The Warm Hands of Ghosts

One of my most-anticipated reads of the year! Katherine Arden followed up her fantastic Winternight trilogy with a quartet of middle-grade horror novels, but this is her first foray back into fiction for adults. Though those looking for the more playful fantasy of Winternight may find this overly grim, I really liked this story of Canadian siblings caught up in World War I. Laura Iven is a combat nurse, and a very good one, but a serious leg wound sends her back home...unfortunately, just in time for the Great Halifax Explosion. The disaster kills both of her parents, leaving her brother Freddie as her sole surviving family. When she receives Freddie's effects in a irregular manner, though, she finagles a way to return to Europe to find out how her brother died...or maybe even if he died at all. The story is told through both Laura's perspective and Freddie's. He finds himself trapped on the battlefield with a German soldier, Hans Winter, and the two form a bond as they struggle back to the front. Both Laura and Freddie separately find themselves, when they are most in need of succor, in a mysterious hotel being run by an even more mysterious man, a violinist who calls himself Faland. This hotel and its proprietor loom large as the siblings continue to try to find one another. I have become a bit of a World War I head, so this book was extremely up my alley. It's an incredibly under-understood time period in American culture, and I appreciate that Arden shines a spotlight on it with this novel. The thing about World War I, though, is that it was a cataclysmic event, causing just staggering amounts of loss and destruction. Naturally, this makes for a much darker tone than her previous work. This book is largely about trauma, and survivor's guilt, and the way people coped (or tried their best to do so) in the face of what was without exaggeration the end of the world as they knew it. Arden's clear, eloquent writing and the plot's forward momentum keep it from getting bogged down in despair, but it definitely falls on the bummer end of the spectrum. I personally love a bummer book, so it really worked for me. I'd definitely recommend it, especially for people curious to learn more about World War I!