But PTSD didn’t exist back then …Įllwood had a sudden image of blood pouring down the train carriage, the way it had flooded down the trench when one of his men had had his insides scooped out by shrapnel from a trench mortar.Īlice also powerfully showed the differences between those privileged boys and the working class, which made chills run over my body eighteen/nineteen-year-old officers, sometimes even minors, giving the often much older privates orders, letting them march into a certain death. Alice Winn sucked me into Gaunt’s and Ellwood’s story and took me from the idyllic green English countryside with privileged, spoiled school boys reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream and glorifying fighting to the nauseating WWI trenches where those boys’ lives changed forever, watching soldiers’ eyes bulging out of their heads because of gas attacks or shells killing multiple soldiers in an instance. In Memoriam is a debut, and I’m perplexed. This book wrecked me in every possible way.
Now death surrounds them in all its grim reality, often inches away, and no one knows who will be next.Īn epic tale of both the devastating tragedies of war and the forbidden romance that blooms in its grip, In Memoriam is a breathtaking debut. To Gaunt's horror, Ellwood rushes to join him at the front, and the rest of their classmates soon follow. When Gaunt's family asks him to enlist to forestall the anti-German sentiment they face, Gaunt does so immediately, relieved to escape his overwhelming feelings for Ellwood. Gaunt, half German, is busy fighting his own private battle-an all-consuming infatuation with his best friend, the glamorous, charming Ellwood-without a clue that Ellwood is pining for him in return. News of the heroic deaths of their friends only makes the war more exciting. The violence of the front feels far away to Henry Gaunt, Sidney Ellwood and the rest of their classmates, safely ensconced in their idyllic boarding school in the English countryside.
It's 1914, and World War I is ceaselessly churning through thousands of young men on both sides of the fight. A haunting, virtuosic debut novel about two young men who fall in love during a time of war.
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