Book Review: The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden

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I voluntarily reviewed a complimentary copy of this book which I received from the author. All views expressed are only my honest opinion.

A book not quite like any other I’ve read. But it’s Katherine Arden and her storytelling always takes my breath away. From the days when I found her first novel, The Bear and the Nightingale and finished the entire Winternight Trilogy with my hear tin my throat – she brings us another masterpiece of storytelling.

This book is set in Canada and Europe during World War I. A brother and sister are serving in the war and have lost everything that mattered to them – except for each other. When she receives word that something has happened to her brother (a care package arrives with his things), she assumes to worst and returns to the front lines demanding answers as to what happened to her brother. But she finds more than she bargained for as the demons of war are haunting them all.

“There’s nothing noble about suffering. It’s an ugly, petty, crawling business. You’ll see men die with less dignity than dogs, cursing you sometimes, that you can’t save them.”

A true storyteller, Arden weaves you through the horrendous front lines of gore and destruction with Laura as our guide – a brilliant and brave field nurse that has nothing left to lose. She just wants answers about her brother. But she crosses paths with a daunting individual – the fiddler – stories from the soldiers are that he can make you forgot your sorrows and find some peace in the midst of war.

But at what price? Join the adventure and learn more about this period than you might have known. I know I picked up quite a few things that were new to me – including the Halifax Explosion of 1917 which I had never even heard of.

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During the Great War, a combat nurse searches for her brother, believed dead in the trenches despite eerie signs that suggest otherwise, in this hauntingly beautiful historical novel with a speculative twist from the New York Times bestselling author of The Bear and the Nightingale

January 1918. Laura Iven was a revered field nurse until she was wounded and discharged from the medical corps, leaving behind a brother still fighting in Flanders. Now home in Halifax, Canada, she receives word of Freddie’s death in combat, along with his personal effects—but something doesn’t make sense. Determined to uncover the truth, Laura returns to Belgium as a volunteer at a private hospital. Soon after arriving, she hears whispers about haunted trenches, and a strange hotelier whose wine gives soldiers the gift of oblivion. Could Freddie have escaped the battlefield, only to fall prey to something—or someone—else?

November 1917. Freddie Iven awakens after an explosion to find himself trapped in an overturned pillbox with a wounded enemy soldier, a German by the name of Hans Winter. Against all odds, the two men form an alliance and succeed in clawing their way out. Unable to bear the thought of returning to the killing fields, especially on opposite sides, they take refuge with a mysterious man who seems to have the power to make the hellscape of the trenches disappear.

As shells rain down on Flanders, and ghosts move among those yet living, Laura’s and Freddie’s deepest traumas are reawakened. Now they must decide whether their world is worth salvaging—or better left behind entirely.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Katherine Arden

A note to everyone who trips and falls upon my Goodreads page. First, welcome. Let us read and discuss all the books together. I review books I’ve read, everything gets five stars, if I didn’t like it I don’t put it up.

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Happy reading.

Born in Texas, Katherine studied French and Russian at Middlebury College. She has lived abroad in France and in Moscow, among other places. She has also lived in Hawaii, where she wrote much of The Bear and the Nightingale. She currently lives in Vermont.

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