This is pretty much exactly what you would expect of it and, what the hell, it’s very entertaining. Deeply unserious with a male love interest that I This is pretty much exactly what you would expect of it and, what the hell, it’s very entertaining. Deeply unserious with a male love interest that I didn’t hate. I could’ve done without the Jane Austen inclusion though. ...more
"No one was ever safe being kept in the dark! The darkness doesn't mean the monsters are gone - it only means you can't see them coming."
This is my "No one was ever safe being kept in the dark! The darkness doesn't mean the monsters are gone - it only means you can't see them coming."
This is my definition of a fun brain-off read. The daughters of Jonathon Harker and James Moriarty, a researcher and detective at the Royal Society for Abnormal Phenomena, are paired up to investigate a string of murders while dealing with the corruption in the Society. And it was fun. In a lot of ways it felt reminiscent of a mix old gas-lamp detective stories and Indiana-Jones-esque adventures (that might be a hear me out, but it is the vibe I got). There were some things that I definitely had to ignore/not think too hard about, but the fact that I was able to push them aside for my enjoyment is a feat in itself....more
“You’ll write more poems. They are not lost. You are the poetry.”
I'll start this off with some disclaimers. I am famously (to me) not a war book rea “You’ll write more poems. They are not lost. You are the poetry.”
I'll start this off with some disclaimers. I am famously (to me) not a war book reader. Specifically, I am not a WWI/WWII historical fiction reader. Some part of my brain was oversaturated with watered down romanticized versions of those wars specifically a while ago and I have had a bit of an aversion ever since. However, I was in a mood (depressed and ready to be emotionally destroyed), and this book filled that void for me well. I read this book in approximately nine hours, finishing as the sun began to rise. I laughed, I cried, I felt. I read this fast and I wanted my soul to be ripped to shreds. While this was what I needed and I couldn’t put it down, there were parts that were nagging me, begging me to critique. Just know (speaking to you, mags, don’t combust) that I did have an emotional 9 hours with this book, and if I ever feel compelled to read this again, the rating may go up.
“But Ellwood had never been interested in ugliness, whereas Gaunt… feared that ugliness was too important to ignore.”
The focal point of this is book is war and how war changes people and that part seems to be very well and thoroughly discussed. Ellwood has always had idealistic dreams about war, believing what was written in the in memoriam’s for his old classmates and dreaming of a noble battle while quoting Tennyson constantly. Gaunt hates the war and has some ability to see through to the ugly truth of war and doesn’t want to fight. During one of the first times Ellwood sees combat, he turns to Gaunt and says, “ ‘I want to go home. . . We’re not nineteen yet, we could still go home. . .’ ” The war is never glamorized nor is it just used as a backdrop, the affect it has on people is at the forefront of the story. As the fighting continues and the in memoriams of the friends we briefly met pile up, the pain is always felt strongly. I have heard that a lot of the in memoriams and depictions of war are pulled pretty directly from the books that Winn cites as inspiration, I am not sure how true that is as I have not read them, but that is something I would like to note.
“You’re squandering your years as if they’re limitless.”
In Memoriam opens at an all-boys boarding school (a setting I am quite a sucker for) in England, where rich boys discuss the War as if it is the most glorious thing to happen, while the deaths of their older peers who are already in the trenches slowly trickle in through the school newspaper. I am a sucker for a good boarding school and was excited to get to know this (very large) cast of characters in an intimate way through their boarding school life before we got into the war. The biggest complaint I have with this book was that everything moved so fast. There was no time to grab hold of anything. I have a feeling this may have been intentional, to show how little time we have, especially when young men are going off to war and their lives end before they even had a chance to begin, but I found that this also meant that the introductions to characters (even our main ones) and their dynamics were a bit weak. I chalk this up in part to Winn’s fanfiction origins (which I promise I have nothing wrong with, I love a good fanfiction) as in a fanfiction setting characters are already more established so there is less of a need to delve into a character before the action of the story starts. The introduction was so quick I felt like I was getting a bit of whiplash as I expected that Elly and Gaunt would have a little more time to develop and that part 1, approximately third of the book, would be focused only on school, alas Winn moved fast and there was no time for pleasantries I suppose. While I did find this book heartbreaking, I do think that Winn was relying a bit on works that came before her to pull at the heart strings during the set-up period. The War was harrowing, but the I was left wanting with the emotions of youth before we got into the thick of it and found that the relationship between them was the weakest part of the book for me because of the lack of time I had to watch them together. Additionally, I found some of their later dialogue to be a bit. . . well it was clear she wrote drarry fanfiction is the best way I can put it. I found myself being the least interested in their later parts together, in part due to this.
“It was dusk, on a Friday. The battered skeletons of trees tapered against the fresh starlight in No Man’s Land. The sky offered curious glimpses of beauty, from time to time. The men wrote about it in their letters, describing sunsets in painstaking detail to their families, as if there was nothing to see at the front but crimson clouds and dusted rays of golden light.”
The letters from Gaunt to Ellwood while he was on the front line and how we see how much Gaunt censored even for Ellwood once he is on the front himself are an important, yet painfully short part of this book. Again, there were months of letters and I felt as though these were so rushed, I wish we got a little bit more of this development. Nonetheless, seeing the juxtaposition of how Gaunt wrote to Elly, his time in the trenches, and how he wrote to his friend, a soldier on the front lines elsewhere, was harrowing and a great way to show the difference in what soldiers experienced versus what they whittled down and kept inside.
“He did not see colours the way he used to. He knew that the grass must be a vibrant, aching green, but it did not seem so to him. . . It was as if Ellwood hovered in some unreal place where the living faded and the dead took form, and all the world was vague.”
Ellwood is the character that we watch change the most throughout this book, and it is a particularly heartbreaking yet realistic portrait, especially of a man who has lost so many people and who doesn’t know how to do anything but fight anymore. Watching him move from a hopeful youth to violent, erratic, and scared was heartbreaking in a way that I don’t think I anticipated (which is a bit silly of me as this is a book about war).
“It was hard to look at him and remember all the years they had spent together, not knowing what violence awaited them.”
Again, I do really wish we got to spend a bit more time with these boys before the horrors of war caught up to them—this really would’ve benefitted from having a hundred or so more pages focused on that—but watching the change and then deaths of these boys, who I may not have remembered when they were first reintroduced, but damn did I not forget them after that, was especially hard hitting. The juxtaposition of knowing how most of them died versus seeing their in memoriams was also heartbreaking. At the end Winn stated that she directly lifted a lot of in memoriams from actual papers during WWI, which I do think was smart, but does make me wonder how much of Winn’s work I actually loved versus how much of it was lifted from actual WWI stuff. I’m still trying to decide if it makes a difference.
“Gaunt was woven into everything he read, saw, wrote, did, dreamt. Every poem had been written about him, every song composed for him, and Ellwood could not scrape his mind clean of him no matter how hard he tried.”
I thought that I had more of an emotional connection to Gaunt and Ellwood before I got to the last part, and then I realized that the swiftness of the first part of the novel had left me a bit. . . empty in regards to their relationship. I could see inklings of it, but it wasn’t as fleshed out as I had imagined it would be. Winn did an excellent job at tugging at my heartstrings during everything except this aspect, where I felt left wanting more. Even as I write this, I am thinking that maybe someone will comment about how that was part of her intention, so I will clarify. It wasn’t necessarily that I wanted more of them together, it was that I wanted to want more of them; I wanted to feel their yearning, their pain, to feel how, while the War had taken so much from them and that they had to shove it down, this was the breaking point for them. I still cared, and was a bit heartbroken, but I wanted a bit more. I think apart of this was the fact that part II, while important, seemed to stretch on forever and it made the pacing feel a bit off. Maybe it was supposed to, but I cannot help but feel that it detracted something that I was supposed to feel deeply.
“ ‘War is. . . a violent teacher?’ he said, eventually. Gaunt smiled at him, ‘That’s right.’ The countryside streamed greenly past the windows. ‘It didn’t teach me anything,’ said Ellwood.”
The end of this book is quite devastating, yet hopeful in a bit of a sad way. I think it shows well how no one is the same after war, how, even if you survive, you are nothing near the same man you were. There is little comfort after the war ends, but there is a little hope of brighter days. Despite my critiques of it, I found it to be quite moving especially in the portrayal of war. I really did appreciate this for what it was, I think I’ve just found other media to be more moving for me in terms of actual queer relationships, and I went into this expecting to be a bit more moved by that aspect of the story.
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