Lovely War by Julie Berry
Julie Berry tortures her readers. It’s true.
She carefully creates characters with so much color and depth that they feel more real than the people I actually know. Then, once I’m invested and committed to these characters, these imaginary people that are no more than ink on the paper, she begins to twist events around them, to brutalize them, to inflict pain on them, to tear them apart from each other…and to torture you, the reader.
It’s amazing, beautiful, and wonderful.
It’s also more feels than I want to feel.
I usually stay on the safer ground for my reading, picking from history, politics, or the occasional foray into science, science fiction, or the like. In Lovely War, a tale of four lovers caught in the maelstrom of the horrible meat grinder of World War I, Berry tells a story that is so much more than its parts, so much more than a simple romance.
But let me back up. Why read it, then? Why take the foray at all?
A few months back, Britt, my better half, was giving me a hard time because my book club was yet again choosing a series of books focused on war, politics, science, and literature (for whatever reason, every time she walks through the room where we meet—the centrally placed family room—on the way to the kitchen on the other side of the house someone is making a comment that seems to be related to war. As a result of this strange coincidence, she claims that all we talk about is war. On the contrary, we also talk about other things. Sometimes we talk about politics, too, especially the politics of…war). Not only that, she questioned whether I read even read anything by women, either. Just because it’s called “the Manly Book Club” it doesn’t mean it can’t read broadly.
Naturally, I took umbrage at this. Because seriously: I read a lot, right? And I choose more than just one topic to read. So I pulled up my reading list from the last year, and it turns out that she wasn’t wrong, at least not by much. By and in large, my reading list was male.
“So give me a list,” I said. “Give me books I should read.”
Lovely War was near the top of that list, and since the setting one of my favorite topics (and yes, I know, a middle-aged guy with an interest in WWI is about as cliche as it gets. But trust me, I have other interests, too. I also like to smoke meat and work on my yard…), I picked it among the first.
And now that we’ve buried the lede all the way down here, and maybe you’re still reading, let me actually tell you about the book and why it sticks out as something different than just a romance set during WWI.<
First, ignore the description of the book. Yes, it’s entirely accurate, but also, it doesn’t do justice to what you find as you first begin to read. The book opens on what appears to be a secret affair between the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen and an equally good-looking man. As they begin to rip their clothes off each other (don’t worry, this book is, at least as it regards to sex, very PG, or PG-13 at the most), they are caught by the misshapen and very much not handsome husband of the woman…Hephaestus. The woman, of course, is Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and her paramour is Ares, the god of war. It’s all very juicy, and it gets even better as the very Greek drama unfolds. Hephaestus decides to put his wife (and sister, I guess, since Zeus is everyone’s dad) on trial, and in her defense, Aphrodite spins a tale of two very real mortals, of her work, and why she is who she is.
I admit I was intrigued on the basis of several Greek gods interacting in the very modern setting of 1940s Paris (the setting for Aphrodite’s failed tryst with Ares), their petty jealousies and passions, and their deathless interactions with mortals. But I soon forgot the premise as Berry uses these muses to tell the intertwined stories of star-crossed lovers Hazel and James, coming together just once before James is shipped off to the trenches of 1917’s Western Front, and Aubrey and Collette, the musician and the orphan, who will both be torn and tossed by Ares’ terrible war. I fell in love with the stories, and there were moments when I forgot that even in the telling by Aphrodite to her fellow gods that the stories were largely over and passed, and the momentary interjections by the gods were a distraction to remind me that no story is without shadows or valleys before a peak is reached.
And Berry is a master of taking her characters through shadows that make the sunlit slopes even more bright. Torture is the word that comes to mind.
Beautiful torture.
So, to sum up, what we have here: a beautifully developed story, Greek gods, a tumultuous and fascinating period of history that is well-researched and painted, and characters that are so empathetic that it was hard not to alternately shout and cheer at their pains and their joys. It was well worth the digression out of my typical reads and, in retrospect, maybe it was no accident that it included one of my favorite eras of history.
Lovely War
Young Adult
Viking Books for Young Readers
March 5, 2019
480
They are Hazel, James, Aubrey, and Colette. A classical pianist from London, a British would-be architect-turned-soldier, a Harlem-born ragtime genius in the U.S. Army, and a Belgian orphan with a gorgeous voice and a devastating past. Their story, as told by goddess Aphrodite, who must spin the tale or face judgment on Mount Olympus, is filled with hope and heartbreak, prejudice and passion, and reveals that, though War is a formidable force, it's no match for the transcendent power of Love.
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