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A review by saucy_bookdragon
The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
"Other times Laura would think, furiously, at her mother, Pageantry? Justice? What a joke. Armageddon was a fire in the harbor, a box delivered on a cold day. It wasn't one great tragedy, but ten million tiny ones, and everyone faced theirs alone."
There were a lot of great elements in The Warm Hands of Ghosts. The atmosphere is atmosphering, heavy with grief and the horrors of war; there's some intriguing fantasy elements; the prose is beautiful. The ingredients are there for a masterpiece, too many actually.
A lot is going on in this pretty short book. It has a dual POV where one POV is far more interesting than the other. The book opens with seances and ghosts-but-not-actually, which made me think that this would have a very small dash of ghosts and mostly be a historic fiction novel, until a third of the way through we're introduced to an entire magical hotel. There's also a bit of a queer romance that would have benefitted from some further exploration, especially given it is 1918 and has other complications besides gender.
I kind of wish this had been entirely from Freddie's POV as it likely would have fixed most-if-not-all my problems. I found a lot of this interesting as a dark fantasy about how horrifying WWI was and grief, but it was a bit of a slog.
Also in the author's note Katherine Arden mentioned that WWI is mostly taught with maybe one documentary and high schoolers skimming All Quiet on the Western Front which she's right but let the record show that I did not skim Western Front, I actually read it entirely.
There were a lot of great elements in The Warm Hands of Ghosts. The atmosphere is atmosphering, heavy with grief and the horrors of war; there's some intriguing fantasy elements; the prose is beautiful. The ingredients are there for a masterpiece, too many actually.
A lot is going on in this pretty short book. It has a dual POV where one POV is far more interesting than the other. The book opens with seances and ghosts-but-not-actually, which made me think that this would have a very small dash of ghosts and mostly be a historic fiction novel, until a third of the way through we're introduced to an entire magical hotel. There's also a bit of a queer romance that would have benefitted from some further exploration, especially given it is 1918 and has other complications besides gender.
I kind of wish this had been entirely from Freddie's POV as it likely would have fixed most-if-not-all my problems. I found a lot of this interesting as a dark fantasy about how horrifying WWI was and grief, but it was a bit of a slog.
Also in the author's note Katherine Arden mentioned that WWI is mostly taught with maybe one documentary and high schoolers skimming All Quiet on the Western Front which she's right but let the record show that I did not skim Western Front, I actually read it entirely.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Gore, Violence, Medical content, Grief, War, and Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Suicide, Xenophobia, and Suicide attempt