What I'm Reading: The Warm Hands of Ghosts

I found The Warm Hands of Ghosts through the Fantastic Strangelings Book Club, and it was such a wonderful surprise of a novel.  This book by Katherine Arden was a ghost story, and a fairy tale, and a historical novel about the terrors of war all rolled into one.

At times this book seems like multiple books bridging multiple genres stuffed into a trench coat, but oh does it work. This is masterfully written genre fiction. It's a story about a nurse who comes home from WWI after an injury only to be drawn back to the front to find out what's happened to her brother, who may be dead or missing in action. It's a story of the horrors, and the love, that her brother finds in the trenches. It's a story of spiritualism and ghosts and what remains of us after we die. It's a story of memory and storytelling and what makes us human. It's a story of queer love and found family.

Even though this novel has dark subject matter at its core, I felt there was a good balance between the dark and the light. Between the terrors of war and hope. There are graphic depictions of trench warfare and injury. The Warm Hands of Ghosts explores the horrors and psychological impacts of WWI, the dizzying technological jumps that happened at this time, the collective trauma of so much death, the realities of war-time nursing, and the complexities of how war affects both those fighting in it and those left behind. It also explores the ties of biological family, found family, and war-time romance.

There are grim battles. A corrupt war-time machine. A sister refusing to give up on the hope of bringing her brother home, or at least finding out what happened to him.

There were so many layers packed into this novel, it was hard to put it down. It was engaging and immersive and easy to fall in love with the characters, despite their many flaws.