"We won, screamed the people outside. Don’t they know, Laura thought, we all lost?"
Wonderfully heart wrenching, and magically romantic all at once, Arden's The Warm Hands of Ghosts is an inventive look at The Great War, World War I. I'm not usually one for historical fiction, but I'm a big fan of The Winternight Trilogy by Arden so I had to give this a try. Throw in a fae-like fiddler and some supernatural intervention and impossible wartime romance and I was hooked!
This book follows Laura, a Canadian combat nurse in WWI, and her brother Freddie, a soldier, in parallel points of view from the winter of 1917 to the spring of 1918. From the beginning, I was drawn to Laura's story and the way she approached her place in this war. She was injured and sent home, but returned when she received her brothers jacket and both dog tags from Flanders field. Something wasn't right and she needed to find the truth.
Freddie was trapped in an overturned pillbox with an enemy soldier, desperate to survive. They miraculously make it out and get on another to safety through secrecy and deceit. Freddie becomes trapped in something else entirely as time goes on, but as their paths slowly begin to cross in real time, their stories unfold as one in both tragedy and hope.
Through war, death, destruction, and hopelessness at returning to civilian life, the promise of a future holds strong. The hope for happiness in this war torn world is a powerful thing, and Freddie and Laura both seem to find it despite all of their trauma.