Sometimes I read a book that makes me either want to quit writing altogether or makes me want to push myself to be a better writer, to put more depth into my research, to really drill down into each word I write in order to avoid cliches. The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherin Arden is one such book. It is exquisite in its prose and craft.
Set in 1917 to 1918, The Warm Hands of Ghosts is an atmospheric historical fantasy that follows a pair of Canadian siblings as they navigate war and its effects. Laura is a former combat nurse who was discharged following an injury and sent back home to Canada. However, she’s drawn back to Europe when her brother Freddie’s coat and tags are sent to her with no explanation as towhat happened to him or whether he’s even alive.
While volunteering as a nurse at a civilian-run hospital, Laura seeks answers about her brother’s fate and discovers that something supernatural may be afoot.
Meanwhile, Freddie is held captive by a mysterious fiddler who seems to appear along the front at random. Soldiers go to the fiddler for a night of drinking and music and when they try to find him again, they can’t. Then they go insane.
I absolutely adored this book. It may be one of my new favorites, and a large part of that comes down to the characters. Laura is prickly, pragmatic, and utterly lovable in her devotion to her brother, her work, and her friends. She’s complicated and ornery and sometimes she thinks ugly things, but I couldn’t help but adore her as I read the story of her search for her sibling. And that’s another thing I loved about this story, that it put a sibling relationship center stage above all others. I have a close relationship with my own younger brother and so maybe I saw something of our relationship in Laura and Freddie: their loyalty, their love. But I also admired the fact that Laura has to come to terms with the fact that after everything Freddie goes through, he’s not the same Freddie anymore and there are parts of him that she can’t understand anymore (I’m not sure if that counts as a spoiler).
Freddie is a sensitive artist and poet who should never have gone to war and my heart broke for him as he struggled to come to terms with everything he had to do to survive.
Winter is a German soldier whose fate ends up tied to Freddie’s and I adore him. He is stoic and kind and it would have been so easy to exclude him from the narrative, to not have any German characters, but Arden doesn’t. Instead, Winter shows us that the war is just as terrible for the German infantry as it is for the Allies and that the true enemies are the higher-ups who’ve never been to the front, and the war itself.
The Warm Hands of Ghosts is also a meditation on the end of the world. I can’t remember where I heard this, probably a podcast or a news story about war refugees, but somebody said something along the lines of how the apocalypse is happening all the time. It isn’t one singular event that happens to everybody worldwide simultaneously. The apocalypse is personal, everyone has their own. But even if the world is ending, there’s a new world waiting on the other side. In school, my history teachers talked a lot about WWI being a turning point in history: the dying of the old world and the birth of the world as we know it. I think Arden did an exceptional job highlighting that idea.
Anyway, I highly recommend this book to fantasy and history lovers alike.
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