decided to read this because I’m a dude and this is a war story. This is not really a traditional war story. The main characters are a woman and a gay couple trying to survive the war (and the couple lacks chemistry). If you’re like me and like reading Brian McClellan war stories, this ain’t that. This is all ‘the horrors of war’ with none of the glorification of warfare/soldier bromance/cool fight scenes. It’s excellent at what it does, but it’s not for everyone.
Overall, I give this 3.75 stars. This book is significantly above average in terms of prose texture, compared to most of what I read. The main reason why I give it such a low* score is because I like those cool fight scenes books, and I didn’t get what I wanted. If I was in the target audience, this would easily be a 4.5 to 5 star book.
*: This is not a low score. I default to giving good books 3 stars, making 3 stars the center of the bell curve. 3.75 is therefore slightly above average for what I read.
WHAT IS THE TARGET AUDIENCE? WHAT GENRES? WHAT MAJOR TROPES?
- Anyone 16+
- Military Fantasy, but for women and gay dudes more than straight dudes.
- World War 1, from the perspective of someone morally against the war
- Healer protagonist
- Religious Horror
- Good prose
- Well researched, and well written
- Horror vibes, without actually being scary
- War story, without combat. Takes a STRONG anti war stance.
CONCEPT AND EXECUTION
Freddie has gone missing in WW1, causing his sister to enlist in the war effort as a nurse to try and find him. The novel follows both as protagonists.
Nurse Laura must cross the ocean and pursue every rumor and scrap of information to try to find her AWOL brother on some of the most deadly battlefields of human history. In her way is army bureaucracy, an endless tide of butchered soldiers who need to be healed, and back-biting women nurses trying to claim status in a patriarchal system.
Freddie, a Canadian soldier, befriends a German soldier in harsh circumstances. Together, the more-than-platonic friends become trapped in a dreamscape Faerieland/Hell-On-Earth, and their souls are slowly sucked out by Faland (aka Satan) through a series of temptations. Great concept.
I felt that this concept was well executed, and occasionally excellently executed. Overall, far above average for what I read.
PACING AND STRUCTURE AND STAKES
I struggled with this book’s pacing. For a book about war and horror, this book was strange for it lacks tension. Tension is that propulsive element which drives the reader to read as fast as possible. I respect the author for writing a war story without the usual trappings of such (you know, combat). However, combat in war stories is useful for amping up the tension, and adding horror to the horror story. As a result of neglecting combat, the novel needed to find another source of tension.
The main villain in this book wasn’t scary, except in the most abstract of ways. I don’t think the author was trying to make him scary. In essence, the bad guy Faland is Satan, and you sell your soul to him one memory at a time, until you’re left a husk of a human being. In exchange, Satan offers you temporary relief from the horrors of the World War 1 battlefield. In the abstract, that is a very compelling villain. It’s a compelling addiction metaphor, of how it destroys you as you drink/use drugs. Faland is one of my favorite versions of a satanic character I’ve ever read, because he only has what power you give him.
In actual practice, Faland fell flat for me. He’s essentially a psychic vampire, who sucks your soul out… and as he sucks your soul out, he dulls your personality, making you shallower and shallower. As a reader, I began to dislike Freddie’s segments as the story went on because he became less and less compelling, more and more shallow, as the big bad ate more of Freddie’s soul. That’s great narrative/magic system synergy, but a bad reading experience.
(You know how ‘Flowers for Algernon’ changes the prose style as the protagonist gains and loses intelligence? Freddie’s prose style changes like that, but with depression. However, he only becomes more depressed as the story goes on. Forgive me, but a depressed POV is not a fun headspace to read from.)
Further, the big bad lacked any pep or verve. He never resorted to violence, as an example. He’s the prototypical ‘man of wealth and taste;’ he makes deals and abides be them. On one hand, that’s GREAT Satan characterization, of a monster who plays by the rules and never doing something so uncivil as violence. On the other… boring. This villain feels passive. This book lacks narrative twists as is; the story needed the villain to step up to the plate and do something.
In short, this is a horror book without jump scares, and a military book without combat. That lack of pep hurt the tension. As for stakes, we know the fate of Freddie’s soul was in peril, which is good stakes. However the stakes need to gradually rise over the course of a novel, which is not something which happened. The book needed more fire.
As for structure, I enjoyed the first half of the book more than the second. The setting and characters are compelling concepts. But the ultimate payoff in the second half wasn’t there.
NOW THAT SAID…
I’m a dude. I like reading military novels. I wanted more pep and verve out of this book, because that’s me. I’m given to understand that this novel has many fans, who perhaps like this book’s more gentle aspect. I know cozy is popular these days, and I don’t like cozy books. While this book isn’t ‘cozy,’ it has a cozy-adjacent, in terms of being soft in attitude for a military and horror book; for those people who like cozy books and want to try something a bit more daring, they’d probably find this approachable.
CHARACTERIZATION
I liked Laura and her religious trauma. No notes, 9 out of 10. Her relationship with Jones was compelling. She is without a doubt one of the top five protagonists I’ve read in the last three years.
And now, Freddie.
One of my favorite books of all time is ‘Sunshine‘ by McKinley. The primary reason why I love it so much is the first act. In Act 1, the protagonist Sunshine is locked in a room with the hungry vampire Constantine. She is unarmed and entirely at his mercy; she only gets to live by continually chatting with him, keeping him sane long enough for them to escape together. With their several-day-long conversation, it becomes CRYSTAL CLEAR that Constantine is fundamentally not human and will eat her if she screws up. ‘Sunshine’ has by FAR the best Act 1 to any Fantasy novel I’ve ever read, due to how tense it is.
Taking a look at ‘Warm Hands of Ghosts’ from a meta-narrative, this book has elements of m/m, the genre of gay dude romance popular with the fanfic and shipping community. I’m not in that community, but let people enjoy what they enjoy. So I’ll try to be diplomatic when I say that I don’t feel like their relationship worked.
Act 1 of Freddie’s plotline attempts something similar to ‘Sunshine’… and it’s not as good as ‘Sunshine.’ Freddie and Vinter are enemies locked in a box together. Sadly, they are quite chatty and friendly with one another from the start, with only one-or-two hiccups. There is not an ounce of tension or ‘oh fuck will he kill me?’ to the opening act of their relationship. It felt like the author wanted to write one of those ‘enemies-to-lovers’ stories you hear so much about, while skipping the first step of enemies-to-friends step.
And at the midway point in the book, Freddie and Vinter split up, and don’t get back again until the end of the book. I feel like this was a mistake. This novel needed to allow these two characters more time to have chemistry together. I have no idea why they are willing to risk so much to be with one another, when they have so little pagecount together.
Simply put, I didn’t believe their relationship. I get the author’s intent, that when the pair were trapped together their friendship was instantly forged through shared trauma bonding. But if so, we needed more time spent in the pit together. For ‘Sunshine,’ all of Act 1 was in the trap together. In ‘Warm Hands of Ghosts,’ Laura got the majority of the pagecount for Act 1, and the boys get relatively little. There wasn’t enough pagecount to sell the relationship before they escaped the bunker.
In the last act, Freddie is a helpless princess in a tower who needs to be rescued by his sister Laura. People rightfully complain about when women are stripped of agency in stories in which they are the primary victim. If I’m interpreting this text correctly, Freddie is the damsel in distress for this book. He needed more characterization.
Freddie feels shallow. What happened to him before the war? What happened to him during the war, before meeting Vinter? Did he lose his innocence going from a school boy to a hardened soldier? Does he also have religious trauma from his parents? With his religious upbringing, does he have internalized homophobia to deal with? I have similar questions for Vinter.
I wanted to like Freddie and Vinter. Of the two plotlines, I felt theirs should have been the beating heart of the book, as they were in the shit moreso than Laura. But this book was very much Laura’s story. The boys needed more. (Feel free to disagree with me. We all have our opinions.)
AUTHORIAL VOICE
World War 1 represented the loss of innocence for the entire Western world. For four years, Europe did it’s best to kill itself in a no-holds-barred beatdown. Nothing was held sacred: cities were demolished, human lives spent like coin. The very landscape was rendered into apocalyptic wastelands.
Arden did an excellent job bringing that loss of innocence to life. Referencing everything from the Halifax explosion to the haunted aspect of no-man’s-land to the spiritualism movement, the author successfully researched the era and brought it to life. I wish all authors who write historical novels are as assiduous in their research, and thoughtful of applying that research into characters.
For example, at one point there is a soldier who attempted to end his own life. This is against the rules of the military, so the not-quite-dead is sent to the doctors to be healed so he can then be executed for breaking the rules of the military. Laura&Co decide to break the rules let the soldier die as a quiet act of rebellion. This is a good, and very real detail, capturing the complex and foreign political moment of that time.
I enjoyed the spiritual aspects of this book. World War 1 brought about a temporary state of madness in the West, and the author manifested this with a religious element to life her story. Between a Satanic character, ghosts and hauntings, the supernatural herein has an uneasy, plausibly deniable aspect which was compelling reading.
The author successfully married a winsome narrative voice with research to fully realize an dark and gloomy setting. If I were to judge this book on voice alone, I’d give this book 100%.
I don’t think the theme was well done. I define this book’s themes as being centered around a nexus of ‘war is evil/hell,’ ‘religious vibes,’ ‘homosexuality is forbidden.’ I don’t feel like any of these ideas fully came together in the end.
- What was this book’s main thesis about religion?
- Is organized religion good/bad? What about spirituality? What about faith?
- What does the devil represent?
- I get that the author was trying to say ‘sell your soul to forget the horrors of war. That is a good message.
- Why not have the devil tempt Freddie with homosexuality? And then the true love between Fred and Vinter frees Freddie of the illusion? That seems like low-hanging fruit.
- Overall, I feel like the author had a bunch of religious vibes and wrote them down, without having a ‘moral of the story’ to back it up.
- What is this book’s main thesis about homosexuality?
- Presumably the author’s thesis is that homosexuality is good, based on the subtext of Freddie and Vinter getting together at the end.
- Why doesn’t Freddie have internalized baggage after being raised by fundamentalists? Or living in a conservative culture in general?
- What is the book’s main thesis about ‘war is hell?’
- I got the feeling the author was trying to say that WW1 was a war beyond the scope of human control. The author referenced how the war machine was portrayed as a bureaucratic sludge pit. The author was correct, this war was a bureaucratic sludge pit, but you need to actually show it.
- Unfortunately, the author did not ‘SHOW, DON’T TELL’ about the war machine being a bureaucratic sludge pit. For example, we’re never shown the protagonist being forced to fill out lots of paperwork, and being given the run-around by various clerks. That would have emphasized the point the author was trying to make.
- Additionally, I feel as though this book’s lack of combat scenes hampered the message of ‘war is hell,’ but that could just be me liking that sort of thing.
Overall, I’m impressed by the author’s research and theme work. Most authors don’t even attempt to put in historical themes like this. Arden deserves praise.
AUDIOBOOK NOTES
The audiobook added to the experience.
LESSONS LEARNED
As an author, I want to improve my own writing/editing skills. To that end, I like to learn lessons from every story I read. Here’s what I learned from this story:
- Target audience is an important factor
- This novel is a war story, a genre usually written by male authors for male readers. In this case, this war story is written by a woman for primarily women readers.
- I enjoyed this book’s prose, it’s concepts and it’s characters. But I struggled with it overall because I’m just not in that target audience. That doesn’t make it a bad book, just a ‘not for me’ book.
Here’s a link to all the lessons I’ve previously learned.
SUMMARY
As I just said, I enjoyed this book’s prose, it’s concepts and it’s characters. It’s themes were pretty good, if only being ‘vibes.’ But I struggled with it overall because I’m just not in that target audience. That doesn’t make it a bad book, just a ‘not for me’ book. I wish I could read a combat-oriented Military Fantasy, with this book’s prose and texture.
Military Fantasy is going through a decades-long dry spell, a dry spell punctuated only by the occasional McClellan novel. I was desperate to try ‘The Warm Hands of Ghosts’ to help break up that dry spell. While I heartily enjoyed this novel, it ultimately didn’t scratch the itch I wanted to be scratched. I think I just have to accept that yet another of my favorite subgenres is functionally extinct in the trad pub space.
Credit where due, this book did a good job of focusing on the healer aspect of war, and the importance of women in the modern battlefield, undertold stories. If you’re a fan of this novel, I suggest you try out Mary Robinette Kowal’s ‘Ghost Talkers,’ a very thematically similar novel.
John Mendez- Book Reviews and More 