Alice Winn's account of the unrelenting slog of World War I and the beautiful young men set against each other in the trenches serves as a backdrop for a tentatively begun, deep love story born in a British boarding school and blossoming amid the cruelties and horrors of battle.
Alice Winn's gorgeous, brutal, captivating historical fiction In Memoriam is set during World War I.
Henry Gaunt, Sydney Ellwood, and their classmates came as young boys to their sometimes claustrophobic, cruel, and lonely English boarding school; now that they're close to the end of their schooling, they are playful, treasuring each other's friendships.
But by 1914, World War I is drawing most of these young boys into a swirl of wartime horrors. They trade their hesitant confidences and youthful search for comfort and affection within an unforgiving school environment for the cruelties of battle.
Our bodies were used to stop bullets, thought Ellwood. He could think of nothing else.
Tragedy and looming doom are twisted through this story of a hard-fought love story between Gaunt and Ellwood.
The wartime mud and trench nightmare, endless slog, relentless death, horrifying gore, and mostly pointless-seeming pushing onward toward mutual destruction--all of this serves as a backdrop for a heartwarming, heartbreaking story of friendship and love.
Characters struggle with vulnerability and to allow feelings to grow, and all is shaped by the constancy of life-and-death danger and the deep-seated fear of destroying a friendship that both young men cling to more deeply than living itself.
In Memoriam is beautiful, frequently painful, and offers a layered, complicated version of happy ever after. I loved this.
I listened to In Memoriam as an audiobook.
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